Independent Computer Consultant - How to Sell Clients on Managed Services

If you're an Independent computer consultant, you know by now that you need to be charging flat, monthly rates for proactive maintenance through a Managed Service Plan and should no longer be relying on how many hours you can bill in a month to generate an income.

But in a time where small business customers still want to know what your hourly rate is, how can we convince them that a flat-fee is the best solution for them?
You need to show VALUE!

What will they get for this predictable and affordable monthly fee?

- Greater reliability from their systems.
- More productivity.
- Less losses due to downtime.
- For about the same or less than they'd pay for hourly, reactive service.

You'll be able to accomplish this by monitoring their systems and providing remote computer support.

Monitoring your client's systems 24x7x365 is easily done with low cost software like GFI Max, which is able to collect real-time inventory reports as well.

Through monitoring, you can immediately identify problems such as failed backups, system event errors, virus activity, hacker attempts, etc. By preventing errors, you will reduce unexpected problems and increase their productivity.

You can provide remote support to all of your client's workstations and servers for free by using software like LogMeIn Free. By providing remote computer support, you can increase your response time to most issues, large or small by about 100%.

The biggest complaint small businesses have when it comes to their computer consultant is having to wait for him or her to arrive, and not being notified when the consultant is going to be late.

With remote computer support, as long as the computer (or user) with the problem has Internet connectivity, you should be able to log on and work as if you were deskside. You can actually respond faster than an internal IT admin could make it across the office.

When you start a computer consulting business, by providing basic proactive maintenance and support, you can generate an income based on predictable and reliable monthly fees, while dedicating a greatly reduced number of work hours on site at your clients. They honestly don't want to see you very often anyway. And they'll be happy to pay a fair rate to ensure that the less they see you, the better.

For complete information on how to succeed at starting a computer consulting business as an Independent Computer Consultant, visit http://SuccessfulComputerConsulting.com.