IT Service Agreements: Identify Your Terms

IT service agreements require advance planning to inspire confidence in your customers. You need to know what benefits and prices you will offer to your customers ahead of time. This will be your compelling case for why your future clients need to be on IT service agreements. Make a Rate Card A rate card is a simple one-page document that shows your typical prices versus your service agreement prices. This is your marketing summary of the benefits you’re providing. Brainstorm a list of at least half a dozen compelling benefits for why someone should sign IT service agreements with you as opposed to paying by the hour. The essential thing here is to make sure that you know what you’re doing with this before you go out on the sales call. Otherwise you'll be screaming out that you’re an amateur. For your smaller clients, you may want to have IT service agreements that are priced at a couple hundred dollars a month. For your sweet spot clients, $800 to $1,000 seems to work really well. For your bigger clients, it may be a $2,500 a month type of deal. Consider Your Travelling Distance If you’re used to servicing people within a 10 or 15-mile radius, you may have to extend your umbrella a little bit. Most of your competitors will easily go 45 minutes to an hour out and then it’s just up to you to figure out an economical way to do it. Some of them will charge for travel time; a VAN charge or a fixed charge for showing up. This compensates for some travel time and transportation expenses. Most of them will enforce some kind of minimum. Minimums range from as little as one hour to as much as a half-day minimum. IT Service Agreements for Small Businesses are Key You would literally have to have a couple hundred home networking customers to equal what you could get with 10 or 15 solid small business accounts. And those home networking customers don’t want to hear that you can’t give them fabulous service because they only spent $300 with you this year. They’re going to expect the sun, the moon, the earth and the stars just as if they were spending $300 a week with you. As a result, it’s a heck of a lot easier to find more concentrated buyers that need to see you a couple times a month. With these customers, you can afford to give that kind of response time. Copyright MMI-MMVI, Small Biz Tech Talk. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}