Your website = your first impression.

I recently meet with a prospective client for the first time to discuss their ideas for a new website. Before meeting with them I fully engrossed myself with their website, understanding their business, reading bios, case studies, etc. My first impression was that they were a reputable small, maybe 10-15 employee firm. To my shock and almost downfall, they were a much larger firm occupying two floors of a massive corporate building. Needless to say, I thought I was in the wrong place.

In the example above, this client had a very big problem. Their business is very people orientated, and if it looks like they have only employees, then it looks like they can only handle small accounts or fewer of the big ones anyways.

A good website will enable your sales people, account reps, and marketing efforts to get the attention they deserve. Imagine you are a company with a hundred employees and multiple locations, and your walking up to a Fortune 500 company and trying to sell them $500,000 in goods or services. But the decision maker that you are meeting with already reviewed your website and thinks you are a small shop with half a dozen employees. Imagine his concern with handing you a $500,000 purchase order.

The ideal situation is that your website not only makes your company appear larger, but more capable and more experienced to handle the ideal target clients you want to pursue.

Selling the invisible.

Undoubtedly the hardest aspect of the selling web & interactive services is that you cannot simply hand the client an actual product, anytime, even after the project is complete. Graphic designers have it slightly easier in that they can hand a prospect their portfolio and the prospect can touch it, feel it, marvel at it the wonderful printing techniques, and I think you get the point.

So how do you convince someone to buy something from you when you cannot hand it to them? The same way the dentist convinces you that you need a tooth pulled. First, no one questions a dentist and his abilities, he is admired, trusted and to some people, down right scary. But even fear instills power. So do you start carrying a gun to meetings? No, but you can instill a fear of choosing the wrong firm (not yours) for the job.

Another reason the dentist does so well is because of his knowledge, his experience. Knowledge is power, excuse the pun. When a CEO, Marketing Director, or even a small business owner, goes to make a decision on developing a website, most of the time they will know next-to-nothing about everything in involved in producing one. It is your job to be the instructor, to be knowledgeable of every aspect from concepts to programming to beta testing. Our developers will tell you, I am anything but a programmer, but I have forced myself to learn the lingo, understand the concepts and methodologies of programming, so that I can inform my clients of the best practices.

So how do you effectively sell the invisible? Simple, make the invisible, visible, make it you. Your knowledge, your experience and some personality doesn’t hurt.

Fire your clients

“Your fired”, a term made so popular by Donald Trump, however he uses it towards his would be employees. I suggest it works well for clients as well.

All too true with the technology industry and more specifically the web design industry, is the huge barrier between clients and firms. Knowledge is that barrier.

I spend so much time educating clients on the business of the web. So much in fact that for some clients I have contemplated adding a line item to their proposal for “education & training”. How frustrating is it to build a phenomenal website with a client-friendly content management system, only to find out two months later they want a quote for updates?

Then there are those clients that maybe watch one too many infomercials, and view the web as their ticket to millions. The first conversation goes something like this, “I have a great idea for a website that combines MySpace with eBay and has cool features like eHarmony”. What is that? A site that you can take a compatibility test, make them your friend and if you don’t like them anymore you can put them in auction? In all serious, I have had plenty of conversations that have sounded like that, and they all end with me quickly hanging up.

So where do you draw the line? What brings you to the point of no return? It all boils down to time and money. Are they waisting too much of your time without making you enough money? As much as your client cares about ROI, you have a bottom line too.

Don’t lick it, click it.

In today’s fast paced society, just about everywhere you look people are connected to the internet. Via their laptop or now the more popular mobile phones and pocket PC’s. The business world has noticed and is now taking advantage of the web to attract new customers and gain an edge over the competition. More and more companies are finding it absolutely crucial to seek out new and innovative ways to connect with their clients. While it has gained in popularity and acceptance, the internet is still far too often overlooked as a marketing tool in today’s market. The internet offers a wide range of marketing opportunities that are unsurpassed by any other medium to date. One such tool being utilized by successful businesses is email marketing. Recently, email marketing began to gain attention and recognition due to its low cost and proven results.

Track it. Track it. Track it.

I know there has been a lot of talk about Google Analytics and how great of a tool it is. Personally, I love Google Analytics, I have used several other web analytics programs and none of them compare. No this isn’t a Google advertisement, but it is an article on the benefits of using web analytics software.

Analytics gives you the ability to track where a user comes from, what they look at on your site and inevitability whether or not they choose to convert into a sale or a lead. You can track users from referring websites, search engines, online campaigns and paid search results. But the real beauty is being able to track more than just your online efforts.

Imagine tracking your print ads, radio ads, commercials, yellow book ads, billboards and any other form of advertising. Using unique domain names for each type of advertisement, and specifying the campaign in your analytics program, you will setup a page at each domain that attaches a tracking code to the users browser and passes them to your website.

Now that you have that all setup you will be able to compare how well your different advertising efforts compare to each other. The key is giving you the data to be able to make effective marketing decisions.