Technician Sales Tips and Techniques

I would guarantee that everyone in the sales and service business has had this happen to them. You spend hours with your client, going over their business, their current infrastructure, their immediate needs and their future needs.

You spend hours preparing a comprehensive estimate listing each piece of hardware, each piece of software, what it will take to install it and the benefits they will receive with your solution. You diligently follow up with them and they give you the standard “We’re considering your proposal” stall tactic.

Then several days later, out of the blue you get the call “WHEN CAN YOU INSTALL THIS EQUIPMENT? WE BOUGHT IT ONLINE, IT WAS CHEAPER THAN WHAT YOU QUOTED”

Here is what I have learned after 19 years in the industry:

* The goal of a proper estimate is to provide a well detailed and documented solution for the customer, without giving them the ability to easily shop it on the internet.
* Never use a part number on a quote unless it is your internal part number and then make sure it is not even close to the manufacturer part number.
* Never use the exact product description in your estimate, change it up a little.
* Combine several individual items into one item with one cost on your estimate.
* Follow up, follow up, follow up. Email is great, but a phone call or a face to face visit along with email will provide better results for you than email only. Companies do business with people they trust, you can convey your knowledge, skill and trustworthiness better with oral conversation than written conversation.

Another thing I have learned, this one from my Dad. You are never too old, or too smart to learn something new. So if anyone has different ideas or suggestions on how to quote with out killing your sale, post them on our Tech-Army Forums!

How to improve your laptops battery life

Calibrate It
You should always calibrate your battery at the very least once every three months. If you are someone who never fully drains your battery before plugging in the AC adapter you should calibrate it once a month.



Calibrating your laptops battery is very simple and just takes three steps.
1. Charge your battery to 100% full
2. Drain your battery completely till your computer automatically shuts off.
3. Fill up your battery again to 100% full
That’s it your done, pretty much what you did was empty your battery completely to get rid of bad recharge cells and completely fill it up all the way again so its like brand new, well almost.

Another easy way to save your battery is to not even use it. If you are someone who has their laptop just sitting on their desk everyday and always has it plugged in to the AC adapter then just remove the battery.

Dial down the brightness when running off of a battery. This is one of the easiest ways to extend your battery life and you can see an extended battery life of up to 15 to 30 minutes.

Use Hibernate mode over Standby mode. Standby keeps the notebook’s state in memory and uses some power, while hibernate stores the machine’s state to disk and uses almost no power.

Turn off your Wi-Fi or your Bluetooth when you are not using them. When you are not online be sure to toggle off your Wi-Fi and your Bluetooth. These items are constantly sending out signals that are using a considerable amount of battery usage. When these are off you will notice a significant difference in battery life.

Do not download large files while on your battery. You can download that movie onto your computer some other time and do not allow those pesky windows updates to download while you are working either. Almost all updates to programs can wait till you get back on the AC adapter.

If you combine all of these you can expect to see a large difference in your battery life, but do not expect your battery to last forever. No battery lasts forever and eventually you will have to replace it just like your car battery. Just make sure to store you battery properly also. Never keep it in a car on a hot day, or out in the snow. Obviously you would not do either of those, but pretty much just try to keep it around 68 degrees to 77 degrees with a 30 to 50 percent charge.

Choosing a Quad Core vs a Dual Core from a business point of view

A question that I myself and anyone else out there has been wondering when buying a computer is should I go with the quad core or the dual Core. This question is even harder though for a company who needs to buy more than 10 computers to replace their out of date computers they are using right now. Well the choice is not an easy one so I will try and break it down into pros for quad cores and pros for dual cores.

Quad Core

• Future Proof
A quad core is the CPU of the future. Dual cores can only go so fast before the laws of physics comes in. So the only thing left for CPU’s is to add more cores. The only problem is only a handful of programs right now actually utilize more than 2 cores, which brings me to my next point.

• Better for rendering, encoding, or scientific applications
If you compare a $210 Quad Core Q6600 to a $190 Dual Core E8400, guess who performs better? The Dual Core, but the quad core does perform better in rendering, encoding and scientific apps. The reason is because no programs are written to utilize 4 cores right now. Eventually in a couple of years though you will find that almost all programs will start to utilize 4 cores as the quad core becomes more standard.

Dual Core

• Cheaper
Of course buying will always be cheaper than buying a quad core. You can buy right now a 3.0GHz Dual core for under $200, but to find a 3.0GHz quad core it will cost you over $1,000. That is a huge difference in price is you ask me, but in reality you are getting double the processing power with 4 cores instead of 2, the problem is utilizing all of it.

• Performs Better to date
A test was done at the Website Codinghorror.com a while back that compared a Dual Core 2.4GHz to a Quad Core 2.4GHz. The results showed that the quad core only performed better in rendering, encoding and scientific apps. So pretty much they were exactly the same. So with that extra money you saved by buying a dual core you could buy an even faster dual core for the same price as that quad core and outperform it on almost all tests.

So when you put all the facts in front when it comes down to buying a quad core or a dual core for your works PC you still more than likely will be undecided. The fact is there is no winner in this point of time, but when you are talking about holding on to a computer for 4+ years,( Which most businesses do) then the logical choice will be the Quad Core because by then the programs will have adapted to use all 4 cores. Now when you are talking about having a computer for only a couple of years then you are better of buying the Dual Core, unless your business is heavy into animation and encoding and rendering.

Hope this article helped, good luck and I hope you make the right choice!

Computer Service Now News Page

Can't get enough of the computer service now blog? Well now there is a way to get even more computer service news by going to our ComputerServiceNow News and Articles Page. At the ComputerServiceNow News page you can get all the latest up to date news articles all in one place. Check out some of our latest articles including:

Technical Support
Disaster Recovery
Microsoft Windows Recovery

Microsoft Office Value Pack Announced

Microsoft has just announced a new product called “Equipt”. Equipt is actually a value pack that includes Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live Mail, Live Messenger and Live Photo. The product will be available on July 15 starting at the subscription price of $70 a year. The product will only be available at Circuit City when it first comes out, but will expand to other retailers in the following weeks.

Analysts say “Equipt” is Microsofts response to other outfits such as Google Docs and other free or low-cost productivity suites. Whatever the reason is this is great news for anyone out there because not only do you receive all your moneys worth, but also Microsoft announced that “Equipt” can be installed on up to 3 computers with one subscription.

Have some insight on this subject or want to see what other people think visit our Tech-Army Discussion Forum.