It’s certainly not for everyone. Not everyone you meet through networking and marketing will be a prime candidate for long-term contracts. So, how do you figure out which of your prospects, customers, and clients will be interested?

1. Be Prepared to Screen Candidates. When you are preparing for sales calls, make sure you are asking your prospects the right questions. If you get signals that potential clients will not want to work with you long term, think twice about continuing to court them. In order to have successful computer repair contract relationships, you have to find clients who want and need ongoing relationships.
2. Sell Peace of Mind with Your Computer Repair Contract Relationships. When you sell your complete, long term solutions, you are selling an insurance policy of sorts. With on-going client relationships, most of the time you will be going to client sites for situations other than emergencies. There will be installations, upgrades, maintenance, training, troubleshooting, and keeping important virus protection and other systems up to date. You may be putting new systems on LANs or configuring e-mail accounts. When you actually have an emergency however, you need to instill trust that you will be there. You need to make sure that the people you court as prospects understand what you are offering: essentially an insurance policy, peace of mind and the security that comes with knowing they have someone trustworthy to scream for when they have major IT problems.
3. Don’t Waste Time on Low-Quality Prospects. If you really want to dramatically improve your business and grow towards offering sophisticated business solutions through a compelling computer repair contract package, think long and hard about whether you will even go on sales calls for those that don’t seem to fit the bill for your ongoing services. Make sure you have a strong pre-qualification process in place, so you know exactly what you are looking for. This way, you won’t waste valuable time on those that will not be able to afford or use your ongoing professional services.

As a small business computer consultant, there are a lot of challenges you will face as you build your business.  One of them involves marketing and selling your services to highly qualified business owners that understand and embrace the value of your sophisticated IT solutions.  The following 3 tips can help you set yourself apart from the competition and avoid price-sensitive buyers.

1. Leverage Your Expertise. When you are selling IT services, your expertise will set you apart from the competition.  There are hundreds of people who can do the easy work of an IT “generalist.” But you need to make it your business to do the hard work and show you know the industry better than they do.  You need to be an IT “specialist” and be one of only a couple people in your area that can do what you do.  When you can truly leverage this concept of being a specialist, you will move away from price sensitive buyers and towards those that understand the concept of a sophisticated IT solution.  These tend to be the same clients that are willing to pay higher hourly billing rates for relatively scarce, high-value, results-focused expertise.

2. Sell Knowledge, Not Commodities. If you want to have a successful IT business, you need to stop selling the same old products by themselves and start selling the real value of your services… and the bottom-line business value they provide.  You aren’t going to get very far by selling IT services to product-only customers or competing on price alone.  You need to bundle in value-added services and add real value in order to substantially grow your company and survive for many years.  Think about the concept of selling “You, Inc.”. Remember, your value proposition includes everything you know and are good at, as well as the personalized relationships you build with your clients.  How can you transform your whole marketing approach, so it’s not about just reaching potential customers and clients?  Rather, think about reaching long-term clients, who will need you for many months and years to keep their IT systems up and running.  Stop thinking about how to market “low, low prices” and start really selling your specific solutions that solve real business problems and are different from the solutions of any other IT service provider in your area.

3. Sell Unique Benefits. When you are selling IT services, think about which benefits you can give your clients that will be different from the average generalist consultant in your area.  You need to differentiate yourself from the competition to increase your base of high-paying, steady, long-term clients.  Think about the benefits you offer as part of long-term relationships with clients.  For example, what are the terms of your service contracts, and how do they benefit both you and your loyal clients?  Or is your location – close to clients – something you can leverage with a guaranteed response time during regular business hours?  Think carefully about exactly what you offer clients that no one else can and then stress these unique benefits in all your marketing collateral.

In this article we talked about 3 valuable tips that can help you when you are selling IT services.  To learn more about how you can get great, steady, high-paying clients, sign up for free tips on Selling IT Services now at the attached link.

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