Computer Consultants Secrets ™

IT consulting rates are slightly different depending upon where in the world you reside.  The IT consulting rates mentioned in this entry will be based in U.S. dollars, so make sure to do some conversions.   These rates work well for populated suburban areas and major metropolitan areas.  If you are in an area of low population or a rural area, you will find you can’t charge as much, but you will have business costs that will be quite low.

IT Consulting Rates for Micro Small Businesses

When you are dealing with micro small businesses, IT consulting rates are going to vary because of the involvement of gurus and volunteers.  You can find rates from $0 to $50 and sometimes more.  If you want to work with micro small businesses as a stepping stone to sweet spot clients, you need to get only the best and most profitable.  

Set Your Rates High

You need to charge at the top of the IT consulting rate range or above when dealing with micro small businesses because otherwise you will not be able to switch from moonlighting to full time.

Charging $50 or less for IT consulting services just doesn’t work.  The only people charging rock-bottom rates are moonlighters that will never be full-time consultants.  You just can’t be happy and work 80 hours per week for $20,000 per year.  

Added By:  Joshua Feinberg

Recently Dell organized a survey of solution providers that revealed that approximately 60 percent of them fear Dell will compete for resellers’ customers.  This perception of solution providers reveals a real hurdle that company has to surmount as it enters a new phase and tries to grow indirect sales.

Results of the survey were posted on Dell’s corporate blog, Direct2Dell by Chris Bates, who directs the company’s Solution Provider Direct segment.  The survey was designed to help build its channel program.  Bates stated that he hopes to curb solution providers’ concerns with its Deal Registration.  

Dell hired the Institute for Partner Education and Development (IPED) to help create the details of its endeavors and build its credibility among solution providers and customers.

In May, Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell reported to CRN that Dell would be expanding its indirect sales in North America.  Since then, solution providers have had mixed feelings about the results this move would produce.  The situation has become more complex since Dell stated its intention to buy Silverback, a major supplier of remote management products to solution providers.

While solution providers acknowledge this move by Dell is probably a good one, they are slightly skeptical that the company will actually be able to fully stray from its direct sales methods.  Still other solution providers are aware that agreeing to work with Dell and resell its products is part of doing good business in the computer industry because of the company’s popularity among users.

For more information about this story for solution providers, visit the attached link.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

A critical part of the first IT sales call is lead qualification.  If you don’t properly qualify a lead, you will waste a lot of time on a prospect that just wants to get free advice and does not intend to hire you.  This situation crops up a lot with small business IT sales.  How can you get beyond it?

No “20 Questions”

Leads and prospects will call and start interviewing you.  They will ask you tons of questions until you feel like you are on a game show and not trying to get IT sales.  You need to be able to cut them off at a certain point.  After an hour, explain to them you have a lot of notes describing all their problems and that you would recommend they go to XYZ as the next steps or else talk about what they can do next.  

When you are done with your IT sales presentation, you need to move past it.  The next logical step in IT sales is having a systems engineer or a technician come back later and spend a couple hours on a site survey.   

Why a Site Survey?

The site survey inventories problems and helps you sort through them.  You and your prospect can then decide what you should do first, second, third and fourth.  The survey should also include a report for your prospect/customer.  Document everything you do so you know where the prospect is in terms of security, software licensing, data protection and everything else.

The Main Idea with IT Sales

IT sales means stopping the brain-picking and asking prospects about doing a site survey.  Explain how moving forward will help them and try to close a sale.

Added By:  Joshua Feinberg

CRN and VARBusiness magazine recently reported on the prevalence of counterfeit goods in the computer industry and the difficulty many solution providers can have identifying them.

Recently, Aqua Systems, a Roslyn, New York-based solution provider sold counterfeit goods to clients.  Whether or not the solution providers are guilty of knowingly doing it or not will be determined by the courts, but the incident has damaged the company and caused channel sales to decline and incredible revenue losses.

Many solution providers are finding themselves embroiled in problems with identifying bona fide hardware and software, and may end up getting trouble if they are not careful at checking products.

Recent reports by experts KPMG and the Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement (AGMA) stated that the IT industry experiences about $100 billion in losses due to black market products annually.  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also states that computer hardware made up nine percent of all counterfeit products taken by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2006.  The total worth of the goods seized was $14.3 million, which was an increase of 198 percent from 2005.  Other reports from the Software Piracy Study declared that 22 percent of total software installations in North America last year were from counterfeit copies, which represents a loss of $8.1 billion in sales for software companies.

The products most counterfeited for solution providers are those produced in mass quantities, including Gigabit interface converters, WAN interface cards, memory, printer cartridges, network modules and regular desktop applications from companies such as Cisco Systems and Microsoft.

Despite high-profile cases of solution providers having difficulty with counterfeit goods in the United States, China is still the country with the largest instance of hardware and software counterfeiting.  For more information on this story for solution providers, visit the attached link.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

CRN and VARBusiness magazine recently reported on the prevalence of counterfeit goods in the computer industry and the difficulty many solution providers can have identifying them.

Recently, Aqua Systems, a Roslyn, New York-based solution provider sold counterfeit goods to clients.  Whether or not the solution providers are guilty of knowingly doing it or not will be determined by the courts, but the incident has damaged the company and caused channel sales to decline and incredible revenue losses.

Many solution providers are finding themselves embroiled in problems with identifying bona fide hardware and software, and may end up getting trouble if they are not careful at checking products.

Recent reports by experts KPMG and the Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement (AGMA) stated that the IT industry experiences about $100 billion in losses due to black market products annually.  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also states that computer hardware made up nine percent of all counterfeit products taken by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2006.  The total worth of the goods seized was $14.3 million, which was an increase of 198 percent from 2005.  Other reports from the Software Piracy Study declared that 22 percent of total software installations in North America last year were from counterfeit copies, which represents a loss of $8.1 billion in sales for software companies.

The products most counterfeited for solution providers are those produced in mass quantities, including Gigabit interface converters, WAN interface cards, memory, printer cartridges, network modules and regular desktop applications from companies such as Cisco Systems and Microsoft.

Despite high-profile cases of solution providers having difficulty with counterfeit goods in the United States, China is still the country with the largest instance of hardware and software counterfeiting.  For more information on this story for solution providers, visit the attached link.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

New IT consultants often give away services, which can prevent them from really being able to go full-time.  You can’t make this mistake.  You absolutely need to charge market rate if you want to thrive in the industry.

IT Consultants That Charge Are Professionals

If you want others to see you as a true professional, you have to charge hourly rates comparable to those computer consultants that you hope to compete with once you go full time.  If you charge too low, you will not be able to build on-going revenue that will allow you to become a full-time consultant.  When contracts come up for renewal, you will have a difficult time raising your rates unless you make them high enough in the beginning. 

Competing full-time IT consultants already know which billing rates will keep them afloat.  Successful IT consultants also know about taxes, training expenses, insurance, marketing, promotion, research and administrative costs. 

IT Consultants Value Their Services

If you think you can charge rock-bottom rates for your consulting services, market to those that will like that concept while charging $25, $35 or $45 per hour and working like crazy and still stay alive, you are wrong.  You can’t work that many hours on a full-time basis. 

IT consultants that make it study the competition when setting rates and give themselves multiple sources of steady consulting revenue. 

The Main Idea with IT Consultants

You have to diversify your revenue sources and build a client base if you want to compete with other IT consultants that have gone full-time.  Don’t quit your day job if 90% of your revenue is from just one or two clients. 

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

Computer business IBM has been working on a new concept – Federated Integration Testing (FIT) – since the beginning of 2007 using teams of people in its research and development centers worldwide.

Mick Lickman, leader of FIT at its Hursley Center states that the concept is different from previous types of integration testing done by individual product development teams because it is based around the ideas of real customers.  Each of the computer business’ products has a scenario testing team, but FIT will put the product together in real-world settings to get to the heart of what customers are actually doing with each product.  It’s possible that these integration stacks could eventually be made into products.  There is a possibility FIT will be sold to solution providers and others to help them show customers what specific solutions can do. 

The computer business’ FIT team is led by IBM Global Services and some select IBM customers.  The stacks have been used so far to simplify some of the more sophisticated parts of specific products.  Lickman’s team looks at these stacks using services-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) along with other types of systems.

For more information on how computer business IBM is developing its FIT technology, visit the attached link.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

Regardless of your niche, a benefits-focused sales letter is critical to strengthening your IT marketing campaign.  You don’t even need to keep it short and sweet – just make it good!

Use a Long Sales Letter for your IT Marketing

Long sales letters can help build urgency, stir up the pot, get people to take action, take prospects through the pain of ignoring IT issues, take prospects through the joy that comes from increased productivity and explain the benefits of growing a company sometimes by 200% without adding staff!

Many of these elements can only be stressed in a long IT marketing letter, so don’t be afraid to keep writing.  

Address Painful Subjects

If you aren’t well-versed in writing sales letters, you can hire an advertising or marketing consultant or a freelance copywriter to do them.  But no matter what you choose to do, you have to make sure the letter addresses the main points of pain for your targets.

Free is Good

In order to get demand to be high with IT marketing, you may want to send out a letter with your business card and offer a free bribe like a one-hour needs assessment.  Make sure the bribe has an end date attached or limits it to the first X number of businesses that respond.

If you are successful at presenting yourself as an IT expert for a niche industry, your IT marketing letters and calls will be better received.  Your knowledge should be obvious in the headline and repeated throughout.  You are offering a relevant service, and most professionals will want to hear what you have to say.

Your letter should discuss work you’ve done for similar firms – use testimonials at every opportunity – and how you can help your target’s firm.  The problems and trends of the industry will be well known by those receiving your letter.     

The Main Idea

The goal with an IT marketing letter is to get your prospect from free to fee, which means an in-depth billable audit or your proving ground project.

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit