Working within an IT department or as an IT consultant to clients involves more than technical work. It requires networking and selling in order to ensure that your clients buy into the IT services that are necessary for their business to succeed. This can be especially challenging when business owners and decision makers have little technical knowledge and are fighting to keep their costs low. In order to protect their digital assets and protect your sources of income, it’s important to learn how to justify the software, products and services that your clients should be using. To do so, follow these tips on how to prove the importance of information technology services to your clients:
If IT is an afterthought:
For some potential clients, IT is an afterthought — this is especially the case when businesses come through to you as referrals. Decision makers are busy running their businesses and taking care of other business responsibilities, so IT is often the last thing on their minds — until it hits them in the face.
You can help prove the need for IT by asking questions about their current setup, either over the phone, in-person, or through a complimentary online survey audit.
Do they have an anti-virus system in place? Are they backing up their data? If they lost their data, how long would their business take to recover from the financial drain of low productivity? How long would it take for them to regain their reputation after a data leak or breach? Do they have a data breach plan? When is the last time they verified that their softwares are up to date? Are there documents they can’t afford to lose? What would happened if they lost access to those documents forever?
When IT isn’t a pressing need, it’s easily forgotten. By framing these questions for potential clients, you may help them recognize the weaknesses within their organization and the financial and reputational risks they’re taking by ignoring them.
If a decision maker is hesitant to adopt preventative services:
The hesitation on top of any decision maker’s mind when considering information technology services is whether the investment is relevant and necessary. You likely already know that investing in information technology services can help businesses thwart cybercrime, keep their data safe from deletion, prevent technical difficulties before they arise, and more, but decision makers may not have the same technical knowledge. While they may understand the need for things like ordering more physical storage devices as needed, they may not be convinced of the need for preventative services that can save them from disaster, like cloud backup.
However, it’s often your job to ensure that these preventative measures are put into place. If you fail to, and an event causes data loss, a security breach, hack, leak, or other disaster, your client will be unsatisfied with your services.
To help your clients see the need for preventative IT services, clearly articulate the dangers of not investing in them. Many clients operate under the belief that disastrous IT events can’t happen to them either because they don’t believe their business is a target for cybercriminals, or because they simply don’t think a disaster is imminent. In these cases, you should dispel any false beliefs they have — small organizations are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals because their defenses are often lower, and disasters can happen to anyone, out of the blue.
It’s also important to communicate the need and benefits of the softwares and services you recommend. Sales tools, like presentations and brochures, can be especially helpful in this — even more so if sales is not your forte.
Depending on the products, softwares and services you are recommending your clients use, the provider may have their own sales materials already created that they will be willing to share with you to help you move your sale along. For example, Nordic Backup offers a reseller program in which they provide sales presentations and financial incentives to resellers for bringing in a new cloud backup account.
If a decision maker is considering an in-house IT department:
Some businesses get stuck between keeping their IT techs in-house versus working with you as a consultant, or they feel a consultant would be the best fit but they’re not open to outsourcing some processes to professional third-party SaaS providers.
Again, it’s important to articulate both the drawbacks of keeping everything in-house and the benefits of working with you, along with outsourcing to third-party SaaS providers as needed.
Some drawbacks of keeping IT in-house include:
The time it takes to hire and/or train IT techs
Reduced scalability
Financial risk of equipment purchases and repairs
Providing salaries to on-staff IT employees
Some benefits of working with an IT consultant and third-party SaaS providers include:
Limitless scalability
Lower financial risk
Trained experts
No salary commitments
Eliminates risk of human error (using a third-party SaaS)
By using these tips to improve your sales process, you’ll be able to help convince potential clients of the need for your services, and convince them to purchase the products, softwares and services their organization most needs.
