By becoming a giver, a salesperson can provide a personal touch to any sales conversation. Understand the needs of your lead and how your company can add value. You'd be surprised by how being persistent will help you close any deal.

Carrie Simpson, President

April 8, 2015

2 Min Read
Photo by Yvonne HartmannGetty Images
(Photo by Yvonne Hartmann/Getty Images)

I have had the pleasure of dealing with a truly masterful sales executive this month. I want to share with you what they did. Maybe you’ll be as impressed as I was. Perhaps you’ll try these ideas yourself as you try to shake up Q2.

I was at a trade show last month where I had a conversation with someone in a large group about how I wanted to use a specific, inexpensive cloud-based solution, but we didn’t think it would work for us based on a few challenges. I didn’t think anything of the conversation, there were a half dozen CSPs standing around our table. One person emailed me the very next day saying he had spent a few hours after we parted considering how we might use the solution, would I like to take a look?

We spent a few hours talking about my business that day, and then we both went back to our respective breakouts. He asked for my business, I said I preferred to deal locally. However, I remained really impressed with the fact that someone would take time out of a busy conference schedule to solve the problem of some random person they had just met over a beer.

A week later, he emailed me with another idea. We chatted, and he asked for my business. I said no, I wasn’t ready to make a change. He did, however, leave me a with a nagging feeling that things could definitely be better.

A week later, a call with a suggestion for a product we might want to explore that would solve another problem I had identified. Finally, I agreed to meet with him to discuss our larger technology challenges — and as a completely cloud-based operation we have many — and needless to say what started out as five seats of a five dollar solution has turned in to a rather large quote.

So, what’s the takeaway?

  1. Givers gain — Be  invested in the success of everyone you meet. Can you help them? Do it. I will recommended this guy to everyone I meet for the next year  — you can’t buy marketing like that.

  2. Be persistent — If you want to do business with someone, keep asking for their business.

  3. Add value — If he had added me to a generic email list, I would have ignored him — it was the personalized content that caught my attention.

  4. Make everyone feel like they are important, that their business is important to you, and that you’re prepared to work to win it. This guy told me no fewer than five times that he would really like to work with us. Then he proved it to us. Be that guy.

Carrie Simpson is founder and CEO of Managed Sales Pros.

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About the Author(s)

Carrie Simpson

President, Managed Sales Pros

Carrie has 20 years of inside and field sales experience. She is the founder of Cold Calls Lead Generation, a business to business sales appointment setting firm. For fourteen years she has helped technology companies sell more, more efficiently. Carrie spent two years building the Managed Services lead generation program at The Eureka Project before founding Managed Sales Pros, a sales cycle acceleration firm that focuses exclusively on the managed services ecosystem. She was named by MSPMentor as one of the 250 most influential people in the technology channel for 2013.

Carrie still cold calls daily. She is responsible for client strategy at Managed Sales Pros and is available for consulting, training and speaking engagements. Carrie’s client list includes MSP industry guru Robin Robins, RMM vendors AVG Managed Workplace and Nable by Solar Winds, Network Security firm OpenDNS, the document management startup ITGlue and emerging and established MSPs from Seattle to New York City.

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