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Do you own an IT consulting firm? To develop sophisticated solutions and build lasting client relationships, you need to understand your clients' biggest business problems and be able to respond to their many needs.
Continuing relationships with clients are essential to the longevity of your business. These relationships help you get steady revenue so you don’t have to be on the edge of your seat wondering when you’ll be getting your next new project. These long-term clients also help you get the career satisfaction that comes from working with the same accounts for a long time and seeing your technology plans really work long term.
Developing relationships means understanding what your small business clients need and also knowing what they expect from you. A major part of what small business clients will need from your IT consulting firm is the guarantee of a single point of contact to make managing all elements of their complex IT infrastructures as simple as possible.
The following 4 tips can help you be a single point of contact for your clients, so you can build strong relationships that will be the foundation of a successful business.
1. Small Business Clients are Very Different than Fortune 1000 Clients. Fortune 1000 IT managers typically know enough about their computing environments to determine, at least on a basic level, which technology provider or vendor to call for various services. However small business owners and managers are largely non-technical. They are not career IT professionals and rarely have the skill set required to understand the many intricacies of their IT assets. Therefore, they will lean heavily on you to understand how to coordinate important technology issues.
2. Know What a Small Business Owner Wants to Understand. All a small business owner or manager usually knows or wants to know is that something is broken with his/her computer system and that your IT consulting firm is needed immediately. Your clients will not want finger pointing or someone that will pass the buck to multiple providers. They will want a simple, single point of accountability and will typically have the mindset, “I don’t care what the problem is … just fix it! Now! And the cost better be reasonable!”
3. Small Business Clients Need a Virtual IT Department. Your small business clients will usually not have formal IT departments. This means your IT consulting firm will have to step in and act as a virtual IT department. Even clients that have no idea of what a corporate IT department does or what “IT” means will generally expect the type of arrangement where you provide on-going maintenance, oversight and services. They want you to be a single point of contact for everything and anything even remotely related to supporting their systems and networks.
4. Know Which Services You Need to Provide. If you want to truly be a single point of contact, you need to know which responsibilities you will have. In a large IT organization, separate departments typically exist for the following services: help desk; network administration; desktop support; software development; standardization; research and development and security. However if you really want to be a single point of contact, your IT consulting firm will have to wear these multiple “hats” on any given day with your small business clients.
In this article we talked about 4 tips to help you be your IT consulting firm clients’ single point of contact. Learn more about how you can attract great, steady, high-paying clients to your IT consulting firm now at the attached link.
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