7 Handy Tips When Selling Website Projects

The following seven tips I have discovered myself over the last two decades in selling website projects. They have really helped me out in my digital marketing agency, and I hope you find value in at least one of them yourself.

If you aren’t in the web design business, don’t despair. Whilst it may seem to be very digital or web heavy, these tips can actually be applied in just about any product or service sales situation. 

So without further ado, let’s get into my key hints on selling website projects.

Sell people and technology

When you first start speaking with a website prospect, they are obviously after a solution and to know that you have the technical capabilities to do the work. However, anyone can learn to use tools and many can master a development language. You need to ensure that you sell yourself, or if you have a team, your people as well.

I’m not talking in an egocentric way, however, you need to ensure that the prospect knows that you are more than competent to do the project at hand. Since you will be working closely together, they really need to understand, like, and trust you and your team. 

Remember you could possibly (if things go right!) be working with them for a number of years, so you've got to learn to sell you and your team as much as selling your product or services.

Be genuine and yourself

When you leave your personal life in the morning and head to work, you don’t leave your personality at home, do you? You need to be confident enough to be able to be real and genuine, in front of your prospects, team and your clients. People are actually very good at sensing when someone is being fake, and they will judge you harshly for that within a heartbeat. 

You want to spend your life ideally being genuine with the people you deal with, and be honestly interested in how you can help their businesses with your services, rather than how you can make wheelbarrow loads of money.

In response, people will be able to sense you are genuine and caring, and they are going to see that you're really trying to be of benefit and of service to them and their businesses.

Always be in their shoes

I don’t mean literally - clients get real funny about you trying to wear their shoes. What I do mean is that when you are out there, attracting new customers and selling website projects, you should always work to be empathetic with your prospects and clients, and further, you should work hard to understand their perspectives and pre-empt their decisions where possible.

By putting yourself in their shoes, you will come to realize that they're potentially making a really big investment in you and your business, and that this is based purely on trust and what you have told them. 

You want to place yourself in your clients shoes and be empathetic towards their situation. If your prospect seems a touch fearful or hesitant to be involved, you'll help them feel comfortable by using terms like ‘we’ and ‘us’ as a way to show that there is implicit teamwork between the two of you.

Don’t bamboozle them

I have plenty of clients who love to bust out acronyms and show off the technical levels of knowledge they have. They (mostly) get it right, when they state user experience, mySQL, rollback to last revision, blah blah. Yet, on the other hand, the majority of my customers wouldn’t know a table from a database or a TLS, DNS, etc, and that’s absolutely fine.

Just like I don’t understand the knowledge my medical clients have, for example, and wouldn’t attempt even light surgery on myself or a friend. These clients come to you because you can speak the geek languages that they can’t.

Especially if this is their first website project. I doubt that they have any idea what is ahead of them, how they are going to be involved, and are generally scared or intimidated with words like MySQL, CSS, UI, PHP IDE’s, or any of the other multitude of three-letter acronyms.

When you are selling website projects, you should focus on getting a good understanding of their technical level, and don’t exceed it, unless they ask. When I ask a signwriter to make a sign for my building, I don’t want to know what rating the vinyl lettering is - I just want them to do it. So don’t bamboozle your prospects.

Repeat their desires

When you're in a meeting with a prospect or a client, you want to be always collecting and confirming information. A good way from a sales perspective to do this, is during your call or meeting, write down the key phrases that you hear them repeating or are passionate about, and then make sure to reiterate them at the end of the telephone call or meeting.

For example, if they use words like modern and slick to describe their new designs which they desire, then when wrapping up your meeting, state phrases such as “In the next few days, I will get back to you with a proposal for us to create a modern and slick website for you that does X, Y and Z”. 

It shows the recipient that you are good at active listening (believe it or not, there are sadly a high percentage of people out there who aren’t!) and that by reiterating what they want, you are subconsciously planting the idea to them that you are the right people for the job.

Brainstorm

These people are coming to you because website designers are creative, and naturally they have good thought processes. One of my favorite things to prove this to them, as well as understand their motivations and ideals more, is to do some informal brainstorming with them.

Say, for example, they are an accounting firm that just wants a brochure website. Start asking what their reception gets asked for a lot - perhaps it is tax preparation forms. Could we create a page that lists all of those, to save your staff time?

Maybe they could build a clients only library of many forms and articles, and make that a selling proposition for their clients. By being a client of XYZ Accounting, you get access to our private client information library, blah blah.

These brainstorm sessions often result in more work and a larger project for you (which equals larger budgets and profits, of course) but they also show to your prospect that you have the ability to think fast and come up with new, fresh ideas.

This is seriously one of the simplest ways that you can encourage a client to become excited about working with you, sharing new ideas, and talking about how you can both grow their business.

Always have a next step

At the conclusion of every meeting or phone call, have a clear next step that you both clearly understand.

You may have listened or engaged with your prospect for an hour or more, but the last thing that often happens is that one of you will say “I’ll get back to you” and then that’s it. Wrong! What you want to do is finish up with a ‘You will get your corporate identity design files over to us and by Thursday, I will send a written proposal and web design contract outlining all we discussed today.

Then what you want to do, to seal the deal, is ensure they state it as well and say they agree.

This simple method will really assist you in selling website projects. It is as simple as spotting the next steps and ensuring that you both understand them. Identify the requirements required by both sides, list them out, and give this all a deadline.

This all helps the prospect in feeling comfortable and you only got to ask yourself what would I search for if I used to be in their situation it'll go an extended way now speaking of talking together with your clients and making them feel comfortable 

In Summary

Embracing these seven tips will definitely improve your chances of success when you are out and about, selling website projects. Irrespective of the size or budget, these seven hints will come in handy.

Those seven hints again are;

• Sell people and technology
• Be genuine and yourself
• Always be in their shoes
• Don’t bamboozle them
• Repeat their desires
• Brainstorm
• Always have a next step

All the best with finding and winning the website projects you love in the year ahead.

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