How to Sell Web Design Services Effectively | EP 737

How to Sell Web Design Services Effectively

1. Sell through Client Education 00:45
2. Don’t Sell Features Sell Accomplishing Client Goals 07:43
3. Don’t Be Worried About the Money. Worry About Serving the Customer  10:12
4. Join Divi Business Expert: https://wpgears.com/divi-business-expert-course/ 12:10

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, my name is David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: In today’s episode 737 this might be the most important web design topic of all 737 episodes. Tim how to sell web design services effectively?

00:45 Tim Strifler: I’m going to take it one step further David, I’m going to say that this episode if you’re listening, is going to be the most important podcast episode that you’ve ever listened to, if you are someone who sells client websites.

01:15 David Blackmon: Absolutely. All right, so first thing that we want to tell you is that sales is, or are what i want to tell you, it sales can be a very scary thing for a lot of people. Sales is just something that i’ve normally excelled at my entire life and it’s not been a difficult thing for me, and it’s not because i’ve been through any courses or i did the zig ziglar stuff or or anything like that. I have always intuitively, i’ve had a servant’s heart so i’ve always wanted to help the person. On the opposite of me as opposed to getting something from them so my my motives all of my life have been to give rather than to get. Well that’s there’s no secret in that when we have that mindset of giving we end up getting a whole lot. So the first thing and most important thing about selling is, you know if you’re selling web design services sell through client education. Educate the customers don’t come in there telling them about how awesome you are and your company is showcasing. Whatever educate them i can tell you that one of the most effective things in closing sales when i sell websites for customers, because you got to remember the people that you’re talking to are not the experts of the digital. In the digital world they’re the experts in their small business and they’re coming to you because they need somebody to help them bring their business to life online. So it’s not about just the ability to build, that it’s about helping them understand how, you know how the online world works. And i’m gonna give an example. I gave it a few days ago in another episode so if you listen to this i apologize but i can tell you it was the one of the most effective things that i could do, because i would see customers eyes light up, and it wasn’t that it was two-pronged they uh they understood finally how how search engines worked on a small scale, but they also what i used to really love was that i could tell that that was the moment where they connected with me, and they realized oh wow this guy knows what he’s talking about and i want him to build my stuff for me.  And it was because i just was educating them. So most clients maybe not today but back then you know over a decade ago, you know a lot of small businesses didn’t even have a website. So they were coming online for the first time and you know i wanted to educate them about how search engines worked. You know because it was really really important. Most people you know i discovered very early in my business life online, that producing content was the most valuable thing that i could do for my business. It wasn’t about you know anything else it was producing content for end users because when that when i did that search engines saw me as an authority in my niche. So i started ranking higher than all of my competitors because i was serving my customer. So the ways that that search engines work and that the example that i used was just very simple and that’s really important to remember. You don’t need to dive off into the technical weeds when selling a customer because their eyes are going to gloss over they’re going to be like “oh my god when’s this guy in a star talk stopped talking holy cow can’t understand the damn thing he’s saying”. You want to keep things simple so the simplest thing that you can do to impress them is to give them some high level knowledge on a very simplistic way of to where they can understand it, and i love this example.  And it was the way that search engines worked search search engines have algorithms that they use to rank your website how do they do that they have spiders or bots that come to your website every day and they crawl your website and they read your content. When a search engine comes to your website all it sees is words that’s it lines of code with just words you know. And that’s all they see so they’re reading that stuff if they notice that your website hasn’t changed in a week or a month they’re gonna quit coming to your website. They’re just gonna they’re gonna think oh this guy doesn’t update their site we don’t need to crawl it anymore. And that was why it was so important to continuously prove you know produce content. So if you’re doing a blog post and it doesn’t mean you have to put content out every day, put it out once a week, once every two weeks that’s much better than your your customers are doing. I can your your competitors are doing i promise you but what happens is the search engines come and they continuously crawl your site. If you’re not producing new content they quit crawling your site and that’s where your competitors get an advantage over you, who are producing content. And i could see when i would explain that simple little search engine nugget which was so easy the customer understood it their brain clicked and what it did was they understood “oh this is important”. But i can promise you, now Tim cat’s out the bag all you web designers out there going to have a bunch of web designers doing it now but i can tell you when when i was doing it no other web designers were coming in educating these customers they were wanting to tell them how great they were and how they could build them a beautiful website you know. And you know, so it was very different they knew it was the click i could see and and and the look in their eye was like oh wow this guy knows what he’s talking about and he can help me succeed online so they wanted to hire me and it almost didn’t matter what i said beyond that. They were hiring me. So Tim’s going to talk a little bit about uh number two on our list. Go Tim.

07:43 Tim Strifler: Yeah absolutely, and that that ties in well with what you’re just talking about David, we’re the competitors other web designers are coming in and they’re not educating the client. What they’re trying to do, is they’re trying to sell features, right? They’re trying to sell the bells and the whistles that the really cool flashy design, and you know some clients might be attracted to that and they might think it’s cool. However what is way more effective and what’s going to help you stand out is not selling features and bells and whistles, but instead selling what’s actually going to help accomplish your clients goals. So for example you your client might tell you that they want a new website, right? They might tell you that they just you know they need a good online presence and help them look professional online, but really that’s not what they want that’s what they think they want. What they really want is they want more calls, they want more uh inbound leads, they want more emails on their email list, they might want more sales like at the end of the day that’s what they want. That’s what the website’s supposed to do. And so if you come in and you do what David says you sell through client education and you don’t sell features but instead you talk about what is actually going to help accomplish their goals. Listen to what their needs are, and and pry a little bit and say well actually i don’t think you actually want just a website what i think you want is getting more people calling you to come and fix their toilet, right? If they’re plumber they’ll be like well yeah you know and so here’s some things that i think will be helpful rather than just give you an online website like every other plumber out there. Instead we’re going to do these things here that’s going to help drive the customer to your contact form to your phone number or whatever. So um basically you’re you’re selling a solution rather than a website and that’s really what clients want even if they don’t realize that that’s the case.  And so that that’s going to help you stand out and close deals because they’re going to be talking to two three four other web designers that are selling them on, you know these flashy websites. For these other companies that paid them a lot of money and they’re really good they have all this experience and stuff, but if you’re actually going in you’re educating the client and you’re showing them what you’re going to do is actually going to help them get more calls, or get more booked clients, whatever. Their their actual goal is they’re going to go with you even if you’re twice as much as the other guy.

10:10 David Blackmon: Absolutely. Now last on our list but definitely not least it might be the most important thing that you can do when selling website services effectively. And this is going to sound crazy and it might even be a little bit scary, because let’s face it, we all we may have families we may have kids we’ve got to keep the lights on. We’ve got to put food on the table and we need to be viable our business needs to be viable we need to make money. And most people where they trip up is they struggle with the money aspect. First of all they’re scared to say how much they’re worth, and how much it’s going to cost to build a website instead of being confident about why you are the best person for this job. Okay now this might sound counterproductive but you need to not worry about the money. At all you need to be worried about serving the customer, because if you serve the customer it won’t matter what your rates are they’re going to want to work with you because they understand the value of what you’re offering. And that’s the trick, and the key to sales. It’s not about saying these catchy closing liners, it’s about helping customers understand the value of what you’re offering and differentiating yourself from the competition and be willing to just serve them, educate them, help them. Even if you know they’re going to say no, or even if there’s a risk they’re going to say no smile on your face, be happy because that energy. If you’re so worried about closing the deal, they’re gonna pick that up. Their walls are already 20 feet high, you know and this guy’s here to sell me something you know as opposed to if you transition that in this process and you’re serving them their walls are coming down you know. And it makes it easy to talk about money and stuff, so don’t be scared to walk away from the cell and not get it. And also don’t be afraid to tell them what you’re worth, because they’re not going to care if you’ve done. The top part that Tim and i have talked about it’s going to be easy and trust me i did some crazy experiments back in the day, Tim probably remembers where i was like we had so much work and we really didn’t want to do client services anymore, but i was willing to meet with people so i would meet and i would educate and then i just started up in the price just to do some tests and i mean i got to some insane pricing for basic websites, and the business is still hired me because we had so much work. I didn’t want any more work, so i would like give them this outlandish price and they would still hire us which was the craziest thing when they could get it for a tenth of what they were, you know. But they didn’t want to work with someone else. So it can be amazing what will happen to you and stuff and i think Tim’s going to say one more thing before we close, and maybe two more things i don’t know if you got the business you know stuff but yeah you can talk about that as well.

13:40 Tim Strifler:  Yeah i just wanted to share an example of this. Last point David made you know don’t be worried about the money, serve the customer first even if it doesn’t end up making you money. Right, and i uh so i have just a short story to share where i was on the other end of that as a as a customer. And this was um back in 2015, my wife and i we just moved from California to Texas, my wife was uh in grad school full time while also working full time and i was in kind of the beginning stages of my business. So i had like built up some clients in southern California, and then we moved to Texas and i had zero clients. And so money was tight, we had one car, and i was driving my wife to work. She’s um she’s a nurse practitioner and now back then she was a regular RN, and it was on thanksgiving day. And i was driving her to work so she wouldn’t have to you know go alone and um on the way we hit a deer. This is in central Texas and it was already dead but we ran over it coming over a hill and the bottom antlers just jacked up the bottom of our car to the point where there was literally parts of the car dragging on the ground and we’re like, dang like we finances are super tight, i wasn’t bringing that much money Uh nurses in Texas don’t make that much money compared to California, and so we’re like shoot like how are we gonna afford to like get this fixed is our only car. My wife’s job was really far, so uh we took it to we we found a a good um car service mechanic, full service place had good reviews on yelp. So we took it to them prepared for them to just upsell us and tell us all these things that are wrong with the car. And the guy comes out and he says no charge today all we did was we just took off the skid plate, um i know nothing about cars but cars have a skid plate that kind of protects the under parts of the car from like rocks and stuff. And so that was what got jacked up was that plastic skid plate that was dragging down. We didn’t know if that was necessary if there was further damage they could have charged us a lot of money and made it a whole big show, and basically do all the things that people fear mechanics are gonna do when you don’t when you aren’t well versed in uh how cars work. But instead they said no charge, you know. We just took it off you don’t really need it. It’s not a necessity you’re fine. And that was like a breath of fresh air,  like really like you know we thought we’re gonna have to pay hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars that we just didn’t have at the moment, and instead he told us that there was no charge. We and we don’t live in Texas anymore but we went back to them again and again for years while we still live there, because they earned our business for life, because they weren’t worried about that money in that moment. They were just focused on serving us as the customer and it didn’t take them very long to do, and so they didn’t charge us for it. And so that was like a huge deal for us at the time and so yeah we we we became um really good clients of theirs, bought multiple other cars and and brought them all there and wrote them multiple good reviews. And so i think that is just a stunning example of good customer service and putting service over money when you’re in a client services business. And so and that’s how you earn customers for life. So yeah i wanted to share that story because that just perfectly illustrates what David was talking about, That’s a great thing about the money, yeah definitely and so that brings us to um i wanted to mention our Divi business expert course. So what you got today was a small little preview of the types of stuff that we teach in the the our business course over on wpgears.com because we don’t just teach you or we don’t really in this specific specific course teach you how to build websites, but we teach you how to build a business around building websites. And so it’s all about closing uh and sales and and the marketing and contracts and all the business stuff. A lot of fun you don’t really see exactly exactly. So anything else David?  You want to add to that?

18:14 David Blackmon: I don’t think so. I think this might go down in history as our longest episode ever I think. However, but most valuable it is very valuable and i did think something great i’ll tell you offline Tim. All right, tomorrow we’ve got another great topic in episode 738 stop selling web design features to your clients and do this instead, man i sound like we got the same topic going back and forth every every single one, uh come join us tomorrow until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

18:43 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.