Many
in the data cabling industry believe that if you do a good job for your
customers, you'll be rewarded with repeat business and a nice flow of
word of mouth referrals... with lots of profitable data cabling jobs.
How true is this conventional wisdom? Is it just wishful
thinking?
Well, it all depends. Obviously it kind of goes without
saying, you need to exceed your clients' expectations with all of your
data cabling jobs if you want to even have a chance at repeat business
or word of mouth referrals.
That alone however is no guarantee of either repeat
business or word of mouth referrals. It just means that you don't strike
out over something silly and totally under your control, in most cases.
So what can you do to get more repeat data cabling
business and more word of mouth referrals?
The simplest approach to getting more repeat business is
to diversify your service offerings and broaden the scope of what you
deliver.
For example, if you or your staff feels comfortable
configuring simple routers and Ethernet settings in workstations and
servers, that's a very easy add-on sale when you're pitching a data
cabling job.
What if you don't have those skills in house? Or what if
your clients want even more diverse, related IT services to go along
with your data cabling work?
Or what if they want the holy grail -- the single point
of accountability for anything and everything related to their IT needs?
That desire for a single point of accountability is
actually a lot more common than many think.
Why?
Because when a small business has no internal IT staff,
the non-technical small business owner or manager has absolutely no
desire to deal with 5-6 different, potentially conflicting, IT vendors.
As a result, smart small business owners and managers
look for a single point of contact.
Is it a cabling problem? A router problem? A device
driver problem? A telco problem? An ISP problem?
Who cares?
Non-technical small business owners and managers sure as
heck care. They have no ability or patience to referee 5-6 different IT
vendors that are all pointing their fingers at each other.
These non-technical small business owners and managers
simply want to make a single phone call to their main IT service
provider and know that the problem will be taken care of.
No hours of enduring music on hold ...
No struggling to understand the language dialects of
outsourced tech support reps in far away places ..
And no feeling like a human ping pong ball.
Now what does this all have to do with data cabling
jobs?
It's really simple; if you want more repeat business
with your clients, you need to take the lead as their outsourced Virtual
IT manager.
Does this mean you or your staff needs to be skilled on
every possible piece of hardware, software or peripheral device that
could possibly be found in a typical small business environment? Of
course not.
However, it means that you do need to build a team of
competent, dependable, local, non-competing technology providers to
serve as your project partners and subcontractors for your projects.
And it means you need to manage the projects and
coordinate all the related tasks and vendors.
Is this a lot of work?
Absolutely. But by going beyond simple data cabling jobs
to take on the role of outsourced Virtual IT manager, you'll take
customers that in the past may have only spent $1,500 with you once...
and now all of a sudden these clients are on annual service agreement
commitments with minimum spend levels of $12,000/year each for many,
many years to come.
Is it worth it?
Only you can decide. But if you want a lot more repeat
business spinning off from your data cabling jobs and you want to
position yourself to get a lot more word of mouth referrals, it's high
time to broaden your way of thinking to go way beyond simple data
cabling jobs.
In this article, we looked at how you can turn
one-shot-deal data cabling jobs into clients with much larger long-term
lifetime client value and a lot more potential for word of mouth
referrals. To learn more about taking your simple cabling projects to a
whole new level of profitability, go sign-up now for the free
Sample Tips and Excerpts below
from the Computer Consulting Kit Home Study Course.
