Paste the exact communication you sent out.

Super saturated market, need to differentiate yourself

Record videos going over websites and how you’d fix. Cold calling won’t really work, if someone called you offering a website would you pay them?

Perhaps up your pricing, you’d be better off doing for free or saying they just have to cover costs than $25/month it implies cheap=low quality labour.

Look into potential government grants for business if they hire local web development and call into physical locations

People don’t buy plants at Home Depot, they buy beautiful front yards. From your post it sounds like you’re calling people and saying “ I will give you a hammer “ but no one cares about that. No one cares about having a website. All someone cares about is having customers. You should frame your offer in this way:

• Noticed you are difficult to find online or you don’t stand out online
• Have you gotten loads of business from being online ? Would you like to have more customers pick you over the 76 other painters in the city when they’re looking? If yes I may have a good solution for you that’s inexpensive. Would you like to hear more?

Basically you’re digging into the problem to see if they have the pain or the need of wanting more customers, passively. If this isn’t true nothing else you say will matter. Good sales is way more about helping someone see the problem clearly than your offer. If someone truly grasps the problem, you won’t have to hard sell on the solution. They’ll naturally understand. Plants = pretty front yard. Or website = more leads from online.

Many people are able to put up their own websites using site builders and templates these days. I would focus on finding a way to differentiate yourself. Why should you build them a site instead of them throwing one up in an afternoon?

Additionally, some of these people probably already have a website up. You need to articulate the benefits of having you redo it for them.

That’s a bit low. $400 a month be fare.

the issue is the channel (cold call) you are choosing to use, its not typical for web design to use that as an approach, and most people will assume it spam call. you can try messaging on their website (if they have one) snail mail to their studio, linkedin messaging, messaging via deviant art and related placed.

additionally, try and find events where painters would meet, nothing bets speaking to a customer face to face.

Hey, electrical company owner here. If im being honest, if you call any tradesperson during the day trying to sell them on getting more leads from their website or ranking higher, we are going to hang up on you. We get so many calls that it’s annoying. Emails go to spam and deleted because we don’t know you. LinkedIn, same thing.

You would have 3 different groups , 1-old timers who just don’t care about the internet and have work contracts to keep busy. 2 - Guys who have created a website themselves to have an internet presence. But we don’t expect work from this. 3 - New guys looking for any way to break into the market.

You need to get the #3s.

Selling to #1 and #2 over the phone cold calling is a losing battle.

However, to give some insight. We are battling increasing pricing and trying to reduce OH.

Here’s an idea to help get us to talk and trust you. Go down in person, talk to the guys, and bring coffee and donuts. Offer to check out the current website for free. Give ideas. Then, you could go into options for upgrading.

Until you can get a name for yourself. Why would we trust you to have our website and brand in your hand? If you shut down, do we lose all our stuff? We like to be in control. Which is why we went on our own.

I’m not trying to shut you down. Just giving you some insights into our side. Try what other guys aren’t doing.

It’s not a horrible offer.

We were working on something similar in a different market.

I think the skepticism is that a nicer website may not offer any ROI. I suspect this is the core underlying objection (and they may be right!!).

The offer structure we found worked was a do the work structure. I.e we would say “hey we think we can get you more customers. You don’t have to do anything, we’ll run some paid ads and if they convert then we can talk about a pay per lead model”.

Now we stopped this, because we suck at running ads. But it got us customers in a very skeptical culture.

But anyway…

If you are targeting businesses in the same niche, why don’t you just create a simple template? Certainly these business owners don’t care about having a super bespoke look and feel.

Then create a website for each lead at temp domain.

Send it to them and make the deal like “I bet if you run this website itl get you more customers (include some stats to back it up). If you agree I’ll set it up for you and then if you get more business you pay me, or if not I’ll switch you back to your old side”.

Now I think this offer structure will work. But I suspect you may find that they are right and a nice website won’t do much for their business by itself.

@FrenchMajesty has your back.

As a consultant - here’s what we end up coaching most businesses on if their founder is not experienced in sales methodology (CRO level) prior to being a founder:

• There is a difference in real value vs perceived value. Unfortunately, perceived value is what makes the sale, real value is what determines your retention.

• Try to understand “why” your target buyer would choose to give you money instead of keep it themselves. Great way to do this is use tools like spyfu(free) which lets you understand their website traffic of organic vs paid. You can then make value statements.

•example: (going back to majesty’s point) “Saw your website is having lots of paid traffic, but not a lot of organic traffic… Have you noticed that organic traffic is hard? Probably because you have 76 competitors that look similar. Small businesses can’t afford a million dollar IT team - that’s where we’ve helped. As long as it makes sense - would 15 minutes on Thursday at 12 EST work?

There are lots of things to unpack with the post and comments.

TL;DR: find out a customers situation, their possible pain, and the impact you assume you’ll deliver - and weave this into your “pitch”.

PS NEVER connect and pitch, and focus on them not you!

Wouldn’t hurt to try a pull marketing strategy like a profile on fiverr where people come actively looking for the service you are providing. Then it’s a cost and service game. It helps because the potential buyer is usually further down the adoption decision pipeline.