In the world of internet, stats are plenty about how India is at the cusp of website boom. For long years we’ve been fed this information, X million SMEs in India, X million people online, so there is a great potential for websites. Despite these numbers the one thing that most web designers and developers experience is strong resistance from people to go online. Which brings us to this topic, in India, selling website is very difficult and most SMEs do not believe in taking their business online. They rely on age old modes of marketing to get new business and spread the word; some of them actually believe going online is damaging for their business. We’ve met jewelry makers who are afraid that a website will mean competitors stealing their ideas. This is the state of things in our country in context to selling websites.
This situation needs attention, it needs understanding but most of all needs Web Designers & Developers to get involved. At Hostgator we believe that web designers and developers are not just our customers but enablers for people who choose to go online. We’ve cooked up this article to help you enablers get people online, it’s where all the action is and is where they should be:
Best Practices to Sell Web Development Services
1. Share more information: Most customers don’t ask questions and that’s because they don’t know what questions to ask. You can change this by sharing more information. Inform them about the components of a website and the ways they all come together to create a complete website.
2. Meet deadlines: One of the most heard reasons behind not going online, is the perceived fraud a lot of people claim to have faced. Customers do not understand the nitty-gritty of website creation, they don’t know the efforts involved in creating the most simplest of functions. It’s up-to you to communicate this to the customers, set clear deadlines for projects and strive hard to meet them. Don’t oversell and under deliver, instead set a deadline and finish the project before. It’ll do wonders for your reputation.
3. Get invested: Most designers and developers limit their scope to just creating a website and supporting it. If you are more invested in the actual selling, it will boost your business significantly. Think of it as converting customers, carry case studies of successful online businesses, online v/s offline business expense comparison charts, presentations etc. Basically wow the customers with information that is indisputable.
4. Understand the reason to be online: In some ways, web designers/developers act as sales folk who deal with the end customers. It’s up-to them to convince the customers that they need to go online. One of the key elements in this is to understand the reasons yourself. Internet is a whole new world of opportunities, where information is freely available, which more and more people are adopting by the day. There are only a handful of businesses online today to serve these customers, the early movers are at a great advantage and this needs to be communicated with your customers.
5. Be Online: We wrote an entire article about this so we’re not going to repeat the whole story. Cutting to the chase – how can you convince customers to get online if you’re not there yourself? A very important part of selling any product is to believe in it yourself. We see tons of web developers/designers without their own website, if you’re serious about selling a website you need to have one of your own.
We’ll end the article at that note, we’ll admit that selling websites is difficult, but together we can convince everyone about the value of being online. We call on you to join us in our efforts to take India Online.
