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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Basic Computer Consulting Tips

If you want your computer consulting business to succeed, you need to offer a sophisticated and total business solution. You have to have a good support contract agreement in place and an IT audit checklist. You also will need partnering agreements and the ability to take your prospects through the sales process until they become long-term clients.

Support Contracts

If you don’t suggest computer consulting support contract agreements to customers, they are not going to ask for them. You need to set a precedent for how you work with other clients; you build mutually beneficial relationships and become your clients’ outsourced computer department.

Get to Paid Services

You need to take prospects from “free” to “fee.” You shouldn’t spend hours on a proposal, because a computer consulting proposal has no value and makes you a commodity. You want prospects, customers and clients to make an investment in your firm.

Take it Step by Step

You should pick one goal per week for the next several weeks and just start working. Maybe you want to come up with a few marketing ideas or a support contract structure that you can start marketing to your clients.

Regardless of what you choose as a focus for the week, you need to start planning and building a network. Get everything ready so you are ready to go when you need to be. Your goal shouldn’t be to reach everyone; you need to define your targets and figure out how to reach a specific group.

You Are an Outsourced IT Department

You need to think about five or six different functions that small businesses need and build your computer consulting business around these functions. When you think of growing your business in these terms, you start to build the foundation for an outsourced IT department. You give your client a single point of contact for all their computer consulting needs.

Blogged By: Joshua Feinberg

Sunday, October 28, 2007

IT Marketing: A Little Bit about Your Elevator Pitch

Your elevator pitch is an important part of your IT marketing assets. Basically, the elevator pitch is a 10 – 20-second introduction to you and your company that you use whenever you encounter a prospect at an event.

What should go into your IT marketing elevator pitch? It should talk about what your company does, what makes you unique and why the prospect might want to consider working with you.

Your IT Marketing Elevator Pitch: A Definition

The concept of the elevator pitch comes from the following situation:

You get into an elevator with someone on the 20th floor of a building and have until you get to the ground floor to talk about you and your company. Your pitch should go quickly enough so that in this situation, the person you are talking to would also have time to give YOU an elevator pitch. It needs to be very reflexive and ready-to-go whenever appropriate.

You Need to Practice Your Elevator Pitch

You should write your IT marketing elevator pitch out on an index card that you keep in your pocket. You can look through it when you’re in traffic or before you’re going into IT sales calls. You need to be comfortable delivering it.

When you start to go out and get involved in expos and seminars or at Chamber events, you will probably be tired of using your elevator pitch. But you have to practice being enthusiastic about it every time you give it as part of your IT marketing activities.

Added By: Computer Consulting Kit

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

IT Marketing and Mail to Your Current Customers

Starting a fresh IT marketing campaign can start with a mailing to your current customers.

Mail to Those That Know You

When you engage in IT marketing efforts to your current customers, you already own the list. And the recipients of the mailing will already know, like and trust you, so you will have overcome one of the biggest IT marketing obstacles.

What’s Your Customer Pitch?

If you already feel good talking to small business owners about important technology aspects such as virus protection, firewalls, passwords, data backup and power protection, then you are well on your way to successful IT marketing of IT audits and data protection.

You can present a very discounted audit deal to sweeten your IT marketing efforts towards your customers. If it’s regularly $400, for example, offer it for $299 through a set date. You can also include little extras such as an entry-level battery backup unit or surge protector. Make sure it’s something of value.

IT Marketing Means Tracking Results

Make sure you analyze the responses you get from any IT marketing mailings. So, if you get five percent inquiries and half end up taking the audit, you can compare this to other lists and mailings (from non-customers and customers alike). Of course, you’ll usually have a more interested audience when you are mailing to your current customers than you will for any other IT marketing campaigns.

Customers Can Use What They Have

You should explore your current customer relationships to figure out how people you work with can more efficiently use what they already have. You will probably find that customers have things that have been purchased but never used. Or if these items are being used, they are not being used to their fullest.

Solidify Your Relationships through IT Marketing

IT marketing mailings to existing customers are a great chance to help you improve your relationships. You can show customers how to better use what they already own while getting more service revenue. You also increase loyalty and the strength of relationships that are vital to the future of your business.

Added By: Computer Consulting Kit

Sunday, October 21, 2007

IT Sales and the First Sales Call

You have to think about the first IT sales call as a lead qualification step. You can’t afford to waste time on clients that may not be serious about hiring you, but you might do just that if you are not careful with how you handle the first IT sales call.

Stop the Game of “20 Questions”

When you get into the initial IT sales call, you will inevitably get hit with a lot of questions. Prospects will start drilling you on what you know and don’t know and trying to get free information out of you.

Eventually, you need to cut off this process to get to the next step. Any more than an hour will give you more than enough issues to discuss with your prospects and tell them what comes next in the IT sales process. When you’re done with the IT sales presentation, move onto suggesting that you, a systems engineer or a technician comes back and spends a couple hours on a site survey.

The Importance of the Site Survey

The site survey is a great next IT sales strep and is a way to inventory problems and analyze them. You and your prospect can decide which steps will come first, third, second and fourth and have a good starting point. Make sure you provide a report as part of this process and document where the prospect stands with security, software licensing, data protection, etc.

The Main Idea about IT Sales

Once you feel the IT sales presentation coming to an end, ask if the prospect would be interested in a site survey and explain how it can help them. This will be your first try at closing the sale and will stop you from wasting hours of time only to find the prospect didn’t necessarily intend to hire you in the first place.

Blogged By: Computer Consulting Kit

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Computer Consulting and a Balanced Portfolio

You should be able to target 70% of your business in the small business computer consulting market cornered with a balanced portfolio. Keep a very small amount of your business with home networks and consumers and then have 5 or 15% of your business geared towards larger businesses. While this plan does work for many computer consulting businesses, success really depends on where you want to focus.

Diversify

You shouldn’t have a single client that accounts for more than 10% of your computer consulting revenue. If you do have a client like this and you lose him/her, you will find yourself taking a huge revenue hit.

Just Get Rid of Bad Clients

Even if it makes you nervous, firing your bad clients can be really smart for your computer consulting business. Some clients will not be worth all the money in the world and will drive your computer consulting staff insane. You’ll see people taking sick days and trying to get out of going to see these problem clients. If you’ve diversified properly, getting rid of these terrible clients should be a lot easier.

What Are Some Reasons to Fire Clients?

Besides bad behavior clients, you may have some computer consulting clients that are not meeting their contract commitments. When this happens, you should be able to cut them loose without losing a lot of revenue.

A lot of management consultants say you should fire your bottom 20% of your customer list each year. While you don’t need to follow this exact rule, you will have to think about getting rid of the clients that put crazy demands and unnecessary strain on your business.

Your Ideal Clients Are Critical

You can’t stand for computer consulting customers that abuse you, harass you and stress you out. Other clients will be great to you and make the process of providing tech services a dream. When you diversify your client base, you will know how to replicate the good clients and fire the bad ones.

Added By: Joshua Feinberg

Monday, October 15, 2007

IT Emergencies Require Preparation

You have to be ready for IT emergencies. This means you need to have online resource access, telephone support lines set up, tool kits available and checklists to track everything.

Are Your Abilities a Match?

To properly handle IT emergencies, you have to make sure your skills match the basic needs of your clients. What kind of hardware is your customer using? Which applications are used and how do these things affect their businesses financially and from an operations standpoint?

Assessment prior to going onsite is essential to taking care of IT emergencies.

Can You Really Fix the Problem?

You may find that a customer’s IT emergencies involve Linux and that you don’t have any experience. Therefore, you shouldn’t start a relationship with them based on this type of scenario. You need to be prepared to and capable of handling the IT emergencies you agree to address.

Prepare Your Company for IT Emergencies

New customers might be using familiar hardware and software, but they may be using a random hub, switch or router. Learning to fix this item will take you longer and cost you more money than the money you will make from fixing it. Therefore, you should encourage customers to replace the items with things you can support. Stress that streamlining products will make support issues in the future easier for both of you.

The point is, you are providing better service in less time when you focus on a single type of server, backup software program or anti-virus solution. You can save time during IT emergencies especially when you are not too busy keeping up with an array of renewals and new products.

The Main Point about IT Emergencies

If you can prioritize during IT emergencies, you will truly impress your customers and make them consider being long-term clients. IT emergencies are excellent opportunities to increase loyalty and build long-term client relationships.

Blogged By: Computer Consulting Kit

Friday, October 12, 2007

IT Consulting and Appropriately Tracking Your Time and Invoices

When you are working with a new IT consulting business, you need to carefully think about your time tracking and invoicing procedures. If you avoid the common mistakes, your IT consulting company will be in a much better financial position, even when money is tight. Keeping close watch on invoicing and time will also help you get more control over your business.

Time Tracking, Billing, etc.

Time tracking, billing issues and invoicing become real challenges for those involved in IT consulting. Which software should you use for time tracking and billing? Well, if you are just thinking about software, you are probably missing an important point – keeping track of time and billing is beyond the type of software you use.

You should use software that is easy to manage and makes your IT consulting job simpler, but no software will fix any issues you have with organization and management.

Manage Your Services

Your loyal IT consulting clients will see you as an insurance policy. A steady client will pay bills on time if you follow through with your promises. Your policies should make clients afraid that when they forget to pay their invoices on time, they may be forgotten during an emergency. You want to follow systems with time tracking, billing and invoicing that encourage IT consulting clients to behave well and really work well with your business.

Added By: Computer Consulting Kit

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Where Do You Find IT Marketing Prospect Lists?

When you finish your long IT marketing sales letter, how do you know where to send it?

IT Marketing Tool #1: Advertising Lists

When you are looking for IT marketing lists, there are many you can choose. For example, in the U.S., the most popular are Zap Data and InfoUSA and are good places to start. When you need to rent mailing lists not in the U.S., go to Accountable List Brokers in Australia, List Angels in the UK or InfoUSA Canada listings.

If you want to get even more lists, you might consider going to your local chambers and industry trade groups or even newspapers and business journals to get IT marketing lists.

IT Marketing Tool #2: Trade Groups

As you build your IT marketing client list, you may end up with two clients that are in the same field, such as dentistry. If you have experience installing LANs and setting up networks for dentists as a result, going to places where prospects just like your current clients are will be easy.

IT Marketing Tool #3: Where Do Your Clients Hang Out?

Look for trade groups that those within your chosen specialty/occupation/industry would go. Then you can go to their meetings and conferences and take out a table at expos. You can become active as a panelist on something technology-related or write an article for one of their industry publications.

Keep It Modest

You should keep your involvement in organizations modest as part of your IT marketing campaign. Don’t join more than two or three industry organizations at a time. Get involved and be reasonably active, but don’t let it get in the way of your job (ie., don’t join the Board of Directors or anything with too much responsibilities). But do go to the meetings and look for word-of-mouth referrals.

With IT marketing, you need to focus on finding potential customers. Build your prospect list by buying or renting advertising lists and going to industry events.

Added By: Computer Consulting Kit

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Starting a Computer Consulting Business and Learning About Relationships and Benefits

When starting a computer consulting business, you can’t just expect to make sales right away without first establishing relationships. You’re also going to have to really show the benefits of your services if you want to succeed.

Starting a Computer Consulting Business: What’s Your Benefit?

Your prospect may have an IT-related issue that you can’t handle. Instead of dwelling on this, you need to focus on the problems they have that you know you can solve and things that will get them to really take notice.

What’s Your Pitch?

When you’re starting a computer consulting business, you need to talk about what you have done in the past with other customers and the tangible benefits they’ve received from your services.

The Relationship Needs to Evolve

Once again, you can’t just expect to have a “serious” relationship right away with a prospect when starting a computer consulting business. Be prepared to spend a couple weeks or months to really get a firm commitment. Patience and persistence are key (without being obnoxious!).

Are There Additional Questions?

Prospects might have more questions or issues that crop up while you are developing your relationship. They may be saying, “Great idea! I’ll get back to you …” and this is NOT the end of the conversation. You need to give them a great reason to do the work TODAY, which means asking lots of questions to assess the situation:

1. How important is the project?

2. When do you want to start?

3. How important is this project?

4. Where are you in the decision process?

5. Have you done research?

6. Is this a good time of year for this type of work to be done?

7. Is there a budget for this work?

When starting your computer consulting business, don’t let the conversation with prospects end if you want to make a sale!

Added By: Joshua Feinberg