IT resellers and ITAD are at an inflection point. Success is even more dependent on your ability to scale sales growth better than your competition. In this series of articles from Circular Momentum, we’ll explore some of our best practices for structuring your sales team to unlock sustainable growth.

Introduction

The Circular economy is seeing tremendous growth, with a forecast CAGR of 22.50% in the North American market through 2031. The Circular IT sector is a big part of this growth with forces such as increased tariffs and the rise of AI computing driving significant expectations for ITAD’s. While this growth underscores opportunities, it also suggests that lower end players will be pushed to the side as scale, compliance, and service integration plays to the strengths of industry leaders. Therefore successful ITAD’s must develop strategies to grow faster than the industry standard, leading ITAD’s to bring an increased focus on developing robust sales and marketing strategies. While acquisitions can be used to compliment organic growth, investing in internal sales capabilities offers a much more consistent ROI.

ITAD’s today are certainly at an inflection point. The heyday of good margins based on secure data destruction, asset remarketing, and asset disposal are gone, replaced by intense competition for profits among these highly commoditized offerings. Today ITAD’s and technology resellers must develop a more services-oriented mindset. There are significant opportunities to address the many needs across the IT Asset lifecycle; IMAC and project work, complex logistics and asset management, maintenance services, and ESG reporting to name a few. Many IT lifecycle services needs in the enterprise space are not being well met by conventional providers like MSP’s and traditional resellers. This is one of the primary growth opportunities for ITAD’s; to become lifecycle services providers, but to do so requires a more refined approach to selling and acquiring customers. It’s a long-known fact that product sales people are not typically effective at selling services, they are too transaction focused. Selling intangibles requires a new sales approach and even a new company philosophy.

Circular Integrity is known for helping ITAD’s develop and implement growth strategies that the outpace the competition, and we’re happy to share some our fundamental principles and best practices we follow when working with clients to achieve success in today’s business environment.

First principles – growth and your mission

A good first step before we start the process is to look at your company mission statement and values. If your company doesn’t yet have these posted publicly, take some time to create them before you proceed. Some technology firms do a great job in this department so examples are not hard to find. Work with your team to decide how you want to position your business as a participant in the circular economy and put it in writing, don’t worry about making it perfect, it can be updated as your growth mindset is developed. Also bear in mind that your mission statement and values should map clearly to your value proposition, something we will develop more clearly as we work to build our go to market strategies for your key customers.

First Principals – Team effort

A growth mindset must be well aligned with the values of the business in a way that every part of your organization can get behind. Don’t think of sales and marketing as a silo that’s not inclusive of product development, operations, finance, and of course the executive team. They should all have buy in. Then the team needs a playbook to understand the process expected from each of the team members, such as lead generation, service delivery, or remarketing efforts. Lastly, the tools that enable these activities such CRM, Sales reporting, and customer satisfaction scoring are important to enable the execution of the strategy. When you build a services deliverable or work to address a new market segment or customer profile, it’s better to have a factory mindset, not a sales first mentality where we’ll deliver the product if sales proves they can sell it. Taking a purposeful approach to launching a new initiative should be well understood and supported by everyone on the team.

Let’s take an example; If your company decides to provide a service supporting remote end user devices like laptops and phones, put that factory mentality into play and write a plan. You’ll need to first understand the market need and your ideal customer profile so you know who to market to for lead generation. Then you need tools to support the program, and their supporting processes, and a pricing model based on competitive analysis. Furthermore, you’ll want to build an annual operating plan that budgets for the costs and the sales achievements required. And there’s much more involved to launch an actual program that we’ll cover elsewhere, the point being that it’s very much like launching a new widget, every part of the company has a part to play in building the new service. These are the people, process, and tools we will address in this series of articles. We will cover all the meaningful areas of sales and customer acquisition development including SWOT analysis, developing your ideal customer profile, sales structure, budgeting and compensation, managing your SQL MQL’s and sales funnel, engaging and qualifying leads, and closing and onboarding new business among other subjects.

In part 1 to follow, we’ll go over sales team structure and roles, the building blocks of a successful sales team.

Over the years the team at Circular Momentum has built deep experience in the best practices required to create strategic growth opportunities for technology companies, specifically in the ITAD segment. If you feel your company would like to engage with us for personalized business development, marketing, and strategy services, reach out to us at www.circmo.com. Also be sure to check out our other playbooks on Marketing and Lifecycle Services development for high technology businesses, ask us for a copy.

We’d love to hear your feedback or questions, feel free to email the author at pete@circmo.com