The following is a story submitted by an audIT subscriber. Find out how the audIT Sales Presentation System worked in a real-world scenario and helped close a sale for Tejas.
Dear Frank,
I wanted to send you a quick note on behalf of TechWerxe in regards to audIT. We got our first chance this week to utilize this product at a client that hired us to perform a thorough evaluation of their full computing environment.
This was not a typical client as they had hired us to ONLY perform a discovery and report back our findings on their current strengths and weaknesses in their computing environment. As usual, just like any other IT Consulting organization we arrived and started our process. We started questioning the IT Staff and Users, and evaluating the environment technically and visually as well as deploying our agents to collect some performance metrics.
The client provided us with tons of information as a part of this process: network diagrams, user experiences, etc. We also had our own notes that we were making as part of the discovery process. After the day was finished and after gathering performance metrics over a week from our agents, we were now armed with all this information with the daunting task of putting this together into something the client can understand.
We had to make sure that our report was thorough and concise, but also short and to the point, as our meeting to outline what we found was with the COO, CFO, and CMO. As you can see they are not technical members of the organization. There were two LAN Admins there, but the analysis was really to be presented to the C Level personnel.
At this point we decided that instead of using our old method of compiling this information into lengthy technical documents and then trying to explain them to the client, we would give audIT a try. We had already been using the system in “test” mode with existing clients and felt that we might be able to present our findings clearly using audIT.
I must say being a technical person myself, deciphering the data was a breeze for me (after all if it wasn’t, audIT was not going to help me with that). What I was more fearful of was the Technical Documentation that was about to follow.
So I began entering my short points into the summary statements and continued moving on in the categories and moving things around as needed for this client. They didn’t need the Telecom part so we left that out from our discovery and the report. It only took me about an hour or so to get all those little boxes together with some of my verbiage. At this point, I thought I sure hope this shows me something useful.
What followed was amazing. I reviewed the initial print out and was thoroughly impressed. The documentation was amazingly easy to follow and the color coding made it eye catching (especially to the red boxes). I even read every page (yes even the factoids that are in there). I couldn’t believe that finally there was something that can take all this data that we got from the client and in a short time give me a report that they can follow. I felt at this point, this meeting is going to be different.
A few short days later we had our meeting with this client, here I am sitting in the room with the COO, CFO, CMO and the LAN Admins. I am slightly nervous, thinking I sure hope these guys are not going to ask me for all the technical mumbo jumbo that we usually bring with us in print and try to explain out.
The response from the C Level staff and LAN Admins was immediate. “I guess a lot of Red Boxes and a score of 27 is not going to make this a short conversation”. This is when I realized “WOW”, I haven’t even said a word yet to them besides thanks for the time, and they had already gotten the point. The rest of the conversation was going through the categories and summarizing what we found, and a couple of gasps.
The kicker of this whole meeting was, after we were done in just about an hour or so, the LAN Admins were asked to leave and we had a unplanned meeting with the COO, CFO, and CMO. That meeting was pretty straightforward. They wanted a proposal for what it would take to fix the problems and for our Managed Services. Amazing right? A client has now turned into a prospect for our full Managed Services. They want a full proposal and were already asking what our timeframe is to start onboarding.
I have say, audIT was the tool that did it for this meeting. They got the point that things were a mess and they needed to act right away in just a few minutes. A tool like this is so necessary for our industry, I am sure there are many technical folks like me that have difficulty converting our data into something a prospect can understand clearly.
Looking forward to many more audIT conversions.
Tejas M Bhatt | Chief Technology Advisor, TechWerxe