By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing
I’ve been around IT guys for over a decade now, and there’s always a spirited debate about whether or not to charge prospects for IT assessments.
Proponents of charging will generally justify their position by suggesting (and rightly so) that giving away the assessment diminishes the perceived value of their service. But those who advocate offering assessments to prospects for free will point out (and rightly so) that charging creates an unnecessary barrier to getting in the door of a new and potentially lucrative client.
While both sides of this debate have legitimate points, the reality is that the debate topic is moot. The most successful MSPs and service providers understand that doing an IT assessment for a prospect is not “an end;” it’s “the means” by which you can engage, educate, and sell a relationship.
Bob Coppedge, CEO of Simplex IT (pictured right), “gets it” and if you want to hear more about his philosophy in his own words, here’s the link to an informative recorded session with him.
“We’re not the business of selling information,” he said. “We’re selling our services. We’re selling our relationship to help the clients move forward.”
To that end, Simplex IT doesn’t “sell” or “push” IT assessments on the prospects that are referred to them. They just perform the assessments as a routine part of their initial visit, and use the results to start building the relationship.
“We don’t use the findings to scare the bejebbers out of them,” he said. “We simply show them what we found, we tell them what they should be concerned about and what they shouldn’t worry about, and what we can do to help them.
Bruce Campbell, VP of Marketing for Clare Computing (pictured left), is a similarly enlightened IT pro who understands the IT assessment is a means to the end.
“The end,” he said, “is where we get to go over the results of the assessment with the prospect and say, ‘Here is what we found.’ And in doing so, we demonstrate that we can find this information quickly and efficiently and not in a chaotic manner. Then we can further show our expertise by interpreting for them the results of the assessment and getting them to a point where they understand their own problems… often for the first time.”
Click here if you want to learn more, directly from Bruce in his own words, about the many ways to leverage IT assessments – for both new prospects and existing clients.
Like thousands of other MSPs, both Bob and Bruce happen to use Network Detective as their primary tool of choice to perform quick, easy and completely non-invasive IT assessments. If you’d like to learn more about this powerful yet affordable tool, visit RapidFire Tools, Inc.
