Computer Consultants Secrets ™

One way to distinguish yourself from other consulting firms with IT marketing is to focus on your unique expertise.  Your clients are buying “You, Inc.” and not a computer or router, so you have to set yourself apart from the rest.

You Are Not a Commodity

Commodities are based on price and are cheap.  Selling “You, Inc.” is essential because you have to stress that you have a special problem-solving ability that no one else has and that you can provide the best solutions for small businesses.   

Get Past Your IT Marketing Materials

You have to make sure you are visible on your website and in all your IT marketing materials.  Don’t hide the size of your company by keeping everything anonymous.  If you focus on selling your background and the background of any staff members, you will be more likely to communicate your particular beliefs and philosophies and attract the best clients.  

You Are Unique

A question that is often asked about IT marketing among consultants is, “What is the best, most cost-effective way to get great leads?”

When everyone is going after the same leads with the same pitch from years ago, they are unoriginal.  You need to provide a unique pitch and a unique IT marketing message to get the best leads.  

Make Your IT Marketing Materials Special

To see if you are truly special with your IT marketing message, examine your business card and your home page.  Then take a few business cards and home pages from our local competitors and see how they are different.  Everyone is probably talking about offering very generalized tasks – PC hardware and software sales, LANs, etc. – but this is not unique.  

When you are unique, you end up competing against a dozen competitors instead of a few hundred, and you increase the success of your IT marketing plan.  

Added By:  Joshua Feinberg

When you are trying to grow your computer business, you need to be an IT specialist in order to find a good group of prospects.  If you know you work best with small accounting offices, do a quick Google search to find out how many small accounting offices are within an hour’s radius of your location.  You can also contact one of that industry’s leading trade groups or talk with a mailing list broker.

Market to a Niche as an IT Specialist

Marketing to a niche is easier than marketing generally.  You will know in which trade publications you have to appear and where to look for prospects.  When you act like an IT specialist, you won’t spend a lot of time and money on generic newspaper, radio or phone book ads.  You can concentrate on a specific group.  

When you get expertise in a specific area as an IT specialist, you will be worth more to potential clients.  Your marketing message is going to ring true with a person picking up the phone and one that is looking at your sales letter or postcard.   

Speak to a Smaller Group as an IT Specialist

You can’t come up with a message that rings true for everyone or you will end up in a price war.  You don’t want to be a commodity or anything that is seen a “dirt cheap.”

Put Your Name Out There

If there is a newsletter or a magazine that prospects all read, you can put a targeted ad in it or write an article.  Or you can become active in an attached organization by volunteering or speaking at an event.  When you mention that your company offers total IT solutions for a particular niche or industry, you become a true IT specialist.  

The Main Idea about Being an IT Specialist

There are a lot of ways to get involved as an IT specialist, but you have to find something you love doing that will be lucrative enough and offer enough prospects to keep you in business.

Submitted By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

Novell recently announced the availability of a new small business computer consulting tool – the Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition – to customers across the world.  This Linux-based desktop-to-server product is designed specifically for small businesses and will help many involved in small business computer consulting provide their clients with flexible and cost-effective open source software options. 

According to many small business computer consulting professionals, this new Novell product will allow many small businesses to better afford IT infrastructure.  Many hope the product will allow them to afford to get additional consulting services and applications to better run their businesses. 

This new product from Novell is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise and presents the Novell GroupWise e-mail system, task management and calendaring.  It also offers the following features:  Open Enterprise Server; SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and the Novell edition of the open source suite OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux.  With purchases, clients will enjoy support to up to five servers and 200 users, which will help better handle business growth.   

Part of the purpose of the new suite is to help foster relationships between small business computer consulting professionals and their customers and clients.  It offers an easy installation process that can install the suite in under an hour with just one DVD.  Also available are remote management functions and desktop tools so small business computer consulting professionals can manage and support clients’ systems via the Web.

For more information on this product designed for the small business computer consulting world, visit the attached link.

Added By:  Joshua Feinberg

When you are a security consultant, you can’t let your clients cut corners on PC purchases, particularly when they are running high-end software.  A lot of the employees of your small businesses will depend on software with fairly low-end requirements such as basic word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail and Web browsing software, etc.  But who uses more resources?

Security Consultant:  Your High-End Users Need Advanced Products

Clients that depend upon advanced software – graphic design packages, computer assisted design (CAD) or financial modeling – need your expertise as a security consultant to advise them to buy what they need to support them.  Though it may seem counter-intuitive to you, with processor and memory-intensive software, employee productivity will gain at a rate that outweighs the high cost of buying cutting-edge PC hardware in the first year of its release.  

What is the User’s Salary?

You should keep in mind the salary demanded by very technical professionals capable of running advanced software applications.  As a security consultant specialist, this type of salary shouldn’t be at all surprising.

If a client of yours has a very experienced graphic designer or engineer with a $60,000 base salary, an extra $1,000 annually on PC expenses for this person could be completely within reason.   

Who Are Your Users?

You need to know who amidst your security consultant clients uses high-end software.  This type of influencer is also someone to watch because he/she will become an important vote when making decisions about hiring and firing technology professionals.

Think about Second-Hand PCs

Many small businesses replace PCs every year or two when they have employees that use high-end software.  The old PCs then get passed onto users that use less intensive resources.  As a security consultant, you can recommend this concept as a way to make expensive resources last longer and also decrease the out-of-pocket support expenses of totally replenishing PCs.

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

Solution providers often find themselves struggling to find the right partnerships that will increase trust among prospects and clients.  Similarly, the best solution providers need to be able to choose and use the technology that will work best to offer complete business solutions to customers and clients.  

Solution providers also must choose the appropriate vendor that has comprehensive partner programs and will allow easy and efficient networking to help grow a business.

On November 7, CMP Channel Assistant News Editor Scott Campbell will conduct a discussion for solution providers at 2 p.m. EST and 11 a.m. PT.  He will talk about innovative, insightful vendors and distributors are helping their solution providers partners to get more of the mid-market computer consulting share.  He will also give tips on what solution providers need to seek out in vendor channel programs.

EMC just received great reviews from the industry leader VAR Business and will also present insight on how to help new partners find relationships that will be most profitable.  

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

You need to know your strengths with IT consulting and be qualified, but you also want to think about which types of companies you want to target with IT support contracts.  And when you’re starting out, you probably don’t want to go for huge businesses with 60 – 150 stations.  

Start Small with IT Support Contracts

You want to start with approachable small business sizes that work with your particular skill set.  You will probably want to target those with 10 – 30 PCs and one or two servers.  They will not be dealing with WAN connections and will mostly use Windows and Office.  Don’t get into larger small businesses until you get your feet wet.  

Communication is Key to IT Support Contracts

You have to stay in contact with customers regularly through e-mails, phone calls or drop-ins if you want to manage customer expectations and build the kind of relationships expected with IT support contracts.  You will most likely be in touch at least twice a month.  

Surveys Can Help Evaluate Service Agreements

If you sent surveys regularly (once a year or more!) to gauge the success of the IT support contract relationships you develop, you will get a better idea of how to build your business.  Send surveys a couple months before renewal and even as much as twice a year or quarterly.  You can make surveys informal, but you need to keep asking how you can improve and continue to provide stellar service with IT support contracts.

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

In computer business news, despite the great reputation open source has developed, new findings from Fortify Software have proven that even open source is susceptible to security breaches.  A new type of Trojan was recently discovered called “build-process injection” that lets hackers put in malicious code into programs while they are being designed.

According to computer business experts, with this Trojan, hackers can replace source code waiting to be entered into the program with different versions, so the virus can start compromising the program before it even goes to testing.

As an example, the software might depend on external parts from the open source server.  Those looking to attack the program could target the server or the DNS and send it to a malicious server.  Of course, the actual software could also be damaged.  And if the software still manages to make it through the test phase, the malware could attack during the production phase.     

Computer business experts at Fortify have compiled a paper that details the new open source Trojan and is releasing it to developers to help them find the threat.  This new rule pack offers support for CWE, the emerging standard that shows common languages that can be used to find problems.    

For more information on this computer business story, including weigh-ins from open source programmers and others affected by this Trojan, please visit the attached link.

Added By:  Computer Consulting Kit

A partner prospecting list is a great way to reach your partnering potential.  To do this, get a piece of paper and write down the next 12 months of the year.  Start with the month you are currently in and end 12 months from now.  Each month should have the following three items:

1.  A person’s name;

2. A company’s name;

3. The type of role they play.

If you already knew 12 people for partnering, you would definitely be doing it already, so you probably won’t find that many immediately.  But you probably know a couple people to fill the slots.  If you know three non-competing technology providers in your area that you’ve met at networking events, etc., you can plan to talk to them about partnering in the next few months.

How Do You Get More Partnering Slots Filled?

First you need to think about your business and your capabilities.  Where are the gaps within your services?  What have clients asked you for recently or do you expect they might ask you in the future that you may not be able to fulfill in house?  Write down the answers to these questions on your partnering sheet and look for appropriate people.  

Partner with Someone That Can Do What You Can’t

Do you need to look for someone for partnering purposes that has great wireless expertise?  Or do you need someone that goes beyond your “bread and butter” expertise and can do very high-end services like Citrix and terminal services?  Whatever your need or wherever you are lacking, you can find someone for partnering that can fill in the gaps and help you provide more comprehensive services to clients.

The Main Idea about Partnering

Whatever you need to enhance with your business, find 12 people that you can get together with one at a time over the next 12 months and talk about partnering relationships.

Added By:  Computer Consulting Kit

Unless you are an amateur, you have to stop going for one-shot deals and get started on IT service contracts.  Do you want to be sitting by the phone waiting to get called once or twice a year by a large number of customers?

No.  You want to be proactive and work with people that will take your advice about their IT issues.  You want people on IT service contracts that will make long-term fixes to make their networks reliable and efficient and improve their ROI on IT investments.  You want a set of clients that will work on strategic planning for the future of their businesses.

One-Shot Deals

Professional businesses will require IT service contracts.  You need to make good IT service contracts a critical component to your business in order to build a solid business foundation and get the recurring revenue you need for the future.  

The Importance of IT Service Contracts

IT service contracts give your business real value.  You get recurring revenue, and you get clients that want to work with you.

Why is recurring revenue so important?  Because the clients that want to have long-term relationships with you are the ones that will let you invest and grow your business.  Without long-term, steady IT service contract clients, you can’t truly plan growth or make hiring decisions.  You can’t really make any decisions about the destination of your business.

What Should You Do?

You need to really think about only taking clients that will need IT service contracts and really understand the value of having one.

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg

If your main focus is to sell to government, non-profit or educational institutions, your computer consulting firm might be used to working with on-the-fly IT spending and the next steps.  However, when you are working with mainly small businesses, you probably don’t want to ascribe to the “use it or lose it” IT spending concept.

IT Spending and the “Use It or Lose It” Philosophy

With educational institutions and non-profits, if you don’t spend money during a fiscal year, leftover funds may not carry over into the next year.  The board of education will probably also feel that your department doesn’t need the full amount they’ve been giving you for IT spending needs and will cut your budge.  Often then, there is a year-end rush to get rid of the tech account, regardless of whether it is the right time of year for this type of IT spending.

The IT Spending Trap for Small Businesses

Many small businesses often practice the “use it or lose it” philosophy, even though it’s not the best option.  Should clients just rush out to get a great PC gadget because they are having a great year, quarter or month?  

No.

You are your clients’ virtual CIO, and you need to be the “grown up” every once in a while and rein in some IT spending.  Remind them of their priorities (gently) and their annual technology plan (and keep in mind, there IS a definite “plan” involved!).  

Planned IT Spending

You should have a written plan for your clients’ projects.  This will help keep your clients’ IT spending priorities on the right track and give you a steady consulting income throughout the year.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit