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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Attracting Qualified Leads with 10-50 Workstations

We're often asked, "What’s the best and quickest way to identify companies that have between 10 and 50 PCs, in other words, qualified leads?"

The goal is to primarily market to those small businesses that have between 10 and 50 PCs, in other words, companies that are qualified leads for Sweet Spot Clients™.

These companies are just beyond the micro-small business, and not large enough to likely have a large in-house IT department.

In every initial contact that you make, you need to ask the basic qualifying questions.

It doesn't matter whether you ask these questions by phone or on a contact form that’s on your website, but you should be asking things like:

  • Where are you located? (to weed out geographically undesirable prospects)

  • How many computers do you have? (to weed out prospects that are too small... mainly)

  • What platform do you predominately run? (You may want to ask what type of software they run as opposed to what platform because non-technical, small business owners generally won’t know what an operating system is or what a platform is. )

    But, if you ask them what type of software they run and you give them a dropdown list, they can probably pick out from a lineup things like Windows, or Netware, or Linux, or Mac, or something like that. You want to make sure that there’s a good match there.

  • How have you gotten support in the past?

  • Who’s supporting your IT needs right now?

Those types of questions should be on a web-contact form. If you have a receptionist or someone else who answers your inbound calls, that should be on his or her inbound calling script – those five key questions as they’re gathering information - because it’s a much more efficient way of doing things.

If you have some kind of faxable info gathering form that you either have people download from your website, or that you fax out to people that you speak with, or that you email out to people that you speak with – a PDF, or something like that that they’re going to complete and fax back to you, those kinds of questions should be in there.

There’s a great time-saving template in Module 2 of the Computer Consulting Kit™ Home Study Course that you really need to embrace, modify and adapt for your business to make sure that you’re capturing these key pieces of information, so you’re working as efficiently as possible in your marketing.

If you’re going out to an expo and you’re doing some kind of drawing for a door prize, you can certainly ask a limited subset of questions.

If you’re having a seminar – some kind of informative seminar, either like this, a teleseminar or webinar, or even better yet, a live seminar – you can certainly capture some of this information on live seminar registrations and end-of-session feedback surveys.

Besides improving your lead qualification, if you belong to a Chamber of Commerce, they should certainly be able to point you in the right direction for the number of employees because most Chambers of Commerce organizations base their membership dues on how many employees a particular company has.

Another option for looking at size issues... Talk to anyone that’s involved in the mailing list industry, like mailing list brokers, or mailing list compilers.

It’s very important with all of this that you remember your qualifying questions at all times.

Now, you want to make sure there’s a good platform match.

You want to make sure that you can take care of them geographically and that they’re not too far away from your central location so you’re not burning up a lot of non-billable time, or low-billable time driving around.

And, you want to find out how they’re getting their support today, and how were they supported the past.

To learn more about Attracting Qualified Leads with 10-50 Workstations, be sure to sign-up for the free sample tips and excerpts now at http://www.computerconsultingkit.net/

Thursday, May 15, 2008

6 Most Important Things You Can Do to Pick up Business in Computer Consulting

Here on the Computer Consulting Kit™ team, we often get asked if there's a "magic pill" or "silver bullet"... where you can do just ONE thing and everything will be "perfect".

If only it were that simple!

Each year at the end of the year, we ask some of our most successful Computer Consulting Kit graduates, if there was "one" single thing that made the most difference to their business during the past year.

Through good times and bad, all over the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, and around the World, we tend to hear the same 6 themes over and over again.

If you need to pick up more business for your firm, consider the following:

  1. Understand Your Business Model and Target Audience: It’s not practical to be all things to all people. But you can be all things to some people. You can’t possibly have the advertising budget to market to everyone. So, find a specialty group to which you can market and focus your efforts there. While you’re at it, figure out what services you will and won’t provide.
  2. Be Proactive in Finding the Right People: Whether it’s finding prospects, customers, clients, staff, contractors or partners, work on these activities weekly. If you procrastinate, you may take on nightmare clients, unreliable employees or just generally make bad decisions. The time to make important decisions is when you’re not operating in crisis mode; those in crisis are likely to make mistakes! Constantly be on the lookout for people that can help you get where you need to be.
  3. Realize Quality Always Trumps Quantity: It’s not about having the biggest customer list. 50 great clients are better than 100 bad customers. Strive to have only the most profitable and stable local businesses on your client list.
  4. Teach Your Customers How to Treat You: If you pick rock-bottom rates, “eat” big blocks of time, tolerate verbal abuse from customers, accept late payments and allow your customers to pay you for 15 minutes of your time instead of signing a support contract, then you’ve taught your customers it’s okay not to respect you or your time. Set your policies in stone from the beginning and you will be a much happier business owner.
  5. Plan for Your Future Success: A full-blown business plan is ideal, but if that’s asking too much, have a weekly business development “to-do” list. Include three columns:
    (a) How much time you’ll spend
    (b) How much money you’ll spend
    (c) Your start and end dates.
    Make sure you fill this out and track where you’re spending your time and how much money is coming in and going out. Analyzing it will help make your business more profitable.
  6. Time Is Money: Your time is your inventory. If you owned a brick and mortar store, would you freely give your inventory away? Of course not! You shouldn’t give your time away either. So know where every ¼ hour block is going every week. It should fit into one of these three categories:
    (a) Billable to a client
    (b) Management/administration
    (c) Sales/marketing.
    If you cannot put every piece of your time into one of these three categories, you need to re-evaluate how you’re spending your time.
The Bottom Line: Success Doesn’t Happen By Accident
Use the six time-tested, proven tips and your computer consulting business can dramatically increase its chances of making even this year a great year. The idea is to grow a highly profitable, stable computer consulting business, serving Sweet Spot Clients™ in your unique specialty and finding the right people to help take you to the top. To learn more about how the Computer Consulting Kit can help you get there faster, be sure to sign-up for the free tips and sample excerpts at http://www.computerconsultingkit.net/