SMB Nation Day 2 - It Keeps Getting Better!
This morning started out with a BANG in Matt Makowicz, the president of Endeavor-Inc, rocked the house with his session on Growing Your Business with Recurring Revenue & Stop Selling Blocks of Hours. The session dove in on several key areas of building repeatable businesses and getting customers a way from being nickeled and dimed for reactive issues and moving them over to a business management and maintance package that entailed up front quarterly billing.
He went through the processes and paint points his company experienced in the beginning when they were first trying to move to a contract and maintenance configuration from hourly billing and how to avoid some of the pitfalls they experienced along the way.
The areas he dove into were:
- What you should include or promise in your contracts?
- How do you build value & sell contracts?
- When (and how) do you present them to the customer?
- How much should you charge?
The part I like the most was how he handled objections when trying to make the sale. Here are some of the objections and responses he discussed.
- "That's not in our budget" (surprise)
- Once it is, there are no more suprises
- "Locking into a contract"
- Make yours easy to cancel and tell them it is
- "How do I know you're doing all that"
- Because you won't have problems
- "What's not included"
- Be very clear about wat isn't (and make it a short list)
- "no additional bills" (No more nickel and diming)
Harry has the full slide deck from Matt's presentation and Matt is working on a sample contract to share with everyone. He is reviewing the ones that Robin Robin's discussed the previous day as well as the sample contract's on the Microsoft Small Business Community site that Eric Ligman hosts.
Check back for more posts from SMBNation.