If you are starting out in the IT consulting industry, you will start to wonder how to move your focus from micros small businesses to the sweet spot. The following questions and tips will help you determine what your prospects will be looking for as IT consulting sweet spot clients and how you can improve your skills:
1. How much time should I spend improving my skills? Your time should be balanced. If you have the skills to work with micro, you might not have those required to work with sweet spot clients. Spend approximately 75% of your time over a couple months on IT consulting business development and about 25% of the time on improving technical skills.
2. Which skills should be your focus? Get a not-for-resale copy of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 and learn about it by installing it on an extra system. This process will help you get into sweet spot IT consulting, as will working in the same way with Novell Small Business Suite.
3. Start simple. You will be able to qualify sweet spot clients before going out on IT consulting sales calls or writing proposals. Going through the process of qualifying and researching prospects will help you figure out if you have the right skills. The smaller sweet spot clients with 10, 15 or 20 seats will have less complicated needs than those with 2 or 3 servers and many locations.
THE SWEET SPOT TRANSITION
Start working with micro small businesses as part of your IT consulting growth and gain confidence by getting references and building your business and knowledge. Some larger micro businesses will probably need the skills you will need to get to the sweet spot as they outgrow peer-to-peer and other simple solutions, so you can practice your sophisticated work on them before making the transition.
Blogged By: Joshua Feinberg
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