Advisory services for Tech & IT firms
Most tech and IT firms are competent enough to produce good quality work for their clients. However, good-enough skills aren’t sufficient to win new clients and keep best-fit ones. Especially when there is a ton of competition, and buyers may be tempted to view your firm as yet another replaceable vendor.
Most firms struggle with business decisions: their necessity, timing, alignment and quality. We have identified nine criticial control points (CRICPs) in professional organizations where, due to organizational entropy, loss of useful work occurs. In our advisory services and solutions, we employ proprietary models and frameworks.
Firms winning less than 55% of bids (proposals) perform below average.
The top challenges of Tech & IT firms
Senior management of tech & IT companies report the following top challenges in their businesses:
- Profitability pressures due to increasing competition and commoditization
- Attracting better talent for key technical roles
- How to motivate existing employees to put in their best effort
- Staying up-to-date with the latest tech yet focused
- How to stand out from other alternatives from buyers’ perspective
- Making smarter strategic business decisions faster
- How to qualify prospects to get better paying clients
- New business development issues
- Diminishing profit margins due to clients’ demands and expectations
- Planning and executing on new ideas and innovation
Based on proprietary management models, our advisory services and management solutions were developed specifically for professional service firms to tackle the aforementioned challenges.
Differentiated IT & Tech companies get better clients
Buyers of IT services get bombarded with copy-paste emails, text messages and offers from tech companies daily. Be it SEO services, cybersecurity, managed IT services, tech support, cloud management, web development offers or try-us-out-for-an-hour-for-free deals. Your prospects need an expert not a deal.
Well-differentiated IT & Tech firms have more leads, better prospects and qualified clients. A path to a compelling differentiation starts with positioning: what business you’re in, who is the target market, and how you serve your clients differently.
If the company isn’t at the top of food chain in the marketplace, claims of being great at everything tech is the wrong approach to marketing. Well-positioned firms emanate deep expertise in one or several adjasent categories — never in everything.
When your firm becomes less interchangebale it can become more compelling by offering limited number of pre-packaged solutions. These two parts set the stage for the third part — lead gen system.
To get better clients you need to have a constant stream of inbound leads, good lead-prospect conversion rates and a way to qualify prospects.
At the end of the day you don’t want your people to be busy with tons of work, you want to be selective, command a price premium, and feel comfortable with the way things develop.
Profitable IT & Tech firms have one thing in common — more choice
Firms from the IT and tech industries have different paths to sustainable businesses. Some focus on ads and SEO, some — on networking and word of mouth, some — on sales reps and cold outreach. This doesn’t always result in comfortable level of profitability.
One thing that all profitable tech firms have in common is a surplus of clients. This allows them to say no more often. Less pursuit of distractions disguised as opportunities. Less wrong-fit clients. Less pitching, estimating and cold-calling. As a result — higher profit margin.
To be able to charge a price premium for the work, a firm has to be well-positioned in the marketplace. It has to have clear and focused inventory of offerings. It has to have a perpetual lead gen system in place.
When the demand for your IT firm is higher than your capacity, you’d be able to raise your fees. Hiring more hands on deck isn’t necessarily the path to a more profitable and comfortbale level of business.
Company culture will help in many unforseen ways
Great talent is attracted to great culture. The culture at an IT or Tech firm cannot be forced on people. Really good specialists will be leaving in droves when their values and expectations aren’t met.
Higher salary only works up to a certain threshold. More benefits don’t work on zealous tech nerds. Best people in tech are motivated by challenge, freedom, acceptance and community.
When a Tech & IT firm can clearly articulate its mission, vision, values and purpose; when it embraces them — it begins to act in a culture-forming manner that attracts better-fit candidates.
Even Tech and IT firms with great culture can’t reduce the turnover to zero. But at these firms employees rarely decamp, on contrary — they do their best to reciprocate by finding a suitable replacement.
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