Differentiate Yourself

Differentiating yourself to meet the needs and motivations of your prospects is critical to your increased success but it is difficult for customers to differentiate between you and your competition.

What I do in every sales situation is get to the Key Buying Influencers as quickly as possible. Then I work to find their business and personal needs. Meeting with all the influencers is important and will give you an edge over your competition.

Help the Customer Understand Their Needs
Sometimes, customers are so inundated with their own daily issues that their real needs are often shortsighted. Some timese they lose sight of what they really need. The salesperson who can shine the light on this will stand out.

Don’t Forget the Personal Win
Find out what the decision makers want to gain personally as well as professionally, and highlight how your solution will achieve them.

When buyers are evaluating several proposals, it is often impossible to differentiate one proposal from the next. The effectiveness of the salesperson, not the proposal, is what buyers remember most.

Set goals...in the customers interest!
Goals should define specific ends that relate to your business, your customer’s business, and your relationships. Examples of qualitative long-term Goals stated from the account’s point of view:
1. Be known as the firm that helped this account break into a competitive market.
2. Be seen as providing the best follow-up service of any company in our industry.
3. Have the account recognize your expertise as the provider of unique solutions to his problems.
4. Be seen as delivering more than you promise.

Your Goals should help the customer reduce costs, boost sales revenue, improve productivity, or raise profit. A Goal that doesn’t do one of these things -- either directly or indirectly -- is probably not a Goal worth pursuing.

Competition? What competition?
Be aware of the competition; never obsess about it.

If you think of yourself as focusing on the goal, training hard (through strategic analysis), and running the best race you know how to, you’ll have a good idea of what we believe competition is about. The point is to look straight ahead and offer the customer your best performance, not to be distracted by what’s going on in the next lane. As any competitive runner will tell you, one sure way to stumble is to look to your side.

What's your "Value Proposition"?

There is a lot of competition. You struggle to find a differentiator to help you grow your business but what really is the value your bring to your customers?

Is your product unique and in demand?
Does it help your customers increase their revenue?
Do your services give your customers a competitive advantage in their marketplace?

A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. The more specific your value proposition is, the better.

Strong value propositions deliver tangible results like:

Increased revenues
Faster time to market
Decreased costs
Improved operational efficiency
Increased market share
Decreased employee turnover
Improved customer retention levels
Documented success stories make you believable to prospective buyers.

Need help identifying your "Value Proposition"? Contact me.

What slow down

The staffing business has always been under pressure from one kind of change or another. Changes take place in new software, new systems, new businesses and new business models, economic recession, etc.

The staff augmentation business has survived and grown inspite of these pressures. Why? The staffing business is fast, flexible, and needed.

With todays communication networks we can maintain contact with resources and know within hours who is available and interested in filling a spot. With todays technology we can provide our services on-site, off-site, or a combination of both and in addition to that many of us can provide solutions in off hours or days.

Clients have projects to complete and may not have long-term budgets. That is where we shine, we can provide them with top notch people on a short-term basis to help them through their difficulties.

Reference Checking

While most technical support/development people are honest and can prove their skills some may not be. In these highly competitive times, where one slip up could cost you a client, you would not want to be forwarding resumes to your clients without thoroughly checking the candiates references.

If your client takes their valuable time to interview your candidate, based upon your submission, and then finds out during the interview that the candidate is less than honest it reflects badly on YOU.

Take a few minutes of your time to verify that the candidate has the skills, has worked where they say they have, and has a good work record. Simple, yet some firms don't even bother

You only have one thing of value to your clients, integrity. Don't blow it.

Prospecting for business

Here's the delimma...we all want to expand our client base and let companies know we exist to help them but IT managers are extremely busy and don't usually have the time to sit and listen to a sales person explain their company to them.

When we call we should understand that our prospects are busy and have probably heard every sales pitch in the world. Our pitch should be short and to the point; we have people or solutions that could probably benefit them. We may have the cheapest rates in town or we may have the most experienced people to work on their systems, whatever it is remember - they don't care about you, they only care about themselves.
Remember that and be prepared with the proper answers to any questions they ask.

A New Year, same old problems

With the turn of the calendar we have swept into 2008 but the same old issue came along with us from 2007; a shortage of good qualified IT Professionals. Many companies I have talked with tell me they continue to look for experienced people to help them with projects that haven't been completed or with new projects.

The economy has slowed but the pressure on IT hasn't. It seems as though they are being asked to do more with fewer resources. So, hiring of full time people is down but since the work still has to be done the need for contract labor has increased.