Sales and marketing is an art, a skill; it needs to be done by someone skilled.
Sales and marketing is not an art, it's a job like any other and can be learned
Joe, if you haven't got enough work coming in, why would you pay someone to do your sales for you whilst you sit in and wait for sales to come in?
Sales is just confidence, product knowledge and an excellent work ethic. Who knows the products better than you, the guy who is installing/building them? Sales is basically chatting to people and learning from your mistakes but lots of people are scared of it because they think it's really complicated.
With the right tools and organisation (phone with headset, Excel spreadsheet of data, electronic records management) it's just a case of picking up the phone, finding out who in the company you are ringing is responsible for the services you are trying to provide (so you're looking at the IT department, bursar, site manager etc in schools; IT department, Facilities/Purchasing Team, Buyer etc in offices) and at the very basic level you are explaining why you are calling, asking what their situation is for what you are selling and asking if you can provide a comparison price to what they have already.
When you start off you'll make lots of silly mistakes and you'll kick yourself for making them but the trick is that when you make a mistake, put the phone down and then think of the perfect answer you'll be armed with that answer next time another company asks you the same question.
So, you just have to make sure you don't get demoralised and keep making calls. Every mistake you make makes you a better sales person.
Remember that you're new so you're going to screw up a lot first but then everybody does and that sales is a numbers game i.e. you could make 50-100 calls before someone takes the time to chat with you so don't get demoralised when people on 20 straight calls tell you they're not interested.
Don't be intimidated by large businesses either through competing against them or calling them asking for business. The main problem with big firms is that they forget that excellent customer services is what people really like. Customers don't want to be bounced around different people, they want to deal with one person, they appreciate only having to ring you once, that you get back to them the same day, that you'll bend over backwards to accommodate them.
You want to be stressing that you're a firm that's small enough to care but large enough to offer a comparable service to the market leaders (but less of a cliché in the way I have written it).
Your costs should be a lot more competitive as you only have to pay your own wage rather than paying for a receptionist, customer services, sales team, accountants, admin assistants, op's managers etc like the national firms.
So you want to be ringing companies and emphasising that you can provide a local service, you're more competitive than the firms currently doing the work, you're an owner who is also an engineer so you go the extra mile, are passionate about doing the job well, you care about your reputation etc etc. Hammer home all those things that make you better than the competition.
