Product Knowledge and Human Resources Knowledge is extremely important

You can’t be a consultant with the process unless you really understand your product and HR processes. If you are going to sell HR software, spend as much time as possible on product knowledge and look at the needs analysis process as an educational opportunity for gaining a better understanding about the processes of HR. You will be amazed at how, with each demo you perform, you are asked questions you have never been asked before. In order to answer a large number of questions that you can’t easily prepare for, it’s important to have detailed product knowledge that allows you to answer the wide range of questions you will receive. It’s all about credibility. And if you don’t know the system you are selling or understand the needs of HR, you aren’t credible.

Project Manage the selection process

If you have been selling HRMS Solutions for any amount of time, you fully understand that the process can be a long one. I’ve had deals that I worked for years before I finally saw a paycheck from the effort. Here’s my advice of how you can potentially shorten the process.

Someone has to project manage the whole process. If HR is not doing it, then you might also want to consider the project management piece as part of your responsibility. With every contact or meeting, it’s important that you do something to advance the process to the next step. At the end of each meeting, I would ask what the next step was and then summarize any deliverables that came up and set time tables for the deliverables. If I had just provided references to the client, I would ask how soon they could follow up with these references and then determine what our next step was after that. This is referred to as "advancing the sale." For me, it’s a little bit of project management as well. Someone needs to keep the process moving forward. If you have internal assistance from others who are gathering information for you, you need to stay on top of them to make sure they are meeting your timelines. If there are individuals with the prospect’s company from which you are waiting for information, you need to follow up with them, as well, to make sure they are meeting their timelines.

FOLLOW UP!

It’s hard to believe but I was frequently amazed how poor a job HR sales reps did with this part of the process. If you tell the prospect you will get them references, additional information, or a proposal by a certain date, you had better do so. There is no easier way to lose credibility than to constantly follow up later than the time frame you set or to not follow up at all. If you can’t meet a time frame, at the very least, let the prospect know and provide a new time frame which, again, you had better meet. The process of selecting HRA Software is long enough; you don’t need to add to it by not following through on time tables that you have set.

When I was selling HR Software, I used a number of different customer resource management systems. They all had the ability to schedule future calls. I used this feature and back then, started my day out doing exactly this. If a client asked me to check back with them in six months, I did so. And I was amazed at how often others did not. I won deals that others lost by effectively following up.

Closing

As mentioned previously, there is nothing easy about selling HR software. There are literally hundreds of reasons why you are going to lose deals you thought you had won. If I won every HR system sale I thought I should have, I would be sitting on my sailboat down in the Caribbean instead of writing this article. I would never suggest that one of my articles would guarantee success but, at the very least, I believe the tips offered in this article will make you a more effective HR software sales rep. The article outlines how I sold HR systems and I was pretty darn effective at it. While with Sage Software, I broke just about every sales record they had. As a reseller for over ten years, we were in the top 20% for sales from their large number of participating vendors. I hope the consultative approach works as well for you as it did for me.