Hiring a new MSP or IT support provider can be risky business for a small business owner.
When you’re meeting with a prospective new customer, trying to convince them why they should be using you as their new service provider, it’s likely they’re going to have a list of potential concerns, (which unless they are very open, they most likely will keep to themselves).
They’re likely going to be wondering things such as:
“Will these guys respond to my calls quickly when I need them?”
“Do these guys have the skills to fix my problems quickly?”
“Are they going to live up to all the promises I’m hearing in this sales pitch I’m getting right now?”
“Can I trust that my precious data will be safe under this company’s care?”
The vast majority of your sales calls will be with companies meeting with you because they want to replace a consultant they are no longer happy with. How do they know you’ll be any better than their last provider was? Undoubtedly, their last consultant made promises that they apparently failed to live up to. How can you convince this new prospect that you’ll be any different?
Regardless of how polished your marketing collateral might look or how convincing your sales pitch might be, it’s not going to be enough to alleviate their concerns.
The greater your ability to reverse the risk your prospect is being asked to take by hiring you, the stronger your chances will be for landing that client.
And the greatest way I’ve found to eliminate any concerns a prospective new customer might have is to offer a full 1-month Free Trial to my Managed Service Plan.
Many RMM utilities available today cost literally pennies a day to provide to an individual small business client with round-the-clock monitoring, making the financial burden for providing a monitoring service a non-issue. Installation of these utilities is also generally a very quick and easy process, taking less than 15 minutes in many cases to set up full monitoring of a network server.
Once set, you can now provide a prospect with an instant health picture of the server, a full server and workstation inventory, anywhere-access to the network monitoring dashboard, round-the-clock alerts for any problems that occur and weekly health status reports for an entire month.
This can be tremendously valuable to a prospect, who might never before had any real idea of the true health status of the network.
If using an affordable remote administration utility, you can also choose to provide free remote support to the end-users for this 30-day period. This will allow the end-users to get to know you and your helpdesk staff and get “attached” to you. This trial period also gives you the opportunity to discover if this is potentially a “problem” client that might not be the ideal fit for your services.
You can protect yourself from excessive support requests by setting terms where a separate, billable rate applies if on-site service is required, or if any individual support incident (remote or otherwise) exceeds an hour or two. You can also exclude support of specific systems that are either too old or too challenging to support under your general maintenance agreement.
A potential new client won’t likely go through the process of having you set them up with a free trial if they’re not seriously considering you as a new provider. Once you’re in the door actually providing the service, the only likely way you won’t land them as a paying client once the trial ends is if you don’t live up to their expectations.
Anytime you ask a prospective new client to hire you, you’re asking them to take a risk. The better you can remove that risk, the better your shot at closing the deal. Offer a free trial and you’re giving your prospect a completely risk-free way to see for themselves just how reliable and qualified you are at maintaining and supporting their valuable computer systems.
Plus, through your monitoring services, you’re giving them a clear, up-to-the-minute picture of the health and status of their network, which they very well might never have had before.
With all this added benefit you’re providing, and requiring no risk on their part, Free Trials of your service will help you to sign many more clients to your managed service offering.
