5 Tips to Increase Your Technical Sales Today
As a technical sales engineer, your ultimate goal is always to close a sale. However, before you get to this point, there are many calls you need to make, emails to send, and meetings to set. We all know it takes a lot of hard work to make a sale, but there are some tactics you can do right now that can help increase your technical sales.
Here are 5 tips to increase your technical sales today:
1. Be Active on Social Media
Although you might think it’s more important to focus on calls and meetings to reach potential clients, many prospects now rely on social media to learn about new suppliers and products.
One thing you need to do today (within the next eight hours) is to post on social media. It’s a must to be active on social nowadays. Concentrate on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Don’t bother with Twitter because people don’t really learn about products there.
You need to write a post today and post it on any of the social media we mentioned above. It doesn’t have to be very long, but write a long post form (not just a couple of sentences) about anything related to your company or product. Use hashtags if you know how. If you’re not sure what to write about, think of what’s new with your company, or a new product or offer.
If you have the talent, skills, or interest, you can also make a video. Don’t worry about how fancy it is or your editing skills, a short video that’s clean and with a clear message will increase engagement as well. When combined with a long form post, a video can help people notice you even more. You’re now in route to boosted technical sales success!
2. Comment on a Prospect’s Social Media Accounts
Aside from making your own posts on social media, you should also comment on a prospect’s social account. Engage with a company’s page on socials or a person’s profile. Go and look for 10 to 15 companies that you want to do business with. You can also look for people who influence decisions in these companies or are the actual decision makers.
You can find them by doing a little research. Go to LinkedIn and enter the company name or go to Instagram and look for the company account to find their latest posts. When you find it, leave a comment. It doesn’t have to be a long comment, a simple “Great video!” or “You guys are doing awesome work” will suffice. These types of comments will get you and your brand noticed. By commenting as your brand or company page, you’re also working on brand awareness. Many company pages don’t get engagement on LinkedIn, so your comment will be noticed by the brand and the people who monitor the account.
If you also know names of people who work in the company – an influencer or a decision maker, do a quick search and find his or her personal page. Comment, like, or share one of his or her posts. This will also help give your name or company name brand awareness and recognition.
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3. Go After Previous Prospects
After working on socials, go after previous prospects. These are companies that you or your company have previously sent proposals to. Whether it was 2 months ago, 6 months ago, or 2 years ago, there is still value to these prospects. You need to circle back to all these past relevant opportunities.
You (or the company) have already done the work towards finding these technical sales prospects and you’ve sent proposals to the most qualified ones. For whatever reason, it didn’t result in the technical sales you were hoping for. Maybe timing wasn’t right or the price was too high at that time.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t work out. Even if they decided to go with someone else at that time, circling back to them is still an awesome tactic in securing more technical sales. Maybe something happened to the supplier or the project was put on the back burner.
When you go back to them, the situation may have changed, such as the project is now active again. Go through your old spreadsheet of people and companies you’ve contacted, or your company has contacted, and start the process again. Email them, message them on social, give them a call. These are low-hanging fruits that you can contact today and eventually they tend to pay off when you finally snag those technical sales.
Those are 3 tips you can do today. Don’t wait before you get started on them. Sit down and work on getting these done in the next 8 hours.
The following tips should be done over the next few days and encourage you to be more strategic:
4. Know Your Target Customer Persona
If you’re new in the space, starting a new business, or you are a new employee in the company, you need to know who are you going after and what type of customer you are looking for. Look at your competition – visit their website and social accounts. Take note of any reviews made by their customers and logos of companies that they might have on their site. From this you’ll be able to have a good idea of who your potential technical sales customers are.
Next, ask your new boss or another person at the company who they have done business with in the past. You can add these contacts to your list of prospects.
Also, one of the musts in any sales category, and especially technical sales, is to create a persona. This is an example of a person or business who is in your target market. You need to think of all the details a potential customer might have. If it’s a business – what industry is it in? What are their needs? What are the profiles for the their decision makers? This information helps develop the technical sales persona you will keep on coming back to when thinking of who you can prospect.
When you’re done with all of this, the ultimate goal is to create a database of your potential technical sales customers. Make a list of your target demographic. Do your research, use Google, LinkedIn, come up with company names, phone numbers, email addresses, websites, and socials. This should be a master list that you continue to grow week after week.
5. Be Active and Consistent with Your Social Media Use
The key is consistency. You can’t just do this once and then forget about it. You have to do these every single day. Tips 1 to 3 should be part of your daily routine. Look at this as a “rinse, repeat, execute” point of view. Make it part of your muscle memory. The difference between growing your technical sales or not is being consistent. If you stop this routine after a week or two, your pipeline will dry up and you’ll have to start from scratch. Keep pushing and don’t get complacent.
Bonus tip: If your company has a marketing department, reach out to them and ask for any marketing materials and content that can help you, such as digital copies of brochures that you can post on social. Ask them what campaigns they recently launched and what other initiatives they are busy with. Remember, marketing’s job is to bring new opportunities to the timelines of the people in technical sales.
Although sales and marketing can sometimes be at odds, it will actually be beneficial for both parties to help each other out. Of course, as the ultimate goal is to increase technical sales, having a healthy relationship between sales and marketing help the bottom line of the company.
There’s no time to waste. Start working on these tips today and see your technical sales start increasing. Although it won’t happen overnight, get the work done today and reap the benefits in the near future.
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