There is an Indian proverb: “Trust grows at the rate of the coconut tree and falls with the speed of the coconut.”

When meeting for the first time with prospective customers, I always start out by asking them about their business. What’s the key things that help them stand out from their competitors? What are their critical success factors? I want to be sure that I can provide them with the support they need. After all, Atlas sees itself as an IT partner for our clients and we feel we have a stake in their success.

The conversation then moves to their pain points: What isn’t working for them? What frustrates them? What takes so much of their time that they are neglecting the core aspects of their business? Those are the areas we can provide the most value.

Recently, I’ve had inquiries from prospects who are unhappy with their current IT provider. I don’t want to compete with other companies but if a relationship has gone sour, I’m interested. So I ask them my usual list of questions.

In one case, the company owner told me that they just weren’t getting good service from their existing provider and that they were also being billed huge amounts for what they did get. We talked further and I had to agree, it didn’t sound like they were getting good value at all. I agreed to supply them with a proposal–one that I thought would give them good value: make their IT system reliable and secure; and at a significant saving from their previous supplier.

We didn’t get that contract.

In asking for a debrief, the client told us that they really weren’t concerned about value or the quality of security, management, or support from their vendor. They just wanted it as cheap as possible. Our price was still too high for them. They were sure they could find someone cheaper.

I thank them for that; we dodged that bullet. I’ll probably refine my qualifying prospect questions going forward. They may reconsider their decision in time as well.

80% of companies reported some sort of a successful cyberattack in the previous year. Other typical causes of lost data and productivity are: failed backup media, user error in deleting files, employee sabotage, and and other hardware failure. Outages have a cost that most businesses never consider. Having a trusted IT partner can prevent many of those outages and level out the costs and protect your business data when they do happen.

Wondering what an outage would cost for your business? Check out our outage calculator here.

Atlas is a company that works hard to grow trust with our clients. We know that this takes time and it’s one thing that our existing customers tell us–They trust us. We’re all about providing value and not dropping the coconuts that our clients have trusted us with.