Prospect: “We Don’t Want to be Held Hostage”
We talk a lot about trust, because we understand trust has to be at the core of the relationships with our clients. Recently, while talking with a prospect, we ran into an interesting objection – “we don’t want to be held hostage”. Hostage? I was curious…
The initial objection was “no monthly fees”. Well, many services and products we sell are billed on a month-to-month basis. This is so that the company pays only for what they use. We thought there must be some misunderstanding about this expectation, so we probed further, trying to get to the real issue. So what is the monthly fee you are concerned about?
“The owners don’t want to be held hostage”, the prospect said.
Hostage? You mean by the IT company? What had these owners gone through in the past? The prospect explained that email was critical to the company and they wanted full control of their systems, and the previous IT company didn’t want to hand over administrative logins for their own email accounts.
Now that we understood where they were coming from, it became a conversation about trust, and how we do business differently. We explained that we do as much or as little as you want, to the level that you are comfortable handing over ‘control’ to the IT company. We’re in partnership with our clients.
Warmly,
The Akamai Systems Team
The Akamai Culture – Part 2
The story above highlights why we’re working so hard to build trust between us, the IT services provider, and our clients. In Part 2 of a series of three, we explore Partnership and what that means to the relationship with our clients:
- We work together with our clients, as a partnership, to achieve the best results.
- We do the right thing for YOUR business; we’re always honest with what you need and don’t need for your business.
- YOUR success is our success.
- We take pride in the fact that our average customer retention rate is 7 years!
- We always have respect for your budget constraints.
- Open communication and loyalty are two key components in the partnership between us and our clients.
The Akamai Culture, Part I, highlighting Reliability, can be read here.
Preventing Password Problems
How do you remember all those secure passwords?! Even with a really good memory, it’s impossible. But there’s help – LastPass! Contact us to learn more.
Charity Golf Tournament
Akamai Systems was a proud sponsor for the 2018 Mark Young Construction charity golf tournament; supporting American Military Family. Thank you, the team at MYC, for putting on such a great event for a great cause every year!
We Love Our Clients!
We work really hard to do the best for our clients. A note of appreciation means a lot to us – thank you, Karyn!
“Hey Peter,
Sorry I had to run out for a second and didn’t get to say goodbye. Just want to say thanks for treating our little company so well. You are much appreciated.Karyn Turner
President
Bovidr Laboratories, Inc.“
