Recently, I was a guest speaker on Brian Burn’s podcast, “The B2B Revenue Leadership Show.” Brian’s podcast focuses in on small business sales and, like his other podcast, “The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling,” sheds light on what you need to win in today’s tech-driven marketplace.
I had a great time discussing some of our ins-and-outs with Brian on this podcast, How to Win When Your Market Thinks You’re a Commodity. We talked about sustaining growth through more than just referrals. GadellNet has gone from a 4-person company to a 65-person company over the last 7 years, and that has been in big part due to the sales processes I talked about during this podcast. We covered how to sell your service as a product, how to sell your consultants and the main keys to our success. Read more about each below:
Our Service is Our Product
Selling services can be a tricky business. It’s hard to convey just how amazing and smart your people are before someone is a client. With a 99.2% client retention rate, we know once someone is with us, they are happy, but how do you make someone feel like a client, understand the level of services they will receive before they get that service? Our service (in our case managed services and tech consulting) is our product; therefore, leading with our consulting and engineering teams and the unique benefits they offer our clients has been huge.
During the sales process, we don’t hesitate to bring these individuals in. They have a knowledge base that I as a sales person simply don’t have. That technical background is just what some prospects want to know more about, and this transparency also makes prospects feel more at ease.
Sell Consultants
We have highly talented engineers and consultants, and infusing personality testing into our hiring process has ensured two things. First, that our employee retention rate is very high, at 99.4%. Second, our hiring process has ensured that our engineers and consultants can make even the most technical services easy for our clients and prospects to understand. This has been an unparalleled benefit to our sales team. I’m able to bring the consultants in during the sales process, and prospects get a taste of the individualized bundles of services they could have.
Bringing in the consulting team also helps to sell their talents to the prospect. They can see firsthand how capable and smart our consulting team is. When a prospect understands that this knowledgeable team could be on their side, creating their tech strategies and helping implementations, something clicks. They can see their future success much more clearly than any picture I could have painted on my own.
Keys to our success
The biggest key to our success is that everyone knows they are one essential piece to a much bigger puzzle. Our sales team doesn’t operate without marketers, engineers, consultants, account managers, and executive buy-in. Being fluid with our processes has served us well, but it won’t work if your manager isn’t ready to rework the plan or if this change in process isn’t communicated out to account managers, engineers, and marketers. Likewise, our account managers, engineers, executives, and marketers rely on the insights gleaned from sales. Without each piece, the puzzle, and our success wouldn’t be possible.
To learn more about our services, contact us today.
