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24 March 2017

Start Your Adventure in IT Sales Today: Become a Pre-Sales Consultant

business

Sales is like oxygen. It is more important than anything else you can imagine. It is important whether you are an entrepreneur working alone or a CEO of Fortune 500 company. If you don’t want your firm to die, you MUST generate a constant flow of prospects and close deals. Only then your business will breathe deeply.

If you want to have a successful sales department, you have to recruit adequate people. You may ask, “But how to do that?” Let me show you how we’re doing that in our company. We start off by finding pre-sales consultants.

What skills are we looking for?

  • Good command of English or French – both in reading and writing
  • Great organization of work
  • Enthusiasm and proper attitude
  • Analytical thinking
  • Accurate action

A pre-sales consultant is responsible for finding and qualifying potential customers by matching company’s offer and portfolio to their needs. He is working closely with experienced salespeople and technical leaders to response to client’s expectations in the best possible way.

Now you know what it means to be a Pre-Sales Consultant… Let’s take a look how it looks in our company.

Stage 1: How it looks like from the Day 1?

Week I

  1. Presentation of people in our team
  2. Preliminary introduction to our tools and techniques
  3. You will receive some books to read (English is very necessary)
  4. You will receive access to e-learning platforms

It’s a lot, we know. But don’t worry, you’ll be alright! You just need to have one thing in mind: continuous learning and asking around are waiting for you.

Week II

  1. We’ll define particular specialisation you will take care of
  2. We’ll create a team with experienced tradesman
  3. We’ll start looking for customers and analysing them together with the team
  4. We’ll show you our materials, offers, project descriptions, and specialisations in various branches

Few words about our sales department and sales process

We are selling as a team, because of a very specific nature of that work and complicated projects. It’s rare if someone is selling all alone. Sales process begins at pre-sales department, in which we collect information about potential customers in various branches. We also monitor economic events to get in touch with a potential customer in the best possible time.

Every prospective customer is being analysed, and we match our offer and realisations to his needs and expectations. In part, this process is being carried out by pre-sales consultants and more experienced tradespeople or technical project managers.

Stage 2: Showing how our sales department works

Welcome to the real world of sales. The world that shows us no mercy. If you want to survive, you, as a pre-sales consultant, must be a fast learner. We will show you some things:

  • Sales department organisational structure
    First of all, you will get to know people you will be working with. Some of them have a vast practical experience you can learn from. They will tell you about our pipelines and systems, and will also show you applications we use. The next thing to learn is the sales process course.
  • Customers
    There is no sales without customers. How to find them? We will tell you that. Moreover, we will also cover other topics, e.g. who our clients are? How to work with them? How to talk with them? Believe me, it’s simple, but not easy.
  • Projects
    Customers mean projects, projects mean money. You will find out about our current projects, types of projects and project settlements. Thanks to that, you will have a better understanding of the way we are working.
  • Business network
    We mainly sale to East Europe and Scandinavia. We have specialists who have experience in working in particular countries. Thanks to that, we can fit our approach basing on their knowledge about business culture in given country. Of course, as a pre-sales consultant, you have to be aware of differences in building a business network in different countries.
  • Resources
    Yes, we’ll give you some books and other materials to read. They will help you to understand and learn such things as prospecting, cold mailing, preparing proposals, etc.

Recommended books:

  • John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
  • Adele Revella, Buyer personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business
  • Jeb Blount, Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling
  • Jason Lemkin, Aaros Ross, From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue
  • Max Altuscher, Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Builing a High-Velocity Sales Machine
  • Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com
  • Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Stage 3: Taking it all into real action

Congratulations! You are ready to start. Be prepared for a lot of studying, making mistakes, testing, and improving. As days go by, you will be better and better in an art of preselling. If you are hard-worker, you will be rewarded for that. Not only in money and good words, but also in self-congratulation and fulfilment.

PS We are currently looking for Pre-Sales Consultants. Feel free to read our job offer.



Author
Robert Matyszewski
VP of Business Development

Graduated from Faculty of Management at the Bialystok University of Technology. Associated with IT and Marketing Industries for over six years. Had his own business - lemontea.pl - for more than three years. His company was specialised in front-end technologies. Two of their projects has won a prize at the most prestigious web design contest in the world – awwwards.com. Lemontea was delivering services for Polish and international companies in UK, DE, and USA.