As VP of Marketing for a thriving 35-person IT services company, Bruce Campbell knows a thing or two about what it takes to generate new business – and keep doing in on a regular basis for Clare Computer Solutions.
Network assessments factor heavily into his strategy and Network Detective is the tool he uses. But if you ask him, Bruce will tell you that they perform network assessments as a means to winning new clients… not just to do “an audit.”
To hear his story in his own words, click here.
“The assessment itself is not the end,” he said. “It is the means to the end. The end is where we get to go over the results of the assessment with the prospect and say, ‘Here’s what we found.’ And, in doing so, we’re demonstrating that: (a) we can find the information very easily and quickly, and in a way that’s not chaotic, and (b) that we can apply our expertise to interpret the results of the assessment. This gets us to a place where we can recommend the solutions they’re going to need, and to bring their networks to a best practices state.”
Bruce says that having an easy-to-use, fast tool that’s not invasive, like Network Detective, makes a huge difference.
“Being able to do free assessments as a pre-sales tool quickly was the Holy Grail for a long time,” he said. “But we just didn’t have tools to do that. We had ways: we could go to the client site and get the clipboard out and start poking around in machines and logging on to this machine and that machine, installing software to probe the network and bring some information back.
“But the problem with that was: it was real slow -- time is money – and if you are going to have an expensive engineer go out and do this kind of stuff, we would rather them be going in for something that we get paid for. That made the idea of a free assessment a lot less attractive, even though we felt we had to because so many other places were doing it.
“Then we found the Network Detective tool, which has worked great for us. We can go in to a prospect’s offices just as cool as a cucumber and, without breaking a sweat, come up with the information we need about their networks. So, we can actually move away from the assessment and demonstrate the value that we have. We are able to show our knowledge about what people should do with their network.”
If you’d like hear Bruce’s story in his own words, here’s a link to a recorded session excerpted from a recent webinar where he was a panelist.
