IT Consulting: Providing Clients with Credit
In running an IT consulting business, do not be too quick to give new clients credit. Even when you give them credit, keep their lines of credit relatively low until they’ve built up some history with you.
Provide Low Lines of Credit
If you have new IT consulting clients, it may make sense to start them out, even if you get a credit application and send out some credit reference letters, with a $500 or $1,000 line of credit. Don’t go allowing them to hang you up on a $5,000 or $10,000 leash before they’ve proven they’re able to pay small invoices.
If they need a lot of work before that, it makes sense to get larger deposits and be able to accept credit cards, but do not be too quick to give new IT consulting clients credit. It’s a way to get yourself in big financial trouble really fast.
Require Written Agreements
It’s even worse if you’re selling products like hardware, software and peripherals. Always insist on written agreements for your IT consulting business. Verbal promises are for amateurs and belong in an era of time that disappeared decades ago.
State what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, when you’re going to do it, what it’s going to cost and the payment schedule, in four to six sentences. Of course, on larger IT consulting projects you will need multi page proposals.
The Bottom Line about IT Consulting
Always insist on written agreements, even if it’s a very small job. Just type up a couple sentences, a letter of understanding, to ensure you and the client are on the same page.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT consulting. To learn more about IT consulting, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Sales: Tips for The Call
IT sales are so important to your computer consulting business. Don’t just "wing it," be prepared for your sales meetings and use the necessary tools to raise your odds of closing the sale. Here are some key points to consider in IT sales calls:
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Do your homework AHEAD of time by qualifying and performing background research on the prospect.
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Manage expectations. Tell the prospect that the purpose of your visit is to mutually decide whether to move forward and how, so your prospects are not expecting a free service call.
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Stay in control of the discussion by having an outline.
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Move the discussion from free to fee by segueing into a discussion about typical Proving Ground Projects your firm works on.
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Whatever you do, don’t touch a keyboard. A sales call is not a free consulting session.
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Remember, a sales call is a MUTUAL interview. You have the right to say NO too!
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Your testimonials and case studies provide PROOF that you know your stuff and trump just about ANYTHING you could do on the sales call.
Some Practical Advice
Read on to find out another tool that helped one of our consultants with IT Sales
"This year, we landed our biggest account yet. The forms in the Computer Consulting Kit alone are worth the cost of the Computer Consulting Kit. We used the forms to tune our sales process."
Tim Maroe, McCall Help Desk
McCall, Idaho
The Bottom Line about IT Sales
To learn more about IT sales, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Support: Where Do Larger Small and Medium Sized Businesses Get It?
Big small businesses get their IT support, from an internal IT person, or a small IT department. Remember, a big/small business typically has 50 to 100 PCs doing anywhere from 5 million to 20 million dollars in U.S. annual revenue.
IT Support Sources for Big/Small Businesses
That’s also where you start to see a full-fledged IT manager or director providing IT support. You might even see a small IT department.
In a lot of cases, you may see slightly bigger versions of the same types of people that show up in sweet spots and small businesses. But you will find fewer soloists and more small firms. You’ll also start to find more deeply niched specialists,
How To Be Successful in Big/Small Businesses
If you want to be successful in big/small businesses and larger, you can’t be the generalist. You need to pick a few things and get really, really deep into them.
The Profile of Medium Sized Businesses
If you get into medium sized businesses with more than 100 PCs, doing more than 20 million dollars in U.S. annual revenue, you’re going to see more IT departments. You’re going to have even bigger versions of those same IT sources you saw with the sweet spot businesses.
Where Medium Sized Businesses Get Their IT Support
You’ll also see even deeper specialists, and, and in those cases, both the big/small businesses and medium sized businesses, and the range in which you can go opens up quite a bit more, because they are paying for a deeply niched specialty.
The Bottom Line about IT Support
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT support. To learn more about IT support, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
Notebook PC Warranties: Study Them Carefully
Over the past five years, the price points on notebook PCs have been driven down dramatically. However, lower purchase prices not withstanding, notebook PCs still have a rather unique warranty service dilemma.
If a keyboard, mouse-equivalent (tracking-stick or touch-pad) or display fails on a notebook PC, you won’t find inexpensive, third party replacements parts readily available at local retail stores.
Study the Warranties
So as your clients’ virtual CIO who decides on what particular brands and models of notebook PCs to recommend, it’s important to scrutinize notebook PC warranties. With notebooks, individual hardware components are much more specialized than components used for desktop PCs.
For example, notebook hard drives are not as generic as desktop PC hard drives (although notebook PC hard drives are getting more standardized).
Parts Not so Common
As your client’s virtual CIO, you would have great difficulty trying to find a replacement notebook PC hard drive locally at a warehouse club or office supply superstore.
And even if you or your clients miraculously could find one, the price likely would be at least double the cost of a comparable desktop PC hard drive. As a result, the value of hardware component warranty coverage on a notebook PC is substantially greater.
The Bottom Line about the Notebook PC
Unlike desktop PC hard drive replacements, notebook hard drive replacements can be expensive, both from a soft cost perspective as well as the cost of the actual replacement part. Moreover, because notebooks require specific parts, it’s pretty difficult to quickly obtain appropriate replacement parts on your own.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to the notebook PC. To learn more about the notebook PC click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
Small Business Computer Consulting: Can You Hire Help?
As a new small business computer consulting firm, you might ask what level of technical staff you can put on payroll. Don’t get too excited yet; you have to be realistic about this.
Of course, it varies by job market, but all things being equal, what kind of technical person will your small business computer consulting firm be able to find?
Can you find someone that has the wide variety of intermediate to high end technical skills that are needed for larger small business clients if your technical salary budget is only $37,500 a year?
The Need for Qualified Help
Your small business computer consulting clients that have ten to fifty PC’s are going to start to have much more sophisticated needs. You can’t send someone in who’s a glorified screwdriver technician.
It doesn’t work. Your small business computer consulting firm needs fairly high level people.
Know What You Have to Offer
On the flip side, on the demand generation side, what kind of polished B to B salesperson are you going to be able to find for your small business computer consulting firm if you can only offer a base salary of $27,500 a year?
That extra $10,000 will need to be allocated to things like direct mail, having that person go to organization and networking meetings, sponsoring events, doing seminars and things along those lines.
The Bottom Line about Small Business Computer Consulting
Finding staff with skills for such low salaries is like Fantasy Island for most new small business computer consulting firms. It’s very unlikely to happen. You, as the owner, are the only person, aside from maybe your spouse or another family member, who’s going to be willing to work like a dog at way below market wages while the business is built up.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to small business computer consulting. To learn more about small business computer consulting click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Leads: Qualify Your Prospects
When it comes to IT leads, keep focusing on your ideal clients. If you’re too scattered with your customers, it will just delay you from growing your business quickly. Pick one group and learn how to pursue them. Go to networking groups, learn about their industry and hang out where they do.
Read on to see what one of our computer consultants found useful in his business:
"I narrowed my clientele to one major group. It helped me see the bigger picture and helped prevent me from wasting my time."
Bill York, The Klifson Group
Reynoldsburg, Ohio
The Bottom Line about IT Leads
To learn more about IT leads, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consulting Rates: What Should You Charge?
Your hourly IT consulting rate potentials will vary according to where you live. The rates in this article will be based in U.S. dollars, so if you’re reading this in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, or another country, you’ll need to do some conversions.
These IT consulting rates work well for densely populated suburban areas and major metro areas. For very sparsely populated areas and rural areas you are going to find that you can’t charge as much, but then again your costs of doing business are also going to be generally a lot lower.
What IT Consulting Rates are Appropriate for Sweet Spot Clients?
In terms of micro small businesses IT consulting rates are all over the map because volunteers and gurus are involved. It can be from zero to $50, sometimes more. If you want to work with micro small businesses as a stepping stone clients, you will only want the cream of the crop and skim only the most profitable opportunities in micro small businesses.
Charge at the Top of the Range
You are going to need to charge either at the absolute top of that range or even above that range, because you simply are not going to be able to make your switch over from part time moonlighting over to full time on $50 an hour.
It just doesn’t work. When you start putting that rate into a spreadsheet, you’ll see that the only people who can charge low rates like that are moonlighters who will never be full time IT consultants. No one is content to work 80 hours a week for $20,000 dollars a year.
The Bottom Line about IT Consulting Rate
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT consulting rates. To learn more about IT consulting rates, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
Computer Consulting Business: Nail Down the Vendor Support Options
No computer consulting business can afford to be sitting at a client site, running up a big bill, staring at a blue-screen-of-death, facing an angry mob of irate users and sitting on hold for two hours with tech support.
This scenario is your absolute worst nightmare in running a computer consulting business and can be the kiss of death to your client relationship.
The Need for Good Vendor Technical Support
Good vendor technical support will preserve your credibility as a computer consulting business during times of crisis. No matter how experienced you are at PC hardware troubleshooting, calling on a specialist is a necessity.
Understand What Is Offered
Rather than get an unpleasant surprise when you need help the most, get the lowdown on vendor technical support before you make the purchase recommendation. Although many top PC vendors have similar capabilities and services, ask about included technical support services, and preferably get a description of them in writing.
Ask Questions
As a computer consulting business, you will want to ask questions to determine the reliability of PC vendor technical support.
Find out if they are available by phone, if the technical support phone number is toll-free and if the support is free or not. Also, find out if there are different technical support phone numbers for different products.
In operating your computer consulting business, you will also want to know if vendor technical support has 24/7 support in case you have a need for emergency support. Ask if online tech support resources are available as well.
Deal With a Specialist
As a computer consulting business, you want direct, rapid access to a specialist who deals with nothing but that particular product all day. So test the technical support group’s responsiveness at a time when your heart isn’t racing in the heat of a client server-down emergency.
Also, PC Magazine regularly evaluates PC vendors’ technical support quality, so this is a good resource to look into.
The Bottom Line about the Computer Consulting Business
In this article, you’ve been introduced to the computer consulting business. To learn more about the computer consulting business click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consulting: Charge Appropriately for Your Services
In IT consulting it is important to know the relationship between hourly billing rates and salary affordability so you can properly plan for both your own salary draw, as well as salaries of future technical and sales-related staff.
This is directly related to one of the biggest mistakes you can make when starting your IT consulting business.
Don’t Give Away Your Services
Many new IT consultants give away their services for ridiculously unsustainable rates, like $25 or $30 an hour, because they’re emulating the wrong people in the market.
They’re copying the computer repair technicians or other moonlighters, and it’s not possible to ever be able to have a sustainable business.
Value your IT Consulting Business
There is a very definite relationship between what your clients pay your consulting firm, your hourly billing rate, and the kind of salary package you can ultimately offer your sales and technology staff.
Even if you don’t plan on hiring additional staff, you have to consider that you are doing the work and you need to be compensated appropriately.
Don’t Underestimate
Your IT consulting company is going to hit a brick wall and you’re going to hit a brick wall if you underestimate the expenses and what you need to be charging.
If your billing rates are at a certain level, you’re eventually going to find that you’re going to have an extremely difficult time attracting the kind of staff that’s required to recruit and service sweet spot IT consulting clients.
The Bottom Line about IT Consulting
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT consulting. To learn more about IT consulting click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Marketing: Narrow Your Client Base
Your ideal client should never be "anyone" - you should have a picture of your ideal client in mind. Narrowing your IT marketing focus and making some slight changes to your business policies can go a long way in increasing your bottom line.
Read on to see how one of our computer consultants benefited by tweaking his operations.
"I made the transition from being a provider to everyone to a provider that sought out customers in the small-midsized business niche. I also went from invoicing customers as they used my services to selling blocks of time and the changes to my bottom line have been great. The audio portions are great as they are packed with lots of ideas that a person without a lot of marketing experience can really draw from. The Computer Consulting Kit was definitely worth every penny spent."
Todd Thanhauser, Thanhauser Computer Services
Morgantown, Pennsylvania
The Bottom Line about IT Marketing
To learn more about IT marketing, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consulting Career: Making the Leap to Full-Time
How do you know it’s a good time to leave your current full time employment and launch into a full-time IT consulting career? Start now.
We have broken down the process into 21 steps that will take you over about 90 days, or 3months, to do. You’ll need to understand what your utilization rates is and how much you’re able to bill out consistently on a regular basis.
Understand your Expenses
Know what your living expenses are before you leave your full time job. You need to understand what’s in your sales funnel, or pipeline.
Prepare for The Unexpected
You need to know and be a little prepared to know what to do if all of a sudden the launch that you were planning on happening 6 months from now all of a sudden gets moved up. You may wake up and find you have been laid off of your current job. What was going to be slow and gradual has now thrusted you into your IT consulting career.
Focus on Getting Steady Clients
How can you give up your steady check the benefits, the vacation, the lifestyle, the perks, the sick time and still have a lifestyle that is a good lifestyle? What is extremely important in your IT consulting career is that you have steady clients and steady income with some regularity in your business.
Charge Appropriate Rates
Don’t undercharge your clients. You need to charge rates that are close to the top of the market. You can’t afford to be messing around with cheapskates and tightwads. And you can’t afford to be messing around with people that aren’t serious.
Finding steady clients and charging the right rates for your services and not cheating yourself is so very, very important for a successful IT consulting career.
Consider Moonlighting
We have a 21-step checklist that will take you through your first 90 days. We also can help you adapt to a sudden launch of your IT consulting career. But in the meantime, you should make the most of your moonlighting opportunities to make it build toward something.
The Bottom Line about an IT Consulting Career
In this article, you’ve been introduced to an IT consulting career. To learn more about an IT consulting career, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consultant: How To Manage Your Time During Start Up
As an IT consultant looking to go solo, how you can cut through the information overload so you can tune out the distractions and focus on only the most relevant, critical tasks for starting up a business?
You need to first realize you may need to stop spending time on things that are not making you any money.
Adjust Your Priorities
If you are serious about starting a business as an IT consultant, you will have to adjust your priorities and manage your time better.
When you’re first starting out, especially during the first six months to a year, put 90% of what you perceive to be your research and development time and your technology training time on the back burner for the next three to six months.
Shift Your Focus to Finding Clients
As an IT consultant trying to go solo, you need to concentrate on finding paying clients for your business. Sitting in a classroom, playing with CDT’s, getting all these not-for-resale copies of things and playing around in your lab with new operating systems is not helping your business!
Once you make this adjustment you will figure out pretty quickly whether you need to get more training.
Your Technology Skills Are Probably Ahead of Your Clients
Fortunately, you’re probably six to 18 months ahead of what small businesses in your area need. They’re not early adopters, they’re late adopters. Put your business development needs ahead of your need to feel like you’re keeping up.
The Bottom Line about the IT Consultant
As an IT consultant looking to go out on your own, keep in mind you need to prioritize and manage your time effectively. Take all the time you would have spent keeping up and reading magazines, and put it into demand generation, lead qualification, sales calls and follow ups.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to the IT consultant. To learn more about the IT consultant click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
PC Purchases: The Benefits of Adding CD-RW Drives
Regardless of whether your clients are considering PC purchases of desktops or notebooks, they need to consider compatibility issues with a CD-RW drive, the accompanying operating system and other hardware components.
With a notebook, you’re generally restricted to proprietary parts that only work with a particular brand, make and model of notebook. So if your clients want internal CD-RW drives, they’ll probably need the sole supported brand and model from the notebook manufacturer.
With PC purchases of desktops, your clients have many more options for adding a CD-RW drive. While they could purchase internal CD-RW drives later and have your firm install the devices, it’s much simpler to get the CD-RW drives bundled with PC purchases.
Foreward Thinking
Even though your firm could be forfeiting some short-term revenue by recommending hardware bundled component PC purchases, your clients will be much happier paying your hourly rates for high-level consulting work, as opposed to turning screwdrivers and connecting up ribbon cables.
By having CD-RW drives factory installed, you and your clients know the drives will work with the PC and operating system. No guesswork. No tedious calls to technical support. Minimal, if any, frustration.
Tech Support and Warranty Benefits
The PC vendor who bundled the CD-RW drive with the desktop notebook or PC purchases should stand behind the configuration as "supported," if and when you or your clients need to call for assistance.
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This one-stop shopping approach also can prove invaluable, as your clients won’t be subjected to the all-too-typical finger-pointing and accountability shirking between a component manufacturer and a PC vendor.
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The bundled CD-RW drive will be covered by the PC’s warranty.
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The incremental cost of upgrading from a standard CD-ROM drive to a CD-RW drive at time of PC purchases is usually minimal.
The Bottom Line about PC Purchases
In this article, you’ve been introduced to PC purchases. To learn more about PC purchases, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Marketing: Understand Your Clients’ Needs
When beginning your computer consulting business, you need to heavily concentrate on IT Marketing. They key to finding clients that benefit from your services is to look at their problems from their point of view - not yours.
Some of our top computer consultants shared with us their IT marketing and sales secrets. Read on to see how one of our consultants was able to break into companies who already had an IT services provider.
"Our approach to sales and lead generation was useless. We were speaking to small business owners from an IT point of view rather than an owner’s point of view. Breaking into companies who already had an IT services company was difficult, but the Computer Consulting Kit has provided us with a new point of view. The Computer Consulting Kit has mapped a path into companies via taking a completely different approach to the sales methods we had been using."
Neil Abrahams, Orbitweb Limited
Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
The Bottom Line about IT Marketing
To learn more about IT marketing, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consultant: Personality Trait Evaluation
In addition to knowing the difference between a lan and a laptop, to be a successful IT consultant, you need to have the personality traits that will permit you to work well with your clients, employees and vendors. Read on to evaluate if you have what it takes to be a successful IT consultant.
IT Consultant Traits: Can You Exhibit Candor?
You can’t be afraid to tell people the truth - even if it hurts. Be very confident, because if you aren’t, people are going to see right through it.
You are going to need to come across as very confident when going out to networking, sales calls and even service calls. If you don’t, people will sense fear and take advantage of it. It is very important that you work on displaying confidence.
IT Consultant Traits: Can You Work With Uncertainty?
You should be able to work with uncertainty; as a business owner, there really is no sure thing, ever. You can do some things to lessen the risk, but is impossible to eliminate all of the risk so you need to be able to cope with that and cope with a certain degree of uncertainty.
IT Consultant Traits: Are You Decisive?
You need to be able to know which battles are worth fighting. There is a lot of things that are going to come up with clients, especially long time clients, that will get on your nerves. You are going to have to take a couple steps back in your mind and figure out is this something worth fighting for or if you should just let it roll off your back.
At the other extreme, you are going to have to figure which prospects, are completely wasting your time and which clients have gone bad. Which are becoming time vampires and sucking all your blood, your energy? You need to be decisive enough to recognize that and take action. You also need to be able to decide which employees and contractors to hire.
The Bottom Line about IT Consultant Traits
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT consultant traits. To learn more about the IT consultant, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
Small Business Computer Consulting: Finding the Right Prospects
If you are starting a small business computer consulting firm, you should know that the small business accounts that have 10 to 50 PC’s are going to have at least one branch office.
Prospects of this size are used to using professional technology providers and this isn’t the first time they’ve had to hire a small business computer consulting firm. Organizations like this have a willingness to pay for support.
Does Your Prospect Have In-House IT?
However, if they have in-house IT, you should learn what they need you for. Is it for a very deep specialty or for an extremely unusual case where they want to outsource everything?
Researching Prospective Clients
To find prospects for your small business computer consulting firm you should Google towns in your area, ZIP and postal codes, area code and telephone prefixes. Additionally, these prospects will usually belong to a local or regional chamber of commerce or similar organization.
To meet some of these people and market your small business computer consulting firm, you can join the organizations or attend as a guest.
Know Where to Find Your Prospects
Your prospects will likely have presence at business to business events, so you can also attend these events to market your small business computer consulting firm.
Since your target clients will often be covered in the business section of your local publications, you’ll want to subscribe to these or read them at the library.
The Bottom Line about Small Business Computer Consulting
If you want to narrow down your focus to the best small businesses in the area, consider networking at local events and reading up on these businesses in your local publications. You want to pay attention to the criteria above and ensure you can identify your prospects right off the bat.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to small business computer consulting. To learn more about small business computer consulting click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consultants: Guide Your Clients Toward Small Business PC Hardware
As IT consultants, you may recall that in the early to mid-‘90s, leading PC vendors began segmenting their product lines into two or three distinct tiers to meet the demands of the different needs of consumers.
IT Consultants Have Different Component Levels to Choose From
As the domestic and global market demand for desktop PCs, notebooks and servers began to soar, top PC vendors such as Compaq (now Hewlett Packard), Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard and IBM wanted to have PC products that would be highly relevant and compelling for various needs and budgets.
The Different Options
Enterprise customers, such as Fortune 1000 network man-agers, would pay premium prices but require incredible amounts of scalability, reliability and availability, stable and mature hardware configurations, as well as ease of manage-ability.
Home users would need rock-bottom prices to entice first-time buyers, as well as bleeding edge hardware components for gaming, digital photography, video capture and other Internet-era hobbies.
Small business users would need something in between — not too stripped down, not too loaded up, but a very good mid-range value.
IT Consultants Can Compare Specs
Fortunately, the PC vendors also have made identifying appropriate products easier for both you and your clients. When researching PC configurations online for your clients, PC vendors’ Web sites almost always will have separate Web pages and sections for each of these three market segments.
This helps to make sure IT consultatns inadvertently don’t recommend a PC with the wrong set of features.
IT Consultants Can Profit From White Box Computer Sales
A big percentage of small businesses Worldwide purchase white-box or clone PCs from local computer resellers, integrators and IT consultants.
Visit the major PC vendors’ Web sites periodically to see how your firm’s recommended small business PC configurations and price points compare to what the major PC vendors offer.
The Bottom Line about IT Consultants
In this article, you’ve learned about IT consultants. To learn more about IT consultants, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consulting: What Non-IT Skills Do You Need?
IT consulting is more than just knowing all about laptops and servers. To be successful, you need to have business skills, too. This article will give you some examples of skills you need for your IT consulting business.
Good Data Management Will Keep You Organized
You should have strong spreadsheet skills and hopefully know Excel pretty well. There will be all kinds of data you will need to put together for internal use and for client’s use. For time management, you need to know how to draw the line. You will need to keep on schedule and keep priorities in check.
The Phone Will Be Your Friend
For IT consulting, you will need good verbal skills, and feel comfortable on the phone. Because you are going to need that for following up on leads and setting up appointments. You’ll also need good phone skills for providing tech support and for keeping clients and vendors in check.
Speaking Effectively in Public Might Close the Deal
In IT consulting, you’ll be doing small group presentations. You’ll be doing these with an internal training or on a sales call. You are going to be talking to 3, 4, 5 as much as 10 people at once sometimes. You may get a company where they will bring in literally all of their middle management to grill you on the solution to make sure you have it.
Proper Grammar and Spelling Will Let Your Professionalism Shine Through
You should have decent word processing and email communications skills to get with your clients, prospects and partners. Those are some of the important business skills.
The Bottom Line about IT Consulting
Much of what determines someone’s success in IT consulting is his business skills rather than technical proficiency. If you have deficiencies in these skills, now is the time to work on them so you can stay in the IT consulting field for the long haul.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT consulting. To learn more about IT consulting, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Consultant: Transition to Full-Time
If you are working a full-time day job and moonlighting as an IT consultant, you need to know a few things before transitioning to becoming a full-time IT consultant.
Take the following into consideration and avoid the common mistakes many IT consultants make when transitioning from part-time to full-time, self-employed consulting.
Rule #1 – Don’t Make Assumptions
A lot of moonlighting IT consultants are initially so enamored and so taken in by the idea of getting some self-employed income that they never stop to plan ahead and think through where it’s all leading.
It just isn’t serving them correctly. You will want to nip this in the bud and start off on the right track.
Rule #2 – Plan Ahead
A lot of the moonlighting IT consultant’s dream of being full time consultants. Sadly, a lot of them are never going to make it because of one simple shortcoming: they’re not planning ahead for how and when the transition is going to take place.
They’re hoping it’s going to take place, but they’re not planning for it.
The Bottom Line about the IT Consultant
If you are a moonlighting IT consultant and want to transition into full-time consulting, make sure you plan ahead. Don’t get caught burying your head in the sand or taking huge risks that don’t make sense.
In this article, you’ve been introduced to the IT consultant. To learn more about the IT consultant click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
IT Marketing: How Can You Boost Your Business for Free?
IT Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. One way to build your IT consulting business is by encouraging your clients to provide referrals. Provide excellent service to your clients, and they can help do some of your marketing for you.
Some of our top computer consultants shared with us their IT marketing strategies. Read on to see which one was most beneficial for one of our consultants:
"I landed an international client who needed a fair amount of work. From the Computer Consulting Kit, I learned that utilizing referrals of people who know me and could play up my abilities could help my company."
Sean Rogers, Distinctive Computer Solutions, LLC
New Britain, Connecticut
The Bottom Line about IT Marketing
To learn more about IT marketing, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.
