Are you trying to set yourself up as a trusted Virtual CIO for your clients’ businesses? If so, you need to know how to convince small business owners that signing a long-term service agreement 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 for your clients and become an extension of their businesses. You will have to give them the continuity of knowing you will be there every week, every month and over the course of several years (at least!) to oversee their IT needs. You will help with strategic planning as well as execution of technology plans, management, supervision and training, as well as coordinating all different types of IT vendors. An on-going service agreement solidifies your role as a Virtual CIO and formalizes your relationships with your clients. Use these 3 steps to get clients to understand your role so you can build long-term relationships. Establish Yourself as the Main Technology Contact. Your small business clients are not going to have the patience to deal with a lot of different technology vendors. As a Virtual CIO, you need to have the attitude of the-buck-stops-here, and be able to take care of everything IT-related, soups-to-nuts. Use Strong Prospect Qualification Strategies. To attract clients that will be receptive to your role as a Virtual CIO, establish effective strategies to make sure they are a good fit for your services. A prospect survey is a good way to ask important questions that will weed out those prospects that will not be interested in long-term relationships. Ask important questions about the size of your prospects’ businesses, where they are located, how many PCs and servers they have, and which type of industry they are in. You can fax, e-mail or mail this survey directly to prospects, or establish an area on your Web site that allows them to fill it out online. Leverage Your 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 qualified customers the difference between “pay-as-you-go” and service contract rates. This rate card is both a marketing document and a reference for your existing clients. It outlines the unique benefits you provide as part of your service contracts and defines your company as their outsourced Virtual IT department. Stress benefits such as better rates, waiving some premiums, better response time and proactive monitoring to help show customers why they need to sign service agreements to protect and grow their businesses. In this article we talked about 3 tips to help you sell yourself as a Virtual CIO to local small businesses. Learn more about how you can attract great, steady, high-paying clients as a Virtual CIO now at http://www. VirtualCIOKit. comCopyright (C), VirtualCIOKit. com, All Rights Reserved
Posts Tagged ‘Continuity’
Virtual Cio Tips For Helping Your Clients Understand Your Role
December 10th, 2009New Forum Launched for Open Discussion of Virtualization – Virtualizationchat.com!
November 21st, 2009
Virtualization is one of the most proven technologies that is swiftly transforming the landscape of IT as well as fundamentally changing the manner in which people compute it. This is basically a technology that benefits computer users especially Mac enthusiasts, government organizations, commercial businesses, IT professionals as well as laymen; in an effective way. The fact of the matter is that virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and 3tera’s, AppLogic, help their clients use less hardware and resources, by creating “Virtual” servers, and infrastructures.
The biggest advantage attached with the virtualization technologies is that it helps in saving energy, money as well as time. Following are presented some of the valuable benefits attached with the process of virtualization:
Infrastructure optimization and server consolidation: the first and foremost benefit connected with the process of virtualization is that it helps in achieving the optimum utilization of the resources. As a matter of fact, you can pool the resources of infrastructure as well as break the legacy of the model of one application to a single server.
Cot reduction of the physical infrastructure: with the virtualization forums, it becomes easy for you to reduce the IT hardware as well as number of servers present in the data center. This greatly leads to reduction in the costs of IT especially in the areas of power, real estate as well as cooling requirements.
Improved operational responsiveness and flexibility: this process of virtualization also offer innovative ways of managing the IT infrastructure. Along with this, this process is also commonly known to help the IT administrators in spending lees time on virtually all the repetitive tasks like configuration, maintenance, provisioning and monitoring.
Improved continuity of business and increased availability of application: the process of virtualization also helps in eliminating the planned downtime as well as in recovering rapidly from the unplanned outages. The fact of the matter is that this software provides the capability of securing the backup as well as in migration of the whole virtual environment. The added advantage attached with this process is that you do not come across any kind of interruption in the services.
Improved desktop security and manageability: manage, deploy as well as monitor the desktop environments in order to access the remotely or locally; the network connection.
Vmware approach in the case of virtualization
Vmware helps to insert a very thin layer of software directly upon the hardware of computers. This creates the virtual server which can operate any OS independent of eachother. As a matter of fact you could run a windows, and linux virtual machine parallel with eachother, on the same piece of physical hardware.
Companies like 3Tera.com offer Applogic, their Grid Operating System, which gives a virtual environment across several “Grid” servers. Imagine having an entire N-tier architecture from firewall, load balancer, web servers, database servers, and NAS storage server, all tied together using one system with a GUI interface for managing all the virtual systems within the Virtual Datacenter. The technology has many benefits, one of them being built in redundancy of your data across several “nodes” or physical servers.
All of these topics and many more are being discussed at www.virtualizationchat.com.
By: Akash Tripathi
