Your Top 5

I'm sure we'd all like to get clients more often and more consistently. We've all read articles about theories of what works and what doesn't. What I would like to know is for your web design business, what have been consistently your Top 5 ways to aquire new clients and projects? Community database, SEO, newsletter, email campaigns, cold calling, chamber of commerce, and more?

 

I was one of the founders of a web design/development company and we sold it recently to a much bigger company. We were the #1 (as ranked a regional business newspaper) web development firm in DC and the #1 firm for assocations and non-profits in the country (as ranked by an association executives group).

Our success was simple but people always wanted to over-complicate it when they looked at us from the outside...

Our secret recipe: Intense direct sales through cold calling combined with a focused niche (for us it was non-profits and associations) and a monthly newsletter that went out like clockwork highlighting our successes and our wins and included quotes from existing and past clients. For our newsletter, the success stories were all written from the perspective of the benefits the client received from the project.

 

Right on. A lot of people don't realize or can't accept that "traditional" marketing like direct mail & space advertising can bring measurable results to a website/company. Marketing online is still just plain old "direct marketing"...with a new twist. You can see results almost instantly, where as in more traditional marketing medians results sometimes take weeks, or even months, to be fully realized.

Traditional advertising still accounts for roughly 90% of my total sales. Online marketing is nothing to turn your back on though, it's importance continues to increase for my business month after month. If all trends continue by years end it will account for almost 20% of my business's overall sales.

 

Thank you for your great replys! I once spent a week cold calling over 300+ fellow members of the chamber of commerce and only got 1 job. Also I have some previous experience and interest in NGO's, can you provide further details on your marketing strategy re: non-profits?

 

If you are involved in web development for the not for profit sector then you probably would have heard of my company, Active Matter and we sold to advanced solutions about 18 months ago.

You say you made 300 calls and got 1 sale - wow. That is fantastic. Our cold calling program was intense and our salespeople averaged about 50 calls per day and they would not make a sales a week -- more like one every 2 weeks BUT even that was only after a good 3-6 month ramp-up period to build up their sales funnel.

Use a program like ACT! to log every call and automate your tickler system ... every sale that closes probably averages 5 times where the client first said "no".

If you are targeting non-profits ... further refine the pitch ... exactly what are you offering non-profits? I will tell you that a hot button right now is usability and IA. Or, for newsletters and fund-raising it is all about conversion tracking and refining the entire program to raise the dollars per donation and donation per "friend".

Anyway, there are lots of ways to go. We didn't really know exactly where we were headed when we started the company but we listened to the clients/prospects and kept our eyes open and the opportunity was there ... content management for association websites that integrated with their backend legacy systems. We productized it and offered services on top to meet the client specific needs. Where everyone else offered a "custom solution", we offered the stability of a product approach. For non-profits/associations - less risk is everything.

Okay - I've rambled quite a bit ... let me know if thee is an area you want to discuss further.

 

<EDIT - added>

Oh - and you want to talk about a wasted opportunity ... Our websites had a footer on every page and our clients had huge, high PR websites...

Sites like: www.naco.org, www.isaca.org, etc. --- we had hundred of them and our PR on active matter was a 9! We weren't doing SEO and didn't know the value of it ... ooops!

</EDIT>

 

salesforce.com might be a good alternative to ACT for CRM... its working for us.

 

I would say it depends on your product. When I owned a service-oriented business, cold-calling, speaking, and anything that got me in front of potential clients worked. It's so personality driven, especially with Internet marketing.

Now I work primarily over email, but when I want to get a new client, it's always a phone call. Using e-newsletters definitely lay the groundwork, but person-to-person seals the deal.

Just my experience,
StacyO