Advanced Strategies for Tech Sales Excellence
So, you want to get a job in tech sales? Good, because you’ve come to the right place. This article will explain how to get a tech sales job, even without experience.
Step 1: Build A Tech Oriented Sales Resume
First things first. Like any other job, you want to start with a solid resume. Then, think back to your experiences and summarize the most relatable sales skills you can bring into your new responsibilities as a sales representative in the tech industry.
Not sure what those relatable skills might be? No worries, we’re here to help you out.
For starters, if you have any sales experience from a previous job, that’s a great place to start. Whether or not you’ve specifically sold technology, if you’ve gone about anything of sale, much of the selling process remains the same.
You’ll still uncover as much information as you can about your prospective customers to learn what they want or need and then relate the underlying reasons behind that desire to your product or service.
What if you don’t have any previous sales experience?
Don’t worry; you can still find a way. Sales are simply the profession of persuasion. No matter what kind of work experience you have, you’ll almost certainly have to do some persuading.
Whether it was persuading your co-workers to jump on board with your new idea or even to eat together at a particular restaurant, you’ve been persuading people. But, if you really can’t think of any situations where you’ve done some persuading, well… perhaps you may want to reconsider a profession in sales.
Let’s move on. So now you’ve got your resume all built up and polished. What next? Getting interviews.
Step 2: Begin Your Job Search Process
There are many ways to go about this. If you have a specific position in mind, you can go directly to a company’s website to look for open positions, but more often than not, you’ll need some help identifying what companies you’d like to work for.
This is where platforms and recruiters can help. If you do some searching online, there are plenty of them, even ones explicitly dedicated to tech sales, that you can leverage. But, of course, we can also help you.
Step 3: Make Sure You Prepare For Your Interview FAR Ahead Of Time
You’ll want to do a few things before you step foot into the room with your potential employer.
- Research about the company itself.
- Learn when they were founded.
- Learn their products and unique value proposition.
- Discover what differentiates them from the other players in the market.
- Find any other details that seem important to be informed about.
- Recent news about and announcements from the company are always a plus.
Step 4: Learn Your Target Company’s Sales Process (And Picture Yourself In It)
Above all, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with their sales process. After all, you are applying for a position in sales.
Prospecting
You need to understand the following things intimately:
- Who are your potential customers, and how will you find them?
- What tools or services will you be using?
- This can be an excellent question for you during your interview if you’re unsure.
- What are the tools and services the company is using today?
- Why did they choose to bring on those specific tools?
Engaging
Questions to ask yourself:
- How are you going to reach out and connect with your prospects?
- What’s the reasoning behind your strategy?
- Based on the company’s target industry, market, and customer profiles, what methods do you think will be most effective, and why?
Discovery
Here’s what you should do:
- Schedule a time to have a conversation with your prospect to learn more about them.
- What is their current situation?
- What problems are they dealing with?
- Based on what you uncover, think of how you can best articulate how your company’s products or services can alleviate those pains.
Closing
In technology sales, the step that usually comes after the discovery is the demo.
This is where you, as the sales rep, have the floor and opportunity to clearly illustrate to your prospects how their lives will be improved through your product or service.
You do this by relating the benefits your company provides to the problems they voiced to you during the discovery part phase.
There may be a bit of back and forth in terms of negotiation and the need to deal with a procurement team, but soon after the demo, the final step you’ll want to end with is closing the deal.
This is when your prospect and the involved stakeholders have made the decision to move forward in doing business with your company and are willing to put pen to paper, or so to say.
Step 5: Revisit and Master Stages of the Sales Funnel
A great way to visualize this process from a high level is to think of it as a funnel.
The concept of a sales funnel is very prevalent in technology sales and is something you’ll likely want to familiarize yourself with.
You can easily search this term online and quickly understand how it would work for a business. In summary, it’s the idea of taking a large number of leads, refining them into prospects based on some target criteria, and ultimately converting them into customers by putting them through the sales process.
Awesome. So you’ve researched and taken the time to understand the sales process and how it works. All that’s left for you to do now is nail the interview.
Step 6: Nail The Interview
There is a lot of advice on the best ways to approach an interview, but here are a few pointers to help you get started.
Be on time. Show up a bit early so you have some time to spare. Trust me, having that little extra time before the interview to level-set and get your head straight can only bode well for you.
Next, remember that most hiring managers are likely looking for three primary qualities.
Those are competency, character, and the ability to learn.
Competency is simply a measure of whether or not you can do the job at hand. If given the opportunity, would you be someone the company can rely on to get things done effectively?
Character is essential because, let’s face it, whether you like it or not, co-workers are people we end up spending a lot of time with. As such, your potential boss is probably looking to see if you can stand having them around and, more importantly if you’re someone they can trust.
The last quality you want to convey to the person on the other side of the table is the ability to learn.
As a bonus, you may want to consider emotional intelligence, too. This will help you become more empathetic as a sales professional, something employers care about.
Sure, it’s great if you’re a good person capable of doing the job at hand, but that’s not all that’s important in the workplace. Change is imminent in all aspects of life, and business is no different. So your boss will want to know that, should it become necessary, you’ll be open to new ideas and willing to adapt to changing circumstances rather than always stuck in your old ways.
Again, there’s a ton more information out there on other things you can do to do well in an interview, but keep these things in mind, and you should land your dream job in tech sales in no time.
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