Selling technical products, profitably, within the construction industry invariably means selling to specifiers such as architects, civil engineers, structural engineers and client teams, especially if they are new innovative products. All of these specifiers will have spent many years becoming qualified and will be educated to degree level. All most all of these technical professionals will be looking for technical support from sales people and won’t be comfortable seeing a ‘sales’ person. They will constantly be judging the technical knowledge of the sales person based on the knowledge they have of the product, the understanding of the relevant standards relating to the application and the technical language that they use. They are unlikely to give any sales presentation credibility if they have judged the sales person as not being technically knowledgable.

Any successful technical sales strategy needs several elements to be considered;

Product positioning is important, is it a product which has a technical differentiation to anything else in the market place? If there isn’t, is it a commodity product which needs a different sales strategy?

What sort of sales team will you need? Do you employ people with technical knowledge, but limited or no sales experience, or do you train sales people technically concerning everything associated with the product?

Technical sales tools such as CPD presentations, white papers, Specification Clauses, standard details will all help sales people demonstrate there technical capability and are a necessity in any strategy.