IT Service Agreements: Know Your Clients

IT service agreements require knowing your ideal customer, keeping in regular contact with them and evaluating the service you provide. With this information you can alter your IT service agreements.

In addition to knowing your skills and being moderately qualified, keep an eye on the size of companies you want to target for IT service agreements. Going after 60 stations, 100 stations, or 150 stations is not the best place to start.

Start Small

Start with something that’s more comfortable and more approachable for your technical skill set. This will probably be someone in the 10 to 35 PC range with one or possibly 2 servers. They will not typically have wide area network connections. Most of their needs will be with Windows and Office and things you’re probably already comfortable with. Definitely start with some smaller small businesses before you progress onto larger ones.

IT Service Agreements Require Regular Communication

In terms of maintaining customer expectations, keeping up and keeping in contact with customers on a regular basis, whether it’s emails, phone calls, or dropping by is extremely important. If the service agreement is set up correctly, you and/or your technical staff should be at a client’s site at a minimum of once a month on-site.

In most cases, it’s going to be at least twice a month. Open lines of communication, staying in touch on a regular basis is extremely important if you want an extra quality control tool to make sure that you’re actually meeting and exceeding their expectations.

Use Surveys to Evaluate IT Service Agreements

Send a survey on a regular basis. Once a year is the minimum. Do this a couple months before you’re ready to give them their renewal. Feel free to adapt that to twice a year or quarterly if you want. You can even make it a little less formal but the key is to keep asking for feedback. Keep asking on how you can improve, how you can continue to deliver via your IT service agreements.

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IT Service Agreements: Living Up to Your Promises

T Service Agreements might make you anxious about meeting your obligations to your clients. Make an inventory skills list and realize your technicians won't need all the latest certifications or be familiar with the latest versions of software to support IT service agreements.



If you are new to the service model, you may be concerned about your ability to live up to your IT service agreements. Let’s assume that you have eight clients who will book $165,000 in yearly revenue. The greatest fear for many new consultants is getting significant IT service agreements and not being able to support their clients in the short-term.

Build Confidence by Planning Ahead

The best way to handle this is to take stock of what you can do today. Make an inventory skills list. Look at what your competitors are doing and figure out where the gaps are. Figure out which of your services would be useful to a small business with a real LAN, with a real network. Figure out what some of your competitors are offering in terms of services and solutions and make a plan of attack for working on those deficiencies. Then, utilize them in your IT service agreements.

How Important are Certifications?

The big thing to keep in mind with most of these small businesses are that, unlike big IT shops, they’re usually a couple of years behind the curve. That means it’s no big deal if your technicians don't have skills on the brand new software versions--your clients probably don't have them either. .

If you’re looking for a baseline qualification, having technicians that have a basic MCP, the Microsoft Certified Professional, will be useful regardless of whether they’re certified on a desktop operating system or a server operating system. For most of the small businesses in the sweet spot, they don’t care. They really can’t differentiate between advanced and entry-level certifications.

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IT Service Agreements: Identify Your Terms

iT Service Agreements need to have pre-determined monthly fees, travel charges, and other policies. Determine your conditions and terms before getting customers to sign IT Service Agreements.

IT service agreements require advance planning to inspire confidence in your customers. You need to know what benefits and prices you will offer to your customers ahead of time. This will be your compelling case for why your future clients need to be on IT service agreements.

Make a Rate Card

A rate card is a simple one-page document that shows your typical prices versus your service agreement prices. This is your marketing summary of the benefits you’re providing. Brainstorm a list of at least half a dozen compelling benefits for why someone should sign IT service agreements with you as opposed to paying by the hour.

The essential thing here is to make sure that you know what you’re doing with this before you go out on the sales call. Otherwise you'll be screaming out that you’re an amateur.

For your smaller clients, you may want to have IT service agreements that are priced at a couple hundred dollars a month. For your sweet spot clients, $800 to $1,000 seems to work really well. For your bigger clients, it may be a $2,500 a month type of deal.

Consider Your Travelling Distance

If you’re used to servicing people within a 10 or 15-mile radius, you may have to extend your umbrella a little bit. Most of your competitors will easily go 45 minutes to an hour out and then it’s just up to you to figure out an economical way to do it. Some of them will charge for travel time; a VAN charge or a fixed charge for showing up. This compensates for some travel time and transportation expenses.

Most of them will enforce some kind of minimum. Minimums range from as little as one hour to as much as a half-day minimum.

IT Service Agreements for Small Businesses are Key

You would literally have to have a couple hundred home networking customers to equal what you could get with 10 or 15 solid small business accounts. And those home networking customers don’t want to hear that you can’t give them fabulous service because they only spent $300 with you this year. They’re going to expect the sun, the moon, the earth and the stars just as if they were spending $300 a week with you.

As a result, it’s a heck of a lot easier to find more concentrated buyers that need to see you a couple times a month. With these customers, you can afford to give that kind of response time.

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IT Service Agreements: When To Offer Them

IT Service Agreements should be suggested at different times. After the IT audit, after an emergency, or when a prospect is not happy with their current provider, are all good times to get clients to sign IT Service Agreements.


Right after emergency service calls is a good time to offer IT service agreements. You’ve just saved the day and you’re at the high point.

Customers have to like, know, and trust you. After an emergency, they love you! They love you because you saved the day; they now know you of course because you just spent the last 16 hours working non-stop to solve this problem; and of course they trust you because you delivered on what you said you could do.

Future Damage Control

Once you fix an emergency, they’re very receptive to talking about how to prevent this kind of panic from happening in the future. Then you can give them a proposal that will include the ongoing maintenance by your company in the form of IT service agreements. So that’s a great time to ask for the service contract.

Offer IT Service Agreements after Conducting IT Audits

After IT audits, customers are wondering what do to next. If they have agreed to an audit, they are more than likely looking for someone that they can call on a regular basis. They want someone who’s going to look out for their needs, who’s going to take a long-term approach to making sure that everything they’re buying fits well with their existing investments, and that it makes sense for their business and fits in with different things going on in their industry.

For someone to sign IT service agreements, they need to be a paying customer of yours. Once they become a paying customer of yours with an IT service agreement, they’re essentially more of a client, because they’re beyond just being a transaction-oriented customer. They’re in it for the long haul, with a long-term client relationship.

The Long Range Option

Another option is a slightly longer sales cycle that can take anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. In this case, your customer realizes that they are not happy with their current technology provider. Perhaps, they’re not delivering as promised; the response time is starting to slack off; they feel they’re padding the bills; there’s personality conflicts; or changes in priorities. A lot of different things can happen and they’re actively shopping for a new consulting firm, a new technology provider to work with.

In those cases, usually the natural step is after you’ve walked out and you have tons and tons of notes and lots of things is to propose to them that you come back and do IT audits. The IT audit is a great segue into proposing IT service agreements.

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IT Service Agreements: Creating the Package

IT service agreements can be a great help to your computer consulting business. However, if you don't know what you're doing right from the outset, you can really mess up your company's IT service agreements.

Think about how you're going to package your IT service agreements. For example, are you going to make them fixed- price, retainer-based or based on pre-paid blocks of time?

IT service agreements that are fixed priced are tricky because you have to forecast what people need and want. Most small business computer consultants don't have the skill to accurately predict these needs, because these kinds of predictions are usually better left to actuaries.

Factors To Consider When Packaging Your IT Service Agreement

Think about how you're going to package your service agreement program. These are real important things that you need to think about BEFORE you're out on the sales call and present this IT service agreement offering to your customers and clients.

What tangible benefits you can offer?

What can you provide that's going to make signing that service agreement beyond compelling?

What is going to make it a no-brainer that your customers will want to sign service agreements?

You want to have some killer benefits in there.

What Kind of Benefits Should You Offer?

One of them typically has to do with response time, whether it's response time for on-site service, response time by phone, or response time for remote support.

Another benefit is proactive maintenance, whether it's remote and VPNing in, or dialing in to check their logs from time to time.

Giving an hourly discount is a huge benefit that usually gets most customers off the fence with signing IT service agreements.

Waiving premiums for after-hour service or emergency service can be another huge issue that can get people over the fence.

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