How to Explain Your Virtual CIO Role to Your Clients

Hi there it’s Joshua Feinberg from VirtualCIOkit.com and I’m here to talk with you today about Virtual CIO Tips for Helping Your Small Business Clients Understand Your Company’s Role. These are Virtual CIO Tips for helping your clients understand your company’s role. We’re going to talk about three steps to helping your clients, prospects, and customers understand why your company exists and the role that you provide as virtual CIOs, so you it can build long-term client relationships. Listen, are you trying to set yourself up as a trusted virtual CIO, trusted technology adviser for your clients’ businesses? If so you need to know how to convince small business owners that’s signing a long term service agreement with your virtual CIO company is in their best interest. You have to know what small businesses will need from you. As a virtual CIO, you provide an outsourced virtual IT department. A virtual IT solution for your clients and become an extension of their businesses. You have to give then the continuity of knowing that you’ll be there every week, every month, and over the courses several years at least to oversee their IT needs. You’ll help them with strategic planning, as well as the execution of those technology plans, management, supervision and training, as well as coordinating everything and anything having to do with their IT vendors and their IT needs. An on-going service agreements solidifies and formalizes your role as a virtual CIO and help formalize your relationships with your clients. So let’s talk about three steps they can help your clients get you the all the front and center, and really establishing a tremendous bond towards your role as providing these long term virtual CIO relationships. Essentially, these are three virtual CIO tips for helping your clients understand your role. First and foremost, let’s dive right in. You want to establish yourself as the main technology contact. What does this mean? Your small business clients are not going to have the patience to deal with a lot of different technology vendors. As their virtual CIO, you need to have the attitude of the buck stops here and be able to take care of everything and anything IT-related soup-to-nuts. What does that mean? You’re getting them out of having to be the human ping pong ball. What does being the human ping pong ball means? You call up the hardware vendor. “It’s not a problem with the hardware, gee, it’s got to be a problem with the OS” Okay, so you bounce over and you call the operating system vendor, in many cases, so it’s Microsoft, you call Microsoft. “No it’s not a problem with the operating system, you need some kind—it's got to be something with the device driver, call the peripheral manufacturer.” Okay, you call the peripheral manufacturer, and bear in mind this is the third phone call. They spend about an hour and a half with music on hold. They’re talking to people in distant lands that they can barely understand and the third person at the peripheral vendor says, “I know you really want to believe it’s that device driver, but you got to call your ISP.” To call the ISP and they’re exasperated, they don’t know what to do and then they realized that you are the solution, providing that single point of accountability, single point of contact, single phone call that takes care of anything and everything related to their IT needs. So look to establish yourself as the main technology contact for your clients. Second, use strong prospect qualification strategy. To attract clients that will be receptive to your role as a virtual CIO, make sure that you establish effective strategies to make sure that they are good fit for what you provide. A prospect survey or a qualification form can be a good way to ask important questions that will weed out those prospects, that are not be interested in a long-term relationships. You certainly need to qualify them from a geographic standpoint, size, what kind of platform or operating system they have, what industry they are in, how they’ve gotten technology support in the past. These are key qualification questions that you absolutely, positively must ask before you’re getting your current drive out there for sales call. Ask these important questions. You can fax or email or mail the survey directly to prospects. Some people use it as a telephone interview script, when they're spending a few minutes talking to prospects on the phone. Some people establish an area on their website that allows prospects to fill these kinds of things out online. Or they simply add a few of those key questions to the contact form on their website, but either way, it doesn’t matter how you ask these questions. You’ve got to ask the three or four key questions. Use strong prospect qualification strategies to make sure that you’re not wasting their time and yours. Third, make sure that you leverage your support agreement rate card. If you want to be a virtual CIO offering on-going service agreements, you need to have a one page rate card to show your qualified customers the difference between pay-as-you-go and being on a service contract with your company. This rate card is both a marketing document and a reference for your existing clients. It outlines the unique benefits that you provide as part of your service contracts, and defines your company as their outsource IT department. Trust benefits like better rates, waving some premiums, surcharges, better response time, proactive monitoring to help your customers why they need to sign service agreements to protect and grow their businesses. So make sure that you leverage your rate card to help sell customers and clients on the benefits of being on a service agreement with your company as their virtual IT department and you as heir virtual CIO. So in this short video, we talked about three tips that can help you sell yourself as the virtual CIO to local small businesses. To learn more about how you can get the best study high paying clients on your area unto your client list, go sign up for your virtual CIO tips, now at VirtualCIOKit.com. Again, the URL is VirtualCIOKit.com. This has been Joshua Feinberg for VirtualCIOKit.com. Thanks for tuning in today and we look forward to connecting up with you again real soon. Take care now.