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Saturday, December 16, 2006

Three IT Consulting Factors to Help You Decide What to Offer

IT consulting services come in many shapes and sizes even within the virtual IT industry. When you start your own business, you need to figure out what IT consulting services you should offer.

Three Factors for Choosing IT Consulting Services


Your IT consulting services should be determined by answering the following three questions:

1. What do your prospects want?

2. What is currently in the rest of the marketplace?

3. What are your competitors doing?

IT Consulting Services: What Do Prospects Want?


The people that use your IT consulting services will know what they want. Start talking to people you see as potential target sweet spot clients and ask them questions about their computer needs. For what purpose do they use their computers? What is working well with their computers? What is not working with their computers? What help do they need with computers?

IT Consulting Services: What’s in the Marketplace?


You can find out what types of products and IT consulting services you should offer by reading the following two trade publications for small business consultants: Computer Reseller News (CRN); VAR Business. These will help you stay up-to-speed with what you need to know about the latest products and services. These two publications can be filters because they focus on IT business and not just the latest hot trends in technology. They can help you find value-added IT consulting services that can give your business great potential.

IT Consulting Services: What are Competitors Offering?


This is the final way to determine what products and IT consulting services to offer is to look at your competitors. To spy on the local competition, visit websites, look at Chamber of Commerce websites, visit links to similar services, or do a Google search for IT consulting services in your city, county, province, state, zip code, postal code, etc. When you know what others are offering in your industry, you can get a better idea of which IT consulting services you want to offer, don’t want to offer and how you can improve upon what you’re currently offering.

Use these three factors of IT consulting to help make the process of deciding what to offer as part of your business as easy as possible. Of course, the most important is to ask prospects directly what they want so you know there will be a demand for your services.

Blogged By: Computer Consulting 101