It's not about proving how smart you are or proving your technical expertise or showing all your certifications. You're only there to see if there's good chemistry and a good fit to suggest the next logical step in the IT sales process.
Is This Someone You Can Work With?
You're there primarily to make sure that you're seeing eye-to-eye, that this looks like a good client that your company could work with, and that they look like other clients that you've had success with. You've asked the key questions about the size and the platform already. You're there to make sure there's a good personality fit and good chemistry to go on to the next logical step for IT sales.
For most nice-sized opportunities in a small business, it pays to spend an hour or so learning about their needs and giving away some limited free advice. But to get IT sales, be very prepared to cap it and shift that discussion toward hiring your firm for an initial IT audit or technology assessment. It's very important to move from free to fee,
"Free" Will Make You Poor
If you stay free forever, you will not develop the profit and at some point you have to draw the line. There are small businesses that will keep you coming back over and over again and picking your brains and sapping your energy and will never result in IT sales.
Know What Service You Want to Sell Them
So, stop giving away the store. Size up your client's immediate needs and hot buttons ahead of the IT sales call. Start thinking about how you're going to be a solution for that. And be prepared to sell some kind of concrete, fixed cost half-day IT audit for a couple hundred dollars.
If you sense a larger opportunity, say $50,000 or $100,000 in pure services, not a product sale where there's going to be margins on it, but a real, pure IT services opportunity, you can certainly afford to risk giving away more than an hour, but you've got to know what the cards look like before you even walk in the door.
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