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?
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.