How can my husband market himself to diversify his business? His new residential business has hit a major low with the bad economy. How can he target new areas? He is a Master Electrician.

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Jay’s Answer: In a word, “specialize”.

Instead of simply being a master electrician, have him focus on a narrow area. For example, home theater systems, burglar alarms, solar panels, etc. People look to hire experts in an area rather than a generalist to solve specific problems. Have him become that expert.

One concern people have in becoming a narrow expert is that they’ll lose the opportunity to work in different non-expert areas. Currently, he’s not getting that work, so it’s not a problem. But when the economy comes back, by being an expert, he can charge more and market better. There’s also no reason he can’t also have a “master electrician” business card, but by starting to focus in a new niche (perhaps with a new business name & website) he can avoid any confusion.

I am working as VP of Marketing and Sales for Manufacturing Company.

My question is What topic and sales tips/ideas on how to change the technical oriented salespeople to marketing oriented salespeople.

Our salespeople are technically educated from engineering faculty and sell our shrimp food to farmers.

The problem with their approach is they focus more on their technical skill and experience in selling the products.And neglect the marketing / sales conversation to close the sale.

My goal is how to talk the business aspect not technical data whereas the customers / prospects are more knowledgeable that even our technical support.

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Jay’s Answer: The simplest thing is to basically ask the prospect, “What information do you need from me and why?” and listen carefully.

Before you can sell anything, you need to know what your potential customer’s mindset is. Are they focused on price, supply, technicalities, competition, quality, customer service, or something else?

The “why” part of the question is to understand their “story”. Have they used the product in the past and had poor results? Are they looking for something new? Do they have a specific problem that they need solved? Are they the decision makers or simply gathering information on behalf of someone else?

Technical people (as a rule) tend to feel more comfortable talking technically. They’re skilled at problem-solving and details. To sell well you need to talk in the language of the customer and from their perspective. So, give your technical people a problem to solve: Find out what it would take to sell the product.

For your workshop/training, you don’t want to try to make the technical people into sales people – that might cause a lot of internal friction. Instead, role play. Create a simple scenario to sell your product (you can have tech people play both roles: the client and the salesperson). Give the “client” a goal (who they are and why they want to buy it). The salesperson needs to find out these things (ideally without asking directly) and then sells accordingly. After each “scene”, critique it. First, have the actors tell their perspective on the conversation, then have the observers critique it. Changing the perspective of conversation and language is simply one of practice. Make the selling process more familiar and less unpleasant. What will naturally happen is that the actors will ask for more information to do a better job – and here’s where you can provide some simple resources for them. For example: You Can’t Teach a Kid…

Alternatively, hire a consultant that would craft a workshop to help train your technical people.