One is finding your industry focus. You must laser beam your target market. You need to stand out tremendously from the crowd because everyone other computer consulting professional is chasing after the same hardware services, LAN, and the exact same advertising.



But there are two other really big ways that you can narrow down your leads and improve your batting average. One is size.

Computer Consulting: Three Different Size Audiences to Pursue:

One is the micro small business where there's just a handful of PCs. It has more to do with the mindset of the business owner than the absolute number of PCs, but it's a very small number of employees, a very small number of PCs, and at that size, the micro small business doesn't usually look for extensive high-level IT computer consulting services. The next step up is really the sweet spot where we see most computer consulting professionals still continuing to do very well even in this challenging environment, and that's the 10- to 50-PC space. A number of different studies have confirmed that the two to one ratio holds across different industries, so if you're maxing out around a 50-seat LAN, a lot of times that equates to anywhere from a 90- to 100-employee company.

At that size, once you get that many PCs, IT is usually a lot more strategically important to the company. Down time becomes much more expensive. You can do simple calculations like taking their annual revenue and dividing by 250 business days a year and eight hours a day and give them real simple ideas of a company doing $4 million a year in annual revenue with 2,000 business hours a year is losing on average $2,000 an hour for down time. A computer consulting professional can save them money in the long run. When you start to get to 50 PCs or 100 PCs or more, you start to enter what we consider the borderline of the top of small business and the bottom of medium-sized business.

What can often happen at that size is the IT services bills from your company start to approach what could become a full-time salary of a real IT manager. They're no longer going to need to outsource the generalist roles--instead they'll hire their own, on-site person.

The Bottom Line About Computer Consulting

To set yourself apart from the crowd, you need to further define your ideal client in order to find the prospects among your leads.

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