Hey Everyone,
I recently launched my web design agency and decided to kick off with cold calling. I’ve reached out to about 100 businesses, particularly painters in Toronto with basic websites, offering a no upfront cost deal at $25 a month for hosting and maintenance for my first 20 clients. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much traction. Any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong or if my offer needs tweaking? I only do static sites so basically no e-commerce would that be limiting myself?
I have seen so many of these “web agency” “web builder” posts saying that they offer really cheap prices and thats a major problem.
In a marketplace where there are squarespace and other websites for really cheap services that you offer, why are you competing on “price”? Its the equivalent of a retailer conpeting on price against walmart… gonna lose 99% of the time.
Being cheap is not good for you. Cheap has negative inherent associations attached to it like: worse quality, expectations of results are really low, less trustworthy, scammy, impersonal, etc…
You need to stand out and the easiest way is to simply look at the average price what everyone is offering and slap a 0 on top of it, 15$ = 150$…
Also, if you go cheap, realise that you will require 10x more clients than if you go expensive. It would seem much smarter in the start to get 5 clients paying 150$ than 50 clients paying you 15$… afterwards when you want to scale you can start looking at other options.
Onto prospects. Best prospects are the one who have already bought… with that in mind, prospects who have bought already, many of them are dissatisfied with what they are receiving but arent aware of a better alternative and will switch if presented with one. So a good way to land clients is by finding companies/entrepreneurs who use shitty website hosters/builders and contact them… alternatively, you can attempt to contact those companies and pay for their “unsubscribed” list (customers who left/switched) and then start contacting those people (btw, the more recent the unsubscribed the prospect the higher the chance it is that you will convert them).
With offers - I would switch your main offer with a “secondary” offer. What I mean by this is instead of offering what you do already as the main offer, instead make the main offer things you would do for them on the backend/once the website and hosting is built for them… it may look like “get 4 additional landing pages built for testing and 5th as a placeholder” or something like that… on top of that, add guarantees as well - at this point Im not aware of any guarantees offered by website hosters so a simple money back guarantee would work splendidly well in theory… also an “obscure” but a very relevant factor to good offers is adding a “reason why” a prospect should buy from you - funnily, the reasons why dont always have to be logical.
The good thing thats going for you is that you are somewhat “niched” as to not doing any e-commerce. If I were you, I would niche down even further like only offering to build websites for pet companies who are ran by families… it just make you seem more of a specialist (builds trust) and justifies a high price.
Anyway, hope this gives you some direction since its never easy to provide help in a simple post.