Consultancy Business that Specializes in Small Business IT
If you’re running a consultancy business in the small business IT space, you know that selling sophisticated IT services can be tough if you fail to prove to your prospects how valuable your solutions are to their businesses.
In the computer consulting business, dead-end solutions can be really expensive mistakes for your prospects … and mistakes that many may have made with less skilled, savvy technology providers. So, if you want to gain long-term, steady, high-paying clients that will bring you the revenue to sustain your consultancy well into the future, you have to prove that your proposed network solution, on-going maintenance and support services will be easy-to-implement and affordable. You also have to show how much more efficient and profitable your clients will be once they take your advice.
Here are 3 tips that will help you prove that the sophisticated IT solutions provided by your consultancy business are right for your prospective clients.
Communicate the Options. Discuss various technology options with your prospects and how these options will work with their companies existing IT infrastructure. Make sure to consider server hardware and OS/NOS selection. And detail how, as you add more memory, faster processors, fault-tolerance, and multiple processors, performance will continue to improve. Make sure to always explain options in non-technical, business-focused terms so you don’t alienate non-technical small business owners and managers. Then talk up available options down the road that focus on keeping IT investments in sync with each client’s long-term business goals. Highlight the Growth Path. Show prospective small business clients, particularly those relying on simple peer-to-peer servers, how the sophisticated network solution proposed by your consultancy business will provide a very well-defined growth path to more application-rich platforms. Then, reiterate how a simple peer-to-peer server severely limits options. A peer-to-peer server might be enough for some limited file and printer sharing, but it’s not a great platform for adding high-performance relational database or messaging applications. Stress how, as your prospects’ companies grow and their needs evolve, the amount of files can spiral out of control … and how your networking solution that will help them stay on their growth path without any major glitches. Stress How Networking Solutions Can Reduce Confusion. With a decentralized peer-to-peer network, your consultancy business clients may end up with multiple, conflicting versions of files in programs like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Whether these files are passed around on a disk or jump drive, or distributed on different users’ “servers,” a well-designed, sophisticated client/server network with consistent naming conventions and a coherent share and folder structure, goes a long way toward preventing confusion. If you stress this de-cluttering benefit with your prospective clients, you can go a long way towards proving how valuable your services can be to them.