How to Win Customer Trust: 7 Strategies for Sales Growth in Technical Services

We live in an ever-increasing digital world where technical services are on the rise. When selling these services to potential customers, startup tech companies need to understand what drives their target market. Finding effective ways to achieve sales growth while navigating the constraints of a limited working team is an ongoing challenge for small-scale tech firms.

This article will share my perspective on how a sales growth strategy built on trust matters more than ever in this competitive market. I'll also show you how to maximize your working relationships, what to look for when building your sales team, and how to effectively use social media to reach new customers. But before we get to that, let's talk about the sales efforts that aren't worth your time or hard-earned money.

Sales strategies that don't work for small tech companies

The unfortunate truth is, more than half of technology projects fail. And it's not difficult to understand why. When you have a small startup team working hard to push revenue forward, it's not uncommon to find each person wearing multiple hats. Sales and marketing efforts are often merged instead of holding separate departments found in national firms.

Employees of large companies have the advantage of being able to focus strictly on their areas of expertise, whether that be fine-tuning the sales funnel or fleshing out email marketing strategies; this isn't the case for most tech startups.

A small team can certainly be successful, but people can become unfocused and spread thin when too many steps are added to sales strategies. The stress of constantly shifting focus and jumping from task to task doesn't often result in accomplishing business goals. Ultimately, this attempt at being smart backfires in the form of lost productivity and employee burnout.

While the constraints of small businesses are real, there are ways to avoid common pitfalls. Drawing from my personal experience with tech companies, I want to share some thoughts on what hasn't worked well.

• Copying what's working for large public companies. These companies have an established history and a sizeable sales team that small firms don't have and can't expect to replicate. What works for them is not likely to work on a smaller scale.
• Broadly marketing to a global audience. The magic behind a small technical services company is in pouring efforts into the slice of the market you're helping–this is your sweet spot. Trying to reach a broader demographic doesn't necessarily increase sales.
• Dropping thousands of dollars on trade shows. Networking at a major trade show might seem like a no-brainer, but what is the actual return on investment (ROI) for such an expensive event? The truth is, the numbers often don't pencil out, and those dollars could be better spent networking with qualified leads in the spaces you're already in.

Spending company resources on unsustainable sales strategies. While sending out thousands of cold emails might sound like a good idea, the result of such an email blast can be chaotic as team members shift attention from A/B testing emails and digital marketing to preparing technical estimates and holding face-to-face meetings. What initially seems like a simple effort turns out to be too difficult to sustain.