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“Succeeding at Sales: Executing Sales as a Well-Defined Process”
North Jersey Technology Executives Networking Group (TENG )
Monthly Meeting: October 5th, 2006 - 6:00 p.m. - Whippany, NJ
SESSION SUMMARY:
Placing Value on Sales: The attending group of
executives discussed that, in
general, domain experts, (whether in IT,
medicine, law, or other) may tend
to devalue sales as a valid career pursuit
in their early careers as they
focus on their domain knowledge and skills.
Part of gaining the "seat at the table": But, as careers develop, the
sales
competence becomes one of the key differences between direction
"takers" and
those who have a "seat at the table" in "making" executive
decisions in
corporations; or those who achieve partnership in professional
services
firms.
It won't go to waste: Even if executives do not
participate directly in
external customer sales, they benefit from sales
skills. There are useful
parallels among sales and other broad management
skills including
persuasion, negotiation, and gaining commitment in
multi-disciplinary teams.
A Process a Tech Exec Could Love: A formal
process model of sales was
presented and discussed that is useful to the
development of successful
sales behaviors. The steps discussed
include:
* Prospect Introduction
* Gaining favorable attention -
"gaining permission to proceed"
* Discovering customer wants and
needs
* Presenting benefits and consequences
* Gaining
commitment
* Follow-up and execution
* Achieving repeat business
within current clients.
What to watch out for: A principal point made
during discussion was that
technologists as a group tend be aggressive
problem solvers, may be a little
impatient with non-tech types in
conversation, and often jump to solve the
first coherently described problem
they encounter, rather than following a
'sales' process that requires a full
understanding of wants and needs.
The range of senior skills and habits:
There are of course many
"non-technical" executive and management skills and
behaviors that IT
executives must adopt and/or adapt to in order to continue
to evolve and
compete in a rapidly changing business and technology
environment. Some of
those include:
* Leadership - effective coaching,
mentoring and people development
* General management
* High performance
- goal oriented behaviors
* Effective time management
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