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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.

Many VARs forget about the importance of writing down a business plan.  Going on a wing and a prayer rarely works for any sort of successful computer consulting professional.  The only way to decrease risk and increase organizational skills and professionalism is to create a business plan.

Computer Consulting and Marketing Plans

Many small VARs are not good with marketing strategies.  Word-of-mouth will not sustain a business, and will definitely not help anyone looking to make the switch from a VAR to a managed services provider.  

Realistic Expectations

A lot of people getting into computer consulting do not have realistic expectations about how their margins will be affected when they transition into a new role as a managed services provider.  You can’t overlook the effort needed to grow a business.

Is Virtual IT Compatible with Managed Services?

Many VARs think that virtual IT and MSP can complement each other.  These two things are different approaches in computer consulting.  While both deliver small business IT services, they need completely different computer consulting marketing strategies, business plans, sales processes, technical competency, infrastructure and financial savvy.  

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting Kit