It Service Agreements When To Offer Them

IT Service Agreements: When To Offer Them

Summary: IT Service Agreements should be suggested at different times. After the IT audit, after an emergency, or when a prospect is not happy with their current provider, are all good times to get clients to sign IT Service Agreements.

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Article Body: Right after emergency service calls is a good time to offer IT service agreements. Youve just saved the day and youre at the high point.

Customers have to like, know, and trust you. After an emergency, they love you! They love you because you saved the day; they now know you of course because you just spent the last hours working non-stop to solve this problem; and of course they trust you because you delivered on what you said you could do.

Future Damage Control

Once you fix an emergency, theyre very receptive to talking about how to prevent this kind of panic from happening in the future. Then you can give them a proposal that will include the ongoing maintenance by your company in the form of IT service agreements. So thats a great time to ask for the service contract.

Offer IT Service Agreements after Conducting IT Audits

After IT audits, customers are wondering what do to next. If they have agreed to an audit, they are more than likely looking for someone that they can call on a regular basis. They want someone whos going to look out for their needs, whos going to take a long-term approach to making sure that everything theyre buying fits well with their existing investments, and that it makes sense for their business and fits in with different things going on in their industry.

For someone to sign IT service agreements, they need to be a paying customer of yours. Once they become a paying customer of yours with an IT service agreement, theyre essentially more of a client, because theyre beyond just being a transaction-oriented customer. Theyre in it for the long haul, with a long-term client relationship.

The Long Range Option

Another option is a slightly longer sales cycle that can take anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. In this case, your customer realizes that they are not happy with their current technology provider. Perhaps, theyre not delivering as promised; the response time is starting to slack off; they feel theyre padding the bills; theres personality conflicts; or changes in priorities. A lot of different things can happen and theyre actively shopping for a new consulting firm, a new technology provider to work with.

In those cases, usually the natural step is after youve walked out and you have tons and tons of notes and lots of things is to propose to them that you come back and do IT audits. The IT audit is a great segue into proposing IT service agreements.

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