IT Marketing and Focusing on Benefits in Your Sales Letter

Regardless of your specialty or niche, you need a sales letter for your IT marketing plan that stresses benefits to clients. While you may have been told previously in your life that business letters need to be short and sweet, this is not always the case.

Use Long Sales Letters for IT Marketing

1. To build urgency.

2. To stir up your pot.

3. To get prospects to take action.

4. To take prospects through the suffering that occurs when they do not do data security right.
5. To help prospects see how great it can be to make their staff more productive.

6. To show prospects how they can benefit and grow their companies 150% to 200% without really adding much more staff.

Address Points of Pain with Prospects

If you are new to writing IT marketing sales letters, you can hire an advertising or marketing consultant or a freelance copywriter to help you. But, regardless of how you approach the letter, you need to understand your prospects’ painful points when it comes to technology in your particular niche.

Provide a Free Offer

In order to get demand up with IT marketing, you may have to send out a letter with your business card that offers a free “bribe” – a free one-hour needs assessment or another service of value to your prospects. Make sure you limit the freebie with a deadline – limit it to the first X number of businesses or put a deadline on it.

If you are considered an IT expert for your niche, your IT marketing letters and calls will be better received. Your expertise will be communicated in the headline and throughout the letter, and you will be offering something completely relevant that most professionals will want.

Your sales letter needs to talk about work you’ve done with other firms like the prospects’ you are addressing (testimonials are important!) and how specifically you can help them. The trends and problems of the industry will mean a lot during this phase of IT marketing.

The goal with your IT marketing sales letter is to move your prospect to the next step, which will most likely be an in-depth IT audit.

Submitted By: Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

LAN Service Contracts Offer Opportunities

If you have sufficiently researched computer consulting and LAN service contracts, you probably have serious information overload. You need to follow specific steps when starting your own computer consulting company.

What are the steps you need to follow for starting with LAN service contracts and your own company?

Select Your Date

You need to pick a real launch date for your business and write it down in very specific terms. This process gives you a chance to work towards something concrete. Put it on your calendar and keep it as a real goal, whether it is six months or six weeks from this very moment.

Set Your LAN Service Contracts Business Priorities

You need to limit the list of things to do to the top 10 most important.

Sample Top Ten Priorities List

1. Get an accountant meeting

2. Obtain your business resale license

3. Open a distributor account

4. Choose your company name

5. Get your business card designed and printed

6. Get your Web site domain name registered

7. Shop insurance options

8. Get your Web site domain

9. Get your business voicemail set up

Keep in mind, there could be 30, 40 or 50 items on your list. You need to narrow the list down to the ten most important.

Organize Your List

Before you do anything with your LAN services contracts business, you need to rank your to-do list into an organized list of items that makes sense. Work on two items per week. If you like to analyze and work on screen, you can do this exercise in Excel or Word. Of course, you also need to get them into a list of the top 10 to prioritize.

Your Timeline is Critical

If you are launching your LAN service contracts business in five weeks and you have ten things to do, choose two things per week. This list will be more doable when you set up a very specific time frame.

Added By: Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

IT Marketing and Public Speaking Events

You can use public speaking events to help with your IT marketing efforts and connect to prospects.

Speaking at the Meetings of Other Groups

When you use other people’s meetings as IT marketing opportunities and speak you get a captive audience. The people there are already at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast or a Rotary Club meeting, and someone else has already sparked their interest and drawn them to the meeting. Your job is to show up and be a compelling featured speaker.

IT Marketing: Speak to Your Audience

You want to talk about a topic that is universal and general enough to appeal to business people. Don’t use IT marketing speak and keep it low-tech, even if the speech is about technology issues (and it should relate in some way).

Make sure the business organizations you choose for furthering IT marketing have similar characteristics to those within your sweet spot. Talk to an executive director or manager to find out before you connect!

Use Free Seminars

You can also get your name out by doing a free seminar on how to protect computer systems from viruses, security breaches and blackouts or some other important topic.

Seminars can be challenging to deliver and execute. Make sure you feel comfortable with the delivery and if possible share the seminar with another speaker within your company to split it up and make it more interesting and varied for attendees. Don’t make the IT marketing seminar longer than 45 minutes.

Get People to Attend Your IT Marketing Seminars

You can generate demand and the RSVPs for free seminars by doing a direct mail piece to a targeted list or a Chamber of Commerce or other organizational list. An effective and low-cost way to mail them is by combining them with a Chamber of Commerce mailing and putting in a flyer when it goes out. This way of spreading the word and generating demand can be a really great IT marketing technique.

Added By: Joshua Feinberg

Which Computer Skills Does Your Staff Need?

If you don’t have really advanced computer skills, you needn’t worry. You just need to devote some time each week to studying. Which computer skills do you need to best serve your clients?

Break Something That Works

You can get a not-for-resale copy of a product you intend to sell, install and support and work with it in your lab. If a member of your staff has a spare half-hour or an hour, walk through the basic installations, then break them and reinstall the software until you increase your comfort level. Most of the products are mature enough that they will not require you to have a lot of technical skills.

Easy Installations

Many years ago, products were more difficult to install. But companies such as Microsoft have now made their products a lot easier for those that do not have advanced computer skills.

Which Computer Skills Do You Need?

1. Good and strong PC hardware skills.

2. Familiarity with a P2P setup.

3. Knowledge of TCP/IP.

4. Comfort with POP3 and SMTP.

5. An awareness of how to work with basic SOHO routers.

If your staff has these computer skills, you are at a good starting point for working with small businesses.

Knowledge Sharing

You need to make sure you cross-train your employees and vice-versa. This way no one gets ahead of anyone else and is tempted to blackmail, extract huge raises or bonuses or walk away with the entire client roster, or go to the next competitor.

Added By: Computer Consulting Kit

Virtual IT: What is It?

Do you run a computer consulting company, and have you been hearing about the term “virtual IT,” but don’t quite know what it is? Most computer consulting companies don’t understand the concept of virtual IT, so you’re not alone!

Why Do Companies Get Virtual IT Wrong?

Most computer consulting business owners make work too hard because they get wrapped up in technology and put their small business clients in second place.

If you don’t focus on your clients, you are getting virtual IT ALL wrong and will guarantee that your computer consulting company is known as clueless. You need to know that recruiting and retaining small business clients is your first priority, and that keeping up with technology should never be put first in the mission of your company. Don’t let hardware, operating systems or applications woo you; instead love business opportunities and how you solve your clients’ biggest business issues with your sophisticated solutions.

Computer Consulting Should Mix with Virtual IT

In order to understand a successful computer consulting company, you need to know about virtual IT. Virtual IT lets your company be an integral part of your small business clients’ companies. You become an outsourced IT department, and your role will be like that of a CIO, CTO or IT manager.

Like any good IT department, your virtual IT business will need to set up complete solutions that include help desk, desktop support, network administration, engineering, security, training, procurement, asset management and anything else you can think of. The goal is to provide a complete virtual IT solution that will deliver on time and under or at budget for your clients.

The Main Virtual IT Concept

Most computer consulting companies don’t understand how to truly set up a virtual IT plan. Make sure to focus on clients – don’t just fall in love with technology – and provide complete solutions for your important accounts.

Added By: Computer Consulting Kit