Selling Business Technology: 3 Ways YOU Can Be The Value Your Customer Needs

By Sean Berg, Shift4 Payments

For many years, resellers have competed by finding holes in the sales strategies of their competition. Whether selling payment processing, POS systems, cloud technology, security solutions, or business consulting services, demonstrating your product’s advantages was, and still is, a winning strategy.

This approach has been quite successful for VARs, especially when combined with knowing their products, educating business owners, and providing added value. The average sales agent today truly embodies being an expert in their field. This approach can continue to be effective as the payments, point of sale, cloud technology, and business solution industries converge into today’s collective business technology industry.

However, with recent mergers and acquisitions, plus advances in technology, the industry continues to evolve into a more competitive space. With these changes, how can you take your sales to the next level?

Why does selling your product backfire?

It has become common for each technology provider and reseller to market the features that make them most proud. But this approach is losing effectiveness as development teams have grown more agile and knowledgeable throughout the years. Any product advantages in this industry are quickly diminished as competitors provide product updates within months —and many times — in weeks.

Today, you may offer groundbreaking new features, but tomorrow your competitors may upgrade. After your competitor has added these new features and more, your product and your knowledge become "outdated."

Each day you spend trying to prove your product is better than the competition is time spent reducing your own credibility.