Earning your client’s trust as an IT professional can be difficult. IT equipment isn’t cheap, your services are also in demand so they do not come cheap, and most of your clients will not understand half the technical jargon that you use when explaining to them that they need to invest more into their IT infrastructure. This is exactly why you need good planning, ideas and solutions that save money, and a knack for being able to explain why upgrades are needed in business terms and not in IT jargon.
Try Not to Be Too Much of a Geek
One issue most IT professionals have when they start their own business is explaining why their customer needs to part with more cash to upgrade their IT system. This is mainly because most new IT business owners were working in an IY company before deciding to take the leap and work for themselves. They are used to speaking to an IT manager and colleagues that understand the jargon but when it comes to dealing with customers, they struggle to get their point across in a way that justifies the need for an upgrade.
This means if you are running an IT company and you have a client-facing role, you need to learn how to be more of a salesperson. Most sales personnel are not IT specialists, but they learn what needs to be sold and then master the art of translating that into benefits for the client such as increased productivity, less downtime, and so on.
Find Solutions That Help Your Clients Save Money
Finding solutions for your clients goes with the territory of any business sector so it is not only a tactic secluded to the IT sector. In order to master this aspect of your customer service towards your client, you will need to understand your client and their business. This means building up a good relationship and listening.
If you have suggested an upgrade of laptops, the client might say that their finances are stretched. Therefore, you know that you need to find a cheaper alternative or a temporary fix until your client’s cash flow issues are rectified in order to justify the investment in your IT services.
Reduce Downtime For Clients
Once a client has agreed to an upgrade, then you need to make sure that you find a solution that gives the business as little downtime as possible. This could mean working weekends or after hours and finding ways to speed up the process. A great example of this is the ThePhotostick solution for design companies that deal with large graphics. You may be tasked with making sure that you do not lose any of their graphics, so you need to make sure you have backups.
You can offer a central location to store all graphics and to lift all graphics as well as videos from the client’s employee laptops and desktops. To do this, you just need to run The Photostick solution. It is the perfect way to scrape every photo and video your client has, then transfer them to the main file server with storage or cloud with enough capacity to hold all the images and videos.
Hopefully, we have just touched the tip of the iceberg giving you some ideas of how to run your IT business more efficiently and how to think outside of the box. We guarantee that if you learn how to speak with your clients and communicate complex IT terminology into terms your client understands you will add value to your services, give your client confidence in your services, help your clients grow their businesses, and help them become more efficient so they continue to grow.
