Small Business Networking: Suggesting Dedicated Servers to Clients

PC-based servers and LANs may be relatively mature technologies. However, small businesses need your firm’s expertise, more than ever. For these businesses, you'll need to select, configure, customize, secure and maintain the right small business networking tools for their unique needs.

Real Small Business Networking Solutions Begin with Real Servers

How many times have you taken on a new small business client who insists that he or she is perfectly content with their peer-to-peer network? You know the peer-to-peer network is really causing a ton of problems.

Is Microsoft Windows peer-to-peer networking any way to run a small business? Perhaps it is for a two-or-three-person company, but those really tiny offices generally aren’t your most profitable client opportunities.

Convincing the Client They Need Small Business Networking

Clients come to you because they need a reliable, yet cost-effective small business networking solution. You know that their data, uptime, and security issues are important, and that there are some corners that aren’t worth cutting. Yet many small business networking prospects and clients still believe that they’re too small to need a dedicated or "real" server.

Cutting Corners Doesn’t Cut It

When you begin talking about a network upgrade, small business clients often dwell on out-of-pocket costs. They often neglect to consider the more substantial soft costs of investing shortsightedly in a small business network.

These include lost employee productivity when imprudent corners are cut, downtime when fault-tolerance is an afterthought, and support costs when difficult-to-support or "dead-end" solutions are selected solely because of their low price tag.

The Bottom Line about Small Business Networking

Often clients don’t recognize they have a small business networking problem until it’s too late. If you show your prospects and clients how a dedicated server can save them money by avoiding inevitable disasters (i.e. share some of your "before" and "after" client case studies), you’ll have a stronger chance of getting prospects and clients to see "the light."

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