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Sometimes it seems like IT sales professionals treat a full lead pipeline as a security blanket. They like to know it’s there … but they don’t do anything with it. The sense is that just having lead available means the future is secure. After all, they can pursue them anytime they want, right? Unfortunately, leads don’t get better with age – especially the hot ones. Eventually, someone will meet a prospect’s needs, taking away the near-term opportunity and giving another company the chance to turn it into a long-lasting relationship. In the end, a full pipeline actually provides little security, if it isn’t approached with swift action.

Of course, there are other reasons why leads are left dormant. Some sales professionals prefer to chase leads that have big tickets, not recognizing that a small client now can become a big one later. And, every rep has his or her favorite accounts, which provide a consistent flow of revenue with little opportunity for growth. In some cases, fear is involved: nobody wants to chase an opportunity and lose.

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Too often, we think we know the answer. We know our clients pain points. We know the solutions they need. We know how much they should budget for it. Unfortunately, what we purport to know is rarely what actually happens. Prospects may delay a purchase, alter implementation timelines or even go down an entirely different path. When this happens, IT sales professionals and implementation teams are often surprised, feeling that the change of plan came out of nowhere. If you pay attention, however, you’ll pick up cues along the way that can keep these surprises from arising.

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Most IT sales professionals know what it takes to close a deal. Put one in front of a well-qualified prospect, and the rest takes care of itself. The problem, of course, is getting those meetings. Without effective marketing support, sales teams are stuck cold-calling, hovering at networking events filled mostly with job-hunters instead of decision-makers and otherwise trying to find very small needles in incredibly large haystacks. The odds against success are high.

The situation is made worse by a tendency – in both sales and marketing departments – to focus only on the present. Even if you can rack up enough appointments for this month, what happens next month? Next quarter? Next year?

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Since self-service information doesn’t always lead to the correct conclusions, as we discussed yesterday, your prospects need your help, whether they realize it or not. They need competent sales professionals and, at times, pre-sales engineers to walk them through the intricacies of a situation to ensure the right solutions are identified and implemented. Without this layer of support, IT buyers who are smart but pressed for time will not always plunge into the details, leaving major causal problems undiagnosed and, post-implementation, not remedied.

Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by IT buyers is that they can sum up a situation quickly and have the strength of reason and experience behind them. This can impede further inquiry and discussion … and result in an ineffective implementation and unhappy client. So, the sales professional needs to begin the process of engaging the IT buyer early, in order to help him move past any preconceived notions that could make a project unsuccessful.

Your prospects will be most interested in answers to the questions they have — even if there are greater issues underlying them. Use their immediate concerns as a starting point, and then guide the dialogue in a manner that gives you a platform for addressing any related or underlying concerns.

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