Narrowing down leads to uncover prospects can be a difficult task in the computer consulting industry.  Finding your industry focus is an important first step that can help you identify the right market.  In order to target clients you have to stand out from the rest of the computer consulting professionals trying to use the exact advertising to sell the same services.

You can also narrow down your leads and turn more into prospects by focusing on size.  

Computer Consulting:  Three Different Sizes

Micro small businesses with just a handful of PCs are a good place to start in computer consulting.  The mindset of the business owner is more important than the number of PCs he has, but micro-small businesses are not typically looking for very high-level, expensive IT computer consulting services.

The sweet spot small businesses are the next step up, and where most computer consulting professionals do very well. Small business computer consulting involves ten to fifty PC’s.  Many studies have proven that the two-to-one ratio works across industries, so if you are maxing out at a 50-seat LAN, this often means a 90-100-employee company.  Downtime for the sweet spot is very expensive.  To determine downtime expenses, divide by 250 business days a year and eight hours a day and give them the example of how a company doing $4 million a year in annual revenue with 2,000 business hours a year loses about $2,000 per hour when there is downtime.  As a computer consulting professional, you can save them money and time over the long-term.

More than 50 PCs gives you the top of the small business world and the bottom of the medium-sized business world.  At this size, the IT services bills from your company would be similar to a full-time salary for an in-house real IT manager.  This type of business will probably not outsource generalist roles and will most likely hire an on-site person and therefore is not as strong a lead as some of the smaller businesses.  

Added By:   Joshua Feinberg