Turn Your Techs into an IT-Selling Sales Machine

You can’t always expect to fit a square peg into a round hole, and you can’t always expect an IT technician to be a great salesperson. However, if you equip them with the right tools, you can turn anyone into an upseller… even if they have little to no experience in sales.

How I Transformed My IT Department into a Sales Team

First and foremost, I want you to understand that I didn’t change anybody’s role. The techs are still techs, and their primary focus is still maintaining and supporting networks. 

As you know, however, the IT department is sort of like the front line. They are the ones going on-site, handling support requests, and talking to the customers on a day-to-day basis. When Susan needs a new laptop, or it’s time to replace some older software, or a client has a new project, the techs are usually the first to get a whiff of it.

And they know to bring it back to the sales team or put together a preliminary quote. Depending on how much leeway you give your IT department, you probably have at least a little occasional revenue coming in simply from little stuff like this.

Little stuff is nice because it adds up over time, but I wanted to accelerate this.

We have some pretty charismatic techs that do a great job with our clients, and some techs have been with us for a while and have formed really good relationships with the main POCs. Where they might fall short (and to no fault of their own) is being good salespeople. 

A tech might recommend a new project that requires a virtual machine and a bunch of billable hours, or mention upgrading a phone system, or drop a hint that we can install surveillance systems, but a salesperson (or as a lot of MSPs like to refer to them, account manager) would sell it. They’d advise it, help the client budget it, and follow up until an agreement is signed.

Just imagine if your techs were able to do that regularly. 

Believe me, it’s awesome.

Equip Your Techs with the Tools to Become Salespeople

Here’s what we’ve done to help turn our technicians into an unstoppable sales machine.

Every Tech Needs a Business Card

Your techs are professionals, they should have a professional business card. If you are like us, and you want to avoid having support requests come in through someone’s email, then these business cards should have your support email on them. 

Start By Having Techs Gather Customer Feedback

This is valuable for a few different reasons—it certainly helps ensure quality of service and accountability, but it also encourages Google reviews and testimonials which can help aid your sales and marketing efforts. It’s hard to simply ask for a testimonial, but if you give your techs a straightforward means to collect reviews every time they touch a device or work with a client, you’ll increase how much feedback you get.

We have simple little tech feedback cards that we equip our technicians with. These cards have a bit.ly link and QR code so the recipient can quickly leave a review, and we drive them right to our Google Business listing. For remote sessions, we have our techs leave the web browser on a feedback page that does the same thing.

The idea is that if the client does have the issue come back, or they have a complaint, they will be funneled over to a form to leave negative feedback, but positive feedback is driven to Google and social media. You can even offer your techs incentives for gathering reviews!

Give Them Brochures and Other Leave Behinds

Our sales team will put together folders of resources to give to a prospect. We have these nice branded folders that we have made, and a big shelf full of brochures with different service briefs and topics ranging from IT management to VoIP to cybersecurity, and everything else we do. 

Your techs don’t always need to pack together a full folder to just hand out every time they are on-site, but having a stack of brochures, whitepapers, recent newsletters, case studies, and even a few tech tip fliers can be really handy.

Our favorite tool by far is our IT Playbook; it’s easy to pack a few in any tech bag, they hold up really well compared to simple paper brochures, and they are impressive as all get-out. When a tech goes on-site for a simple break-fix job where the client is new or simply hasn’t signed an agreement yet, I make sure they leave behind one or two of these.

Keep Your Techs in the Loop on Promotions and Sales Initiatives

Don’t let huge disconnects happen between your technicians and your sales/marketing. If you are promoting cybersecurity services or running a campaign for a particular service, keep your techs in the loop. 

Have weekly huddles between the different departments so sales/marketing can talk about what the next couple weeks of initiatives look like, gather feedback, and look for opportunities. Chances are, your techs will have some ideas and clients that would be ideal for upselling.

If your marketing involves landing pages (which it should), make sure your techs have an updated list of all of the active landing pages and campaigns you are running! It’s one thing for a tech to idly mention a promotion or offer, but when they can pull up the landing page on a client’s computer and say “Yeah, we’re running a promotion and offering a free 30 days of phishing simulation, here’s some info and how to sign up!” then they are ensuring that action will likely be taken. Your techs can even offer to fill out the form for the client.

Give Your Techs an Easy Way to Schedule Sales Meetings

You should make it easy for clients and prospects to pop a sales meeting on your schedule, using either JoomConnect or Calendly, and you should make sure your technicians are fully aware of how to use it so they can loop a client into a sales meeting when the request is more complicated or they feel they need the client to run through a sales presentation. You wouldn’t believe how important this is—sometimes a tech might be too busy to have time to properly pitch a service, or might not feel confident in being able to “sell” it, and encouraging them to book the client with the sales team or an account manager ensures that there is momentum from the initial query.

Use Your Blog as a Knowledge Center

Our MSP uses our own blog service, where we write and publish three articles each week. A large portion of these blog posts are tips and tricks—Windows shortcuts, Excel/Google Sheets tricks, cybersecurity tips, and other such things. 

Encourage your techs to familiarize themselves with your blog, and when a question comes up, do a quick search to see if there is a post that answers their question. 

If you have an Ultimate MSP Website, whether you have our blog service or not, your techs can also easily add new content to the blog, and build out simple knowledge-base posts that cover certain topics.

MSP Salespeople Don’t Need to Go It Alone!

Synergizing the relationship between sales and IT can be a huge game changer for MSPs, and can help keep the sales pipe full. If you need help equipping your techs (or your sales and marketing team) with materials and resources, give us a call today at 888-546-4384.