Even then, our research indicates we're leaving 70% of sales opportunities with existing customers on the table!
Is your sales team your only sales team?
Many modern sales teams work in the world of "marketing qualified leads".
But how does Marketing know the day to day problems specific customers are experiencing?
Your sales team is probably either chasing opportunities brought to them, or trying to generate new opportunities. Customer pain points are many, but the sales folk aren't necessarily skilled at identifying them.
So - who is best placed to identify and understand customer pain points? It's the technical and consulting folk (AKA the TECHIES!) that work with customers on a day to day basis!
The solution selling mindset
There is a whole body of work on selling to customers based on solving their problems.
Sales people are taught to encourage customers to reveal the nature of their problems - what the implications are of those problems - and to then build a vision of what their organisation will be like once the problem is solved. The "sales art" is to build a vision that only the selling organisation can provide.
Wheel in the REAL problem identifiers!
Your "techies" spend their day knee-deep in customer problems! 
Generally, they're dispatched (physically, on the phone) to deal with specific issues. They're experts in solving those issues - but they're continually exposed to customer pain point after customer pain point!
The added benefit - and where our techies "have it all over" our customers - is that they have so much more experience in identifying and solving problems than customers. By the nature of working day in, day out on solving customer problems - they can probably see a problem coming before the customer has even thought about it!
Lots of rhetoric is being written around being a "trusted advisor" - no question, that if we can spot a customer problem and head it off BEFORE it has any impact, we can rightly claim trusted advisor status.
This is all great - but it's not happening! Our techies are doing great work - but we're not seeing that flow of problem identifications that lead to real sales opportunities...
Why aren't techies continually passing opportunities to Sales?
Our research indicates 3 main factors that inhibit "techies" from passing opportunities to Sales:
- They're so focused on what they've been asked to do,
they miss spotting looming problems in other parts of the organisation - They don't trust Sales - they worry that if they pass information to Sales that Sales will ride in on their steeds and pressure the customer into buying something - thus destroying the trust between the customer and the techie
- They simply haven't been programmed to do it. No-one has shown them that methodology.
How do we build a REVENUE ACCELERATION PROGRAM that guides techies to spot opportunities in the field, and pass them on to Sales?
We undertook significant research in this area when tasked by 
in Australia to come up with a revenue acceleration program to teach all Microsoft Consulting Services personnel how to spot opportunities in the field, and then pass these off to Sales.
The program went off like a bomb - it was made compulsory in Australia and NZ. New revenue generation commenced within 1 month of completing the initial program.
Techie "revenue readiness"
Our research led us to develop this model of techie "sales/revenue readiness":
Where do your techies lie on the continuum?
Next steps
Download more details on our Sales for Techies Revenue Acceleration Program - and answer some questions to get feedback on the likely value of the program in your organisation.
Sign up for our free Revenue Acceleration webinar series!
