Networking your way to success

Happy Halloween!
It has been quite some time since my last post, and that is mostly because of urgent workload demands.  One of the things I have been struggling with is finding good sub-contractors, who are reliable, professional and knowledgeable.  I get asked fairly frequently by our customers and partners if we have someone who can do something... Most of the time my search turns up empty because of a small pool to draw from from.  At Progentus we focus only on our core competency as we know we can't be everything to everyone.  This enables us to excel at our consulting business and SaaS offerings, but leaves us and our partners in the cold when it comes to helping customers with other things.  I think we would all agree, the secret to ongoing service and solution success is not to let your competitor in the door.  The question is, how do you do that if you don't have the resources to handle the whole enchilada?  My answer is a large pool of really well vetted sub contractors.  But how do you build the pool?  Asking for referrals has netted me almost zero.  Thus a new function was born.

The end of summer vacation

I can't believe it has already been a month since my last post.  Summer is supposed to be a relaxing time.  Those who have traveled with small kids know that is not always the case... But so be it.   Summer in the IT sales game has always been a slow time for business.  This has two impacts, the first is the numbers always kind-of-suck this time of year, the second is you have more time to do the things you can't do when sales volume is high.  This is kind of like New Years for VARs.  That being said how about a New Year's Resolution... Make your customer's business critically important to you.

Please remove my handcuffs they hurt (my sales)

Understanding your customers needs, challenges and objectives is the first step to selling a solution.  I am not sure how many times we, as an industry, forget that.  


I have been asked to give a talk several times that focuses on how to increase the solution sales traction in a company.  The presentation is universally well received.  The reason, I believe (based on the feedback I have been given), for the success of the message is this:
"The challenge has been identified over years of research, the message is clear, concise and in terms the target audience can understand."


This has lead me to the recognition that the most important thing we can do to sell solutions is understand our customers needs completely.  Not partially, not kind-of, not almost 100%, but completely.  I realize this is easier said than done but it is not too hard either.  It's not as though you need to understand every aspect of your customer as well as they do, but you do need to demonstrate your understanding of the aspects of what you impact well enough so your customer can trust you.

What we have found in our research is, most of the time the challenges to doing boil down to the same thing...