When Mitch Garvis and I were presenting on when to choose EBS or SBS on the weekend, we asked a very simply question of the audience and received a very shocking answer….”How many of you are providing managed services to you clients?” and the answer was very few.
Now the reality is that most in the room really were providing this service in one form or another…but not necessarily charging for it. As SBS consultants we all manage our clients systems remotely and check on them from time to time to make sure the systems are running as expected. We may run disk utilities, ensure the backup is running regularly and of course check on the patch level and virus scan version. The big question is: Are you charging for this service and better yet have you bundled this into a service offering?
Small Business owners are frugal, I understand and respect that, but they are practical as well. They do not want to suffer the down time that a system failure, backup issue, etc can cause. As such, there is always a balance between the cost and value such services provides. This can be a very lucrative way to increase your revenue while providing you customer greater value. Even greater is the ability to build trust and a business relationship on these services when they are needed for the wrong reasons. Saving the data issues that an about to fail drive will cause in a proactive manner will win you nothing but respect and positive referrals with the customers business contacts.
If you are not offering this service look into it, if you are….market it as hard as you market any aspect of your business as it very well could be what you build your entire SMB practice around.
Cheers
Will
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5