Good Advice on Selling Technology in Latin America

If you are immediately turned off by the idea of someone selling you technology or of yourself as a salesperson, you need to read this post.

Thanks to Startup Chile, I spent Friday morning learning about business to enterprise sales from Nicolas Elizarraga, an expert on tech sales in Latin America . Although the focus was on business in Latin America, most of it applies to education in the U.S. in my experience. If you don’t think this is the case, I’d appreciate hearing your opinion in the comments. Inspired by Nicolas’ results, I’m going to be doing a research study on educational technology decision-making in the U.S. and Latin America, so if we’re connected on LinkedIn or Twitter and you get a request from me to interview you, you’ll know why. Or maybe I just think you’re awesome and miss you. It’s probably for the research, though.

Okay, on to what I learned, in no particular order.

There are two types of people making decisions:

Nicolas focused on Chief Information Officer (CIO) but I think it just applies in general and all of us probably fall in both of these categories at different times or for different products.

Proactive: These people are on the cutting edge. They are looking for the next new thing to make their organization better. They have some time to research and explore new technologies. These people are your pilot sites and beta testers.