Stop Doing Site Reviews
Selling – or even offering – site audits and/or consultations has a very low conversion rate. In other words, that offer doesn’t generate leads very effectively anymore for three major reasons.
It’s “me” focused
Offering an audit or consultation is all about telling the client what you are going to do and what they can expect from meeting with you.
The copy on landing pages offering site audits will often literally say that nothing about the client matters. For example, it's common to see something like this:
It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out and don’t even have a website yet or you’re a seasoned pro with websites, funnels, marketing tools, and more. We've got it all covered.
You will get far more leads (calls) by focusing on the client. Even when you’re talking about yourself, you’re still focusing on the client by sharing information about why you have the authority and expertise to get them the results they need.
It doesn’t tap into the client’s desired result
Nobody is restlessly awake at night fretting over not being able to get a site audit. People will not book calls with you unless they want what you’re offering. Something needs to be said about what measurable business outcome the client will get from the engagement.
Most of the time, the result of a site audit is a plan to do more – potentially a LOT more – work with you. Therefore, the client sees this as being asked to pay you money to tell them how much more money they need to pay you. Even then, it’s unclear if they will actually get the results they need in their business.
Requires buying intent without a clear outcome
Your business will make far more money if you divide onboarding clients into two steps.
- Get leads
- Closing sales
Delegate the task of pullings leads to your website and you handle onboarding the client once they are on the call. You’ll get far more clients this way because generating leads is much easier than closing sales.
This often requires a change in mindset because, as web designers, we generally don’t like closing sales. So, we push sales off to someone or something else. We’ll try to get referrals where other people essentially close the sale with the authority of their relationships. We’ll take overflow work from other agencies so the other agency can worry about sales. Or, we’ll push the sale off on our websites.
The #1 Shift For More Revenue
From my own experience during the 20+ years of running our agency and from working with hundreds of other web designers, not separating lead generation from onboarding clients is the #1 reason most web designers aren’t as profitable as they’d like to be.
One way to overcome this problem is with the Two-Step Close as described in our Lead Generation course in Blue Theory.
There is one very important mindset shift required for step one (the discovery phase) of the Two-Step Close.
You’re not discovering what the client needs so that you can develop a custom solution for them. You are discovering if the client is a good fit for the solution you already have.
How To Sell Websites To Local Businesses
So, if we're separating the process of getting leads from the process of closing sales, here's how we sell websites to local businesses.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
