newbie sales need a clue

June 21, 2008 11:05 AM

I'm doing a career change into sales for an IT company. This company doesn't have a sales person now or a marketing strategy. How can I best contribute and succeed at this role?

I've applied for and think I will receive an offer to work for a local IT group. I've worked for small IT groups before. My picture is that they tend to be great at what they do best, building IT systems, and not so good at the other parts of business building.
This company has some great talent and products, but is relatively small and has no sales program in place. They've built their business on the basis of referrals and local connections but need to expand. That's where I come in.
As a relative newbie to sales, I'd be expected to learn their products, establish a marketing strategy, learn sales and start producing. That's quite a lot on my plate. Where can I start? I've been googling sales courses and marketing templates, looking at competitors and seeing how I could contribute. What's the best course of action to drive some success to this company?
We are talking remote server and database admin as one product line, and special expertise in the medical records arena as another.

posted by diode to technology (3 comments total)

Sales and marketing are very different beasts. Sales will have you out knocking on doors pitching products and marketing will have you building an overall system for making folks aware of the products, such as creating radio spots or mailing out postcards. Do you know which one they are hiring you to do?
posted by bprater at 11:49 AM on June 21

One thing that effective sales and marketing have in common is identification and strong definition of competitive advantages or differences. How one product is better or different from every other potential "competing" product, both from valid competitors and from the company's own other offerings.
posted by rokusan at 12:10 PM on June 21

I don't know that the company has any particular marketing or sales expertise. The job title is technical account manager aka sales but the marketing aspect is not being dealt with so I'm expecting that will be up to me as well.
posted by diode at 5:36 PM on June 21