 So, I'm Bill, I'm from an agency called Imagine, which is headquartered up in Boston. We actually have an office down in South Florida as well, which is where my wife and I flew up from to be here with you. Much nicer weather here than we're getting down there right now, extremely hot and humid. I'm here to talk about selling bigger projects to bigger companies. One thing I think is important before I get started is, so Imagine is a decent size agency. We have close to 50 employees now, been in business for, I'd say, about 15 years. And this talk is not intended to necessarily be designed around building an agency, building a big company, I mean, maybe some people want to do that. Maybe some people just want to earn a better living, sell bigger projects. So it's really just about making more money, either making more money doing what you're already doing or doing bigger stuff. I know that a lot of people get into this business, it's not really for the money. Just a passion for either design or development or technology. And I can honestly say now after doing this for many years that it really shouldn't be all about the money. I wouldn't have ever thought I would say that if someone had asked me in my early 20s because back then it was all about building something big and making a bunch of money and having cool things and now as I look back, it's really been about enjoying what I've done and a passion for this business. For me personally, I'm not a web developer, it's another disclaimer. So all the stuff I'm going to talk about here today, if anybody has any questions about exactly how we do the stuff that we do, please, I probably won't be able to answer any of that stuff. I'm a sales and marketing guy. But so sales and marketing has always been my passion. It's what I was doing before I started to imagine. And without that passion, there definitely wouldn't have been much success. So it really shouldn't be all about the money. But that said, I don't know many people that don't want to make more money. If there's anyone in the room that doesn't care about making any more money, raise your hand. So we all care about making more money. And again, it doesn't necessarily mean making millions of dollars and building big companies, but just earning more for yourself and being more profitable and ultimately the way that we have found and imagined the way that we've done that is moving up the food chain. To a certain extent, what I'm going to talk about here today is simply getting more for what you're already doing. But with us, it's definitely been a graduation. We've had to move up. We've had to take chances and sell bigger projects and sell things that we weren't necessarily comfortable with or confident that we were going to be able to execute on. So it's really a mix of simply charging more for what you're already good at and what you're already doing because most people that I meet are not charging enough. But also, like I said, moving up the food chain and figuring out how to sell bigger stuff. So I think probably important for me to start with a little bit of an intro on who I am, who my company is. I don't want this to come across at all as a sales pitch about me, but just in order to establish a little bit of credibility here and what I'm going to be talking about. I'd want to talk a little bit about the history. So we started, like I said, if you really want to dig in, my partner and I, so companies owned by two of us, we started dabbling in web stuff as early as 1995. So we're talking at a time where nobody had websites. So it was very easy to sell web development services because everybody was hearing of this stuff, everybody knew they needed something, nobody had any clue how to get it done. And whatever you walked in and said to people, they were going to believe and buy it from you because everybody needed it. So we were basically kind of the typical two guys in a garage. We did not have any money to put into this business. And when I say we didn't have any money, I mean we had no money. My partner and I both grew up, I'd say, relatively poor single moms. So not even a couple thousand dollars to put into this business at the beginning. We were just a couple guys with computers, me with a little bit of sales and marketing. Maybe I pretended to be a designer for the first little while that we were starting out. My partner a lot more technical than I am, he always handled the programming side of things. But just pretty much kind of the, I'd say a very typical model in this business, just a couple of guys diving in and figuring things out, which 18, 15, 20 years later, basically what we're still doing every day, just figuring it out. In the early days, pretty much taking on anything that we could get. So from very small business, little brochure websites, doing a little bit of e-commerce, a mix, pretty much again. Anything we could get our hands on, just to figure stuff out, make a paycheck, whatever we sold, we would pretty much split the check and that's how we were making a living. We had zero focus. So neither my partner or I came from any real industry background. So it's not as though we came with any connections. It's not as though we had, came with any knowledge of any particular industry. There was no focus. Anything we could sell, we would do in terms of web development. We were so old that there was no WordPress. There was no Juma. There was no Drupal. There was nothing. So we, I say we, he built our own proprietary CMS because there really was nothing else. So back then, we first started on Cold Fusion, eventually transitioned over to ASP, ASP.net, did that for many years. We never really, we didn't want to be a software CMS company. It's never really what we wanted to be, but because there wasn't anything else good available to us, we had our own CMS. So it was great once the open source platforms really kind of came into their own over the past several years. We dabbled a little in Juma, a little bit in Drupal, but ultimately I'd say three, four years ago decided WordPress was what we're going to focus on. So we've been solely focused on WordPress as our platform for the past three to four years or so. So again, going way back, Average Project was anywhere from $1,000 to a few thousand dollars. Again, mostly small businesses. Manufacturing was just an easy target for us because we just happened to have been located near a bunch of industrial parks that had a lot of manufacturers, small manufacturers, maybe companies that did anywhere between three and $10 million a year in revenues. So we focused a lot on them only because there were a lot of them around us. They all needed websites and they could all afford $1,000 to $3,000 for us to throw together a decent website for them. What's very important and I think is going to show throughout this entire presentation is even back then we always were focused if not obsessed on sales and marketing. So I guess we are technology people, more so some people in our company than others. I again don't consider myself really a technical person, but my partner and I both and just kind of permeating throughout the company, we've always been obsessed with sales and marketing because it's my belief that without that mentality you will not grow a business very much. You're focused just day to day on WordPress or on design or on development. The saying if you build it they'll come. I don't think that's true at all. I wish that were true. I wish that we could have sat back, built a business that people would have been flocking to us looking to spend money. Just never worked that way. We have always had to find and close business the hardest way possible which I'm going to talk about here today. And a lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk about, a lot of people might not have the stomach for it. The sales and marketing that I'm going to talk about is hard. It's time consuming. It requires this as I say an obsession over sales and marketing and relentless pursuit of new business and I'll get into the details of all that. So the next decade I would say after the first few years we went about ten years straight being one particular era of our business and that's where we gradually defined what our strengths were. Again that never stops. We're still defining our strengths every day and they change. Figured out what type of projects made money. So like I said in the early days we would take on anything and everything. We learned what was really going to be our bread and butter and I would say for the most part it was what would be called a brochure site. So a brochure site might not be a five or six page website for the pizza shop down the street even for a manufacturer or a small high tech startup. The sites are not tremendously complex. They might have 40, 50, 60 pages on them. They might have some functionality in WordPress to manage press releases and put registration forms in front of things like white papers and maybe they're integrated with a CRM system like salesforce.com or Marketo but these are not any most of what I'm going to talk about here today through our entire evolution and all the selling I'm going to talk about is not with regard to selling complex web applications. That's not who we are. We're a website design and digital marketing company. So none of the things I'm talking about are complex development. We might have the technical acumen in house but that's that the highly, highly technical projects have never been what we consider to be money makers. And there's a lot of money out there to be spent on the real technical stuff but not necessarily to be made in terms of profitability. So we've always focused on the relatively simple type of stuff and that took a while to figure out. We built a few, we made a lot of mistakes. We built a few highly technical applications. We built a few e-commerce sites that, again I'm going back a little bit that maybe should have probably cost $50,000 and we charged eight literally and a year later we're still building this website. We made a lot of those mistakes. So it was a very important thing for us to identify what type of projects were really money makers. We started over this next decade to define our industries and the type of companies that we thought were going to be good to go after and again that's always evolving still today. But as I'm going to point out I think critical and I think a lot of developers that I meet are not doing this. Again it's very easy to take on anything and everything and try to be everything to everyone. I think that's a mistake. I think that everybody, whether you're one guy, five guys, or 50, you know you need to define who your core markets are, what you're going to be good at for a variety of reasons and I'll get into those. So we started to define that high tech became a specialty of ours just because we're from the Boston region and it's such a tech mecca. Again we don't really come from technical backgrounds but because of where we happen to be born there were so many high tech startups, biotechs in the region, so much venture capital up there that we decided to go after those companies and did very well for them for about 10 years and like I said that was a little intimidating for us because these are companies with millions of dollars in funding behind them and big shot CEOs that had come from big companies. We decided to go after them anyway. It was very intimidating but one of the things I'm going to talk about here today more is going after things that you're not necessarily comfortable with and I think that's really one of the only ways to grow. If you stay within your comfort zone you'll stay pretty much selling and charging the same that you are for projects. So tech, biotech, those became big industries of ours. We slowly added a handful of employees, very difficult. I'm sure anybody here who has an employee or two or more or is thinking about hiring an employee can identify. It's very difficult. Payroll is very stressful. Once you get into things like medical insurance and 401ks it's very challenging to build a company and so taking on that handful of employees was definitely risky and also a big sacrifice because it essentially meant my partner and I not getting paid for months. Kind of taking what we needed to pay our rent and pay our personal bills but really not making any income over and above that in the interest of being able to hire our first part time designer just out of college. More interestingly as I talk a lot here today about this obsession with sales and marketing our first employee was not a designer, was not a developer, our first employee was a part time inside sales person. So it was a young kid who would hammer the phones for us and find us leads. So we've always had an obsession on sales and marketing for day one. Our average project over that 10 year period grew from about 5,000 on average in our first few years to about 25,000 on average over that next decade. So that's going up to about 2010. We had a period there where we just sold a ton of projects at about $25,000 and just so you know who the companies are at that price point. These were again, these were not huge companies but they were no longer the small, small manufacturers that we were finding in the industrial park in the early years. They were a lot of like I said VC backed high tech startups, maybe companies including manufacturers, industrial companies, professional services companies that maybe did up to 20, 25 million a year in revenues which in the scheme of things is not really a big company. And that was our target for a while and they, I'm not going to say it was easy selling a lot of them website services for $25,000 but we probably did over that 10 year period. We probably did 6,700 websites to completion at that price point for again companies that are not enormous companies. Bigger at first than we were comfortable talking to intimidating for us at first going in and talking to big shot CEOs who had Harvard MBAs and Wharton guys because that's not, I mean one other note neither my partner I graduated from college. So most of these people that we've been selling to our entire career have been much smarter than we are. So it's always been intimidating. So as much as I talk about boldly walking into bigger companies and selling them bigger things for more money, I can't lie every single time that has been intimidating to me. To this day this many years into this business it's intimidating to me because I'm usually selling to people who again are a lot smarter, a lot more formally educated and in a lot of ways a lot more successful than I am. But it required that I use the word confidence, I don't know if it was real confidence I would say kind of phony confidence that I've had to put on that has generated a lot of these deals. Once again always throughout this history maintaining an obsession a laser focus on sales and marketing yes it's interesting and I'm going to talk a lot about that and I would say yes we have augmented our lead generation with new tactics and things like social media didn't exist 10, 15 years ago and this inbound and content marketing. So we've augmented but a lot of it is a lot of what we did way back which I'm going to talk about is still exist today. Yes, us B2B we have maybe should have pointed out we have always been focused on B2B. Now I think maybe the reason I don't highlight that is because I don't know that that matters and I don't know that that should necessarily be advice for anybody because there's a lot of money to be made in B2C. We just never really thought we knew it well enough. We do B2C we do pharmaceutical companies in the healthcare we're working on some hospitals that would be the extent of our B2C experience. So yes we've always had a focus on B2B a lot of technology companies manufacturers but I don't that's not necessarily a recommendation from me. So recent years just now looking over these and then I'm going to wrap up with our history and I'm going to bore you too much with the story. But over the past few years now we've continued and we'll always continue to define and refine our markets as I just mentioned hospitals that's a fairly new thing for us it's a new market we're working on a couple of them now but that's a fairly new market for us. Obviously continue to add and refine your core offerings at all times. We've built and leveraged a highly specialized portfolio we can proudly say again because we're so old and have been doing this for so long we have an enormous portfolio but it's also very specialized so it's not only big but we were able to by focusing on one thing and I can't emphasize this enough and not necessarily one thing maybe it's three things. You start to build up a portfolio of work and references that are highly relevant to those people that you're going in and selling to and that has been our strongest selling point. When we went into a small high-tech startup in Boston and we could show them and I mean literally showed them although we've always had a website we would walk in with printed color glossy printout portfolios. I came from print and direct mail before I started to imagine so I've always loved the power and impact of a hard printed colorful piece and I still do today. So we've always traveled around with print printed color portfolios of our work and we walk into a high-tech startup and we can show we couldn't necessarily do all of this in one printed piece but when we can show five, six hundred websites we've done like yours but even if that number was twenty or thirty or eight to ten you've got a big advantage over the other guys you're competing with. So specialization was huge and so we've leveraged that. It's difficult when we go into a new market. We don't have any hospitals under our belt yet we see that as a highly lucrative market for us so that's a little challenging anytime you're going to a new one but the more you can specialize and build that portfolio and leverage it later in sales the more it's going to help you. As I mentioned already we made WordPress our primary platform over the past few years. There's been challenges in that because we are as I keep saying moving up the food chain bigger companies are a little reluctant to WordPress in many cases. Not across the board but I would say our experience has shown Drupal to be a little bit more favored and I think if I were... We don't have all the answers as to why that is and we don't have all the answers as to how to overcome that. We're constantly working on that but IT departments largely drive too many decisions in a lot of these big companies. So we see websites as typically owned by marketing and in reality behind the scenes marketing doesn't own it as much as they'd like to or they should. IT is easily able to convince the executives at a company that they know what's best for the platform for their website and IT departments tend to favor Drupal so we're constantly fighting that fight and doing okay with it but we still lose a lot of deals to Drupal. I'd say Jumla has not been that impactful to our sales but we lose a lot of sales to Drupal. We go back and forth every year should we need to be a Drupal shop too with that double our business and it might but we also know that as I've already said we can't be everything to everyone so specialization not only in terms of the markets you focus on but in terms of your strengths and your offerings specialization focusing on your strengths being great at a couple of things instead of just good at everything we look at a lot of our competitors and they list every CMS you could list on their website and some of you might do that. We laugh when we see that because we know there's no way they can be good at all this stuff because we're having a hard time being good at one so Howard and we're almost 50 people and we're barely good at one in many ways and we'll see a firm who might be much smaller than us and they've got 12 different CMSs listed on their website so we know they're probably lying which to a certain extent you have to in sales but so our average project now and I don't want to talk too much about the high numbers but I think it's at least important to mention our average project today is somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 we do some projects I would say several projects that are much more than that a year some done projects close to half a million dollars nothing bigger than that many a year in the $150,000, $200,000, $250,000 range but again I don't want to focus too much on that because I don't think that's the real focus of this presentation as opposed to just a gradual moving up the food chain so that's just kind of an overview and history of where we've come and how we've gotten there as I've said a couple times here I think it's really important and a lot of this is marketing 101 that some of you might be saying well duh I know that but as obvious as some of this stuff is it's amazing to me how rarely you see it actually on display and so I'm going to talk a lot of stuff that is kind of basic marketing principles 101 but it's important to mention and talk about it in a little more detail and it is important to identify and decide who you are and as I said in that brief history of us that was probably the most important thing that we did we decided on some markets that were going to make us money we decided on the type of projects that we were good at and not good at and we went after those and did it relentlessly and maybe would stray here and there but I would say the focus once we decided what that was that we were pretty good at it and we stayed pretty focused even though we always experimented a little bit we continue to experiment I can't say enough how important that focus is also decide who you are what are you again whether it's you individually as a web developer or if you've got a firm what is your brand what is the identity that you want prospective clients of yours or existing clients of yours to perceive you as and you know that's not easy and that's a gradual process you kind of gradually figure out who you are in business as I mentioned determine what you're good at because and that doesn't mean to not experiment and try things that you don't know yet because you always have to do that in this business it's basically how we all exist we're always figuring out how to do the next thing but don't take on too much stuff that you know is going to be a loser just for the money as I said we've done that even as we matured we did it because we've been through a couple I keep talking about how many years we've been in business but through that we've been through a couple of really difficult financial times 9-11 happened shortly after we went into business and everything tanked for a good couple of years 2008-2009 happened and everything tanked and I don't know that we've really we as a country have fully rebounded from that yet so there's been times where that occasional project came up for us as an opportunity that we knew was going to be a loser for us and we took it on anyway and every single time we regretted it because we did rebound later we did get more of the kind of business that we wanted and then we still had this horrible thing that we took on kind of out of desperation sitting over there not done yet taking money that we should have never taken on in the first place so it's easy to say don't be lured by the money but really the more you can resist taking on the stuff that you know is going to be a loser the better in the long run again determine what makes you the most money I can't say that I have an exact precise handle I'd like to think my production manager at my company has a better handle than I do on it but I can't say that I know exactly how much we make on every project but you do learn which types of things are good which things are going to be more profitable which things require the kind of effort that you just don't think is the best use of your time and focus on those things and again choose your target industries choose your target companies and company size I'm going to talk about how to target them but it's very important to choose them that's the part that I don't think I can answer for you here today as I mentioned we've been focused on B2B and healthcare those have been our core markets throughout our history that does not at all mean that that's who you should focus on so I'm not really going to try to talk much about who you should focus on like I said in our early days manufacturers were always a great target because yeah up in Boston we had a lot of high tech companies around us but there's barely a town in America that does not have dozens of 5, 10, 15 million dollar industrial manufacturing companies everywhere in all of these industrial buildings and warehouses and industrial parks and obviously it makes it makes sense for a number of reasons to start regionally we've expanded our business now we're a national firm and I do think that you should consider going outside of your region especially I think that was a big step for us as well we had always focused on the Boston region because it was easy to get in the car and drive to these meetings and now I look and think about even if it wasn't enormous it wasn't necessarily an enormous project but let's say it was we're going to be something that was 10, 12,000 dollars but it might have required me a 300 dollar round trip flight to get there to try to pitch it but I thought it was going to be a real strong opportunity worth the money never did it in the early days we pretty much stuck to who we could drive to within 30, 40 minutes and as I look back today I would have expanded regionally a little bit sooner in my career than I did because I mean it just opens up the opportunities endlessly there's challenges in that and I can say being here in the south you guys have been one of our specific challenges because southerners like to work with southerners and being the Boston guys trying to sell into a lot of the southern states we hit a lot of resistance so regional expansion has its nuances and the south was one of those nuances for us that we were just never really successful here but you'll find regions where people don't care there's companies and people where they don't care where you're located if you've got a strong differentiator for me and I'm convinced you're the best person to do this project for me I don't care where you are this is a remote but now we visit our clients but you don't even have to necessarily this is obviously a highly virtual business it's a technical field there are a lot of projects that can be done without ever traveling to anybody we always find it worthwhile to get in front of our perspective clients and then once we're actually starting a project to be in front of them and they'll usually pay for that they're not going to pay for your sales pitch but most companies again not just big companies once they've selected you to do a project for them and you just put in the contract that you'd like for them to pick up your travel and accommodations if they're out of state for you 90% of the time they're going to see that as a non-issue to pay for that extra four or five hundred dollars for a flight in a hotel room for a night for you so regional expansion was something I definitely wish that we had done a little bit sooner I can't say this enough obsessed over sales and marketing but knowing again a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about here today and gun it once I get into the specific tactics as I said I don't think is necessarily for everybody but it's difficult the the B2B marketing so regardless of what market you're going at you're going after for us all this is B2B marketing marketing a professional service to other businesses it's difficult it's very time consuming it requires relentless perseverance and patience and a little bit of luck and we wish that luck would strike a lot more often than it does my wife is sitting here in the front row with the camera on me she works at Imagine and Business Development and and we have I think we have a team of between inside lead generation people and outside sales people we have a team of eight or so and she's one of the people on the inside that hammers the phone and email and LinkedIn and making connections with people and doing research and finding all these companies that we've identified that fit our target market and contacts all these companies every day we wish that luck she wishes believe me every day that luck would strike a lot more often than it does on that day that I'm calling emailing a hundred companies that one every single day I'm going to be lucky enough to get them at that moment that they have a need for a project and they're happy to talk to me it doesn't happen that way so a little bit of luck happens and she loves when that happens and they love when that happens but it really is about just the relentless perseverance and obsession over contacting these companies which again we'll talk about in detail so to move on to the tactical stuff and as this gentleman asked a little while ago about our lead generation tactics they've evolved but we have stuck with and successfully very traditional methods and you any day you go on Twitter or LinkedIn people who are B2B thought leaders about marketing and lead generation barely a day goes by where you won't see at least 10 posts that say outbound marketing is dead cold calling is dead inbound marketing inbound marketing I've always believed and we believe this that the people who say outbound marketing is dead and cold calling is dead are just the people that don't want to do it and inbound marketing has given people something to grab on to to say oh no I don't have to pick up that phone because now we have inbound marketing you can do things like content marketing and social media and thought leadership and people are just going to come to me with all their money to spend I don't meet many people who that's working that way for obviously inbound marketing is a real thing we do it we love it when it works and I'm going to talk about it but one of the reasons my family was in the retail business for several years coming up from Boston Seafood is big up there so my brother and my sister had seafood business couple of stores and one of the things I always hated about retail was it's such a passive business you're standing there basically waiting for people to hopefully walk in your door and maybe you can do some advertising but you're basically standing and hoping that people come in your door I never wanted to be in that position when I decided on the business why I've always liked the services business the services business you can constantly be reaching out to the people that you want to do business with and that's how we've always done it it's how we continue to do it today we've been doing marketing which is great when it works but what we do and always have done from the time again from the time it was just Brett my partner and me and our first employee being a part time kid right out of college I think he was actually still in college to him are the phones for us it has always been the hard hard work that nobody really wants to do and I mean nobody wants to hit the phones every day the bad news from my perspective and by the way if any of you have found other ways to generate a lot of business great for you and the advice that I'm giving with regard to the phones and this stuff that everyone hates to do forget it but we have not for us it has always been the hardest ways to generate business are also the most successful ways so pick your targets ok so like I said we focused on manufacturers just because there happened to have been a lot of them around us they seemed to generally have the kind of money that we were looking for which was maybe a few thousand dollars in the early days and so we focused on them and then we found them all so what does that mean for me it was literally on a Sunday afternoon I remember I was still living with my mom I was in my early 20s and I had her take me for a ride around an industrial park and I was literally leaning out the window writing down all of these companies industrial park I couldn't afford a mailing list and even today we barely buy any mailing list we do most of our research ourselves on companies and contacts using LinkedIn and picking up the phone and asking who the appropriate contacts are but back then I was driving around with my mom writing down a list of a bunch of companies none of this was from a textbook I just really didn't know how else to go about this back then so I wrote down a bunch of companies this was a Sunday afternoon the next morning I picked up the phone called every single company that I had written down the day before and asked who would make decisions there with regard to your marketing or a website again none of them had websites this is going way back and oftentimes it might be a receptionist that answered the phone the decision maker would in many cases be the owner of the company again fairly small companies maybe occasionally there was a marketing manager that they would lead me to maybe occasionally I would get hung up on but I would build that list and yet today we use a CRM system back then I might not have even been using Excel I might have been writing them down on a Word document I might have been jotting them down on a notebook I don't really remember but at the very least create your list build your list of companies build your list of contacts use them put them in a spreadsheet use outlook even to keep your whatever it is again CRM systems are nice but keeping a relatively small list of a few hundred companies is not that difficult whatever format you decide to use but find the appropriate contacts one of the things that that I did read in my early days because I was a big proponent of direct mail was that any marketing that you do to anybody regardless of the creative regardless of the message regardless of the offer the most important component to any marketing is the accuracy of that list okay so I can't emphasize enough how important that is because we obsess over it daily so again Crystal here my wife the rest of my marketing sales marketing team every day just spend relentless hours just finding those people so contacting them is a whole separate part of it but finding out who they are and knowing accurately who it is you should be talking to and in certain cases that's going to be multiple people in a given company so the bigger you get to be one person in many cases we're contacting the CEO slash owner of a company a marketing manager of the bigger companies now have all these weird titles so we can't just decide okay we need to go after that position because there are so many made up titles in this world of you know e-business digital evangelist you know every buzzword you can think of has come into people's titles so we just kind of have to figure that out one by one build the list contact as many people as you can within a given company at a certain point one of them is going to respond to you and say stop calling her she has nothing to do with this I'm your person talk to me and by the way I'm not interested and then you just kind of back off for a while but until then until you're told now contact as many people as you can do everything you can to try to ease that door opening get inside of it and don't worry about being annoying hammer them and do anything you can to get in so the meticulous research is critical with regard to who you're contacting create high value offers thank you things like so we did this in our very early days I would say we're a little remiss and not doing as much of this these days but in our early days what was very successful for us is we created a couple of educational workshops slash seminars SEO was a huge topic and it still is just as intriguing to people and we're going back to right around 2000 SEO was as intriguing then if not more as it is to people today nobody has any idea how it works they think it's some magic that goes on behind the scenes websites and Google's algorithms and all that it's always a topic that people want to hear about so we created this one hour free educational workshop on SEO and this topic could be anything anything that you can demonstrate expertise on that you think an audience might be interested in learning so maybe it's a demo of WordPress or WordPress being applied in a certain way but we use this free educational seminar workshop as an offer that we would call companies with and say we want to come in and do this for you it's a way to introduce ourselves there will be no selling whatsoever that goes on in this workshop and there's not we would have one slide at the end of it that said who we were and said and we would walk away saying and by the way if you are interested in doing business with us and learning about our services please let us know this is completely educational we went around with that SEO workshop and must have done it for 150 companies in a year it required a lot of running around and traveling and driving around and meeting a lot of people that were never going to spend any money but it generated a lot of business so high value educational offers the easiest use of that people create webinars white papers blog posts obviously so there's a lot of ways to demonstrate thought leadership and educate people the workshop was great because it gave you that chance to build rapport to be face to face and get to know people so offers free analyses we also do even today we still do a lot of free analyses and I don't mean automated reports that like we all get emailed to us sometimes telling us we're ranked in search engines we do a very comprehensive free analysis of somebody's website so an actual person in our company will write with screenshots critique a website we hand over a very comprehensive color document that's about 30 pages a lot of it is boilerplate we've really streamlined the process for doing this but it's a very impressive deliverable when we're handing a company a 30 page color document with screenshots of their website and things drawn all over it and some very intelligent commentary as well as some automated reports on some of the technical things that are wrong with their website from an SEO standpoint those types of offers go a long way and they've always been very important to our lead generation so try to think of some good offers that you can interest some prospects with because it's much better to be calling people with that type of stuff than just hey do you need a website or do you need web development services because we're good at it you'll generate a lot higher volume of interested responders with offers and coordinate your outreach and in terms of extending those offers so once you've defined your list, reach out to people email them mail to them we still use direct mail call them relentlessly connect with them on social media link them in engage with them on social media a lot of times that's difficult we wish social media would play a bigger role for us than it does but we've just found our prospects and our clients aren't as present on social media as we wish they were so the engaging of them is something we'd like to do but they're just not ready to engage yet we post a lot of social media we do a lot of articles and company culture type of stuff but as far as engaging our prospects they're just not quite ready for that we've found and score and segment your leads I don't want to go too much into this because this can be a this can be a whole seminar in itself but when you're using this process that I'm talking about of defining contact and reaching out to them and extending offers where it's not just all about hard sales calls you really end up with a variety of responders to your offers you end up with the people that we consider to be the luck ones you're calling people and someone happens to need what you're selling today and those are these couple of people of the dozens or hundreds that you could potentially be calling or emailing there's a couple that you happen to get very lucky with that need something today but most of those people that are going into the funnel end up in different categories so you might end up with a couple of conversations you might end up with a couple of people who are willing to take your offer but most of them are going to end up in these two categories they might engage you they might say hey we appreciate your call we appreciate your offer we're not really doing anything for six months or I'd appreciate if you check back in with me in three months or I know I'm not doing anything for 12 months we have no budget, we just let some people go you hear a variety of answers and it's important to classify these people again, whether it's in some fancy CRM system or you're just writing it down or keeping track of it in a spreadsheet classify the people you're talking to and don't give up on them so we have made most of our money with these people not the A leads the A leads make up for a very, very small percentage of the responders to your marketing so once somebody gives you even an opening of a door to speak to them later stay on them, call them call them monthly, email them do everything you can to stay in touch with them as I'm talking about, nurturing is everything once you build these contacts of those B and C and even D leads, the people who say they're not interested not interested just means they're not interested today they might have just created a whole new website they might already be working with some firm or a guy doing what they need that doesn't mean they're never going to be interested in what it is you have to offer so don't rule them out the people who tell you no contact them again in six months, something might have changed in our business, unfortunately for our clients but fortunately for us a lot of other people fail at the projects they took on and you'll meet a lot of people who say hey when you called me a few months ago I was engaged with someone else doing what I needed and they're not even picking up their phone anymore can you rescue me and help me out with this thing so we've gained a lot of business through the failure of others so nurture people, use social media use things, create things like webinars, white papers educate people, relentlessly but tactfully pursue the people that you define as your critical prospects once you have a sales ready prospect try to get in front of everybody face to face a lot of people, this is a virtual business a lot of people like to do things today mostly over the phone or using maybe a go to meeting or a WebEx to do the presentations I'm a big proponent of getting face to face in front of people there's nothing like face to face rapport so do everything you can to get in front of somebody ask a lot of questions do a lot more listening, this is again sales 101 do a lot more listening than you do talking ask questions that don't even pertain to the project let people know that you care about their business you understand their business and that you're there to help them not just to sell them so educating, empathizing is always going to close a heck of a lot more business than pitching and selling and make sure everything you do and everything you show is killer, your presentations should be beautiful your proposals should be as nicely designed as you do your websites graphics, every detail, your type that you're using we do fancy color covers on our proposals beautiful documents you want to make sure that every single contact point you have with a prospect is on point and makes you look super professional so even if you're one person look like a very professional business because that's what these people need in order to trust you in order to trust you with their every five, ten, forty thousand dollars so always remember that every single thing that you, even your business cards your business cards, thank you cards leave behinds everything must kind of convey the brand that you want to represent the details matter why should they choose you be great at something so I think we have a few things that we've defined as the things we're really good at it might be one thing, it might be five things define what that is, be great at it and be able to communicate that to your prospects why you're great at it define certain differentiators that might not even be that different okay, we sell one of our strengths differentiators is how much we're able to support our clients after the project's done because we do have a support and maintenance team that shouldn't be much of a differentiator say hey we'll be here for you after the project it is a differentiator add value through additional services so for us we do SEO we do social media, we build websites we do web hosting we do all this stuff in addition to just building websites for people as I mentioned, convince them that you can support them for the long term that's very important to businesses they definitely want to believe that you're going to be a long term partner for them and that you're not going to build this thing for them and then suddenly you went off and got another full time job and they're not answering their calls so very important, make them like you obviously as I mentioned on the previous slide you're a professional business, not just a web developer so come across as one be professional, be professional, dress the part have your presentations and your proposals on point and make it sound like it's going to be very easy for them so people sometimes relate these type of projects to like as painful as a root canap you need to make your clients or your prospective clients feel as though you're going to make it very easy for them and you're going to do all the hard stuff and heavy lifting and go big, okay I'm going to wrap this up in a minute go bigger than what you're doing today whatever it is you've been comfortable selling, whatever type of project you've been comfortable doing go a little bigger starting right away try stuff that's out of your comfort zone take on a project that you're not going to totally fall on your face with but try selling stuff that you've been a little uncomfortable with before and in addition to that start just charging more so even for the stuff that you're doing today I recommend you leave here and charge try on your next quote that you give out just charge 30% more and see what happens, okay and do that over a series of of your next quotes and proposals and it will usually work you might lose a couple so a couple of people might be a little bit turned off for those people that are just focused on price but if you can convince people that you're better and that you have value and that it's worth spending the extra money with you as opposed to going with the cheapest solution you'll win more that will outweigh those few that are going to be turned off by you being a little bit more expensive it's all about conveying that value and why you're a little bit more money but every time we every single time that we have increased our pricing not just moved up the food chain in terms of bigger companies bigger projects but literally just increased our pricing we had times where for the same level companies the same exact project we went from $5,000 and said you know what the next one we do we're going to $12,000 and we won more projects than we lost over the next six months of doing that because it actually increased our credibility that we were a little bit more money I think I'm up in time or do we have time for questions I wanted to say as far as questions go I could take a few here if we've got few minutes but I'm going to be hanging out outside the room for as long as I've got five more minutes okay so let me see if there's anything else I needed to get to no I don't think so so is there any questions yes so we go back and forth between Salesforce.com and SugarCRM Salesforce.com is obviously by far the most popular CRM in the world we use Sugar as well because it's open source so we can take around with it a little bit more yeah and it's free yes so as you grew how did you manage the ups and downs you got a banking relationship that helped make that a little bit easier to navigate? no no we've never taken any an interesting point we've never had any debt so we've never taken out any loans it's been difficult it's been very difficult managing the ups and downs and like I said a lot of through the downs a lot of it was my partner and I sacrificing paychecks to keep people employed but how we managed it was just a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of chest pain so I don't really have a great answer for that any other questions yes yeah we haven't we have probably not been as good at developing specific partners as we could be so in many cases we just have to say sorry that's not our thing and we lose the project because they do want everything done under one roof which in many cases we know our competitor is probably lying because we know that most of the firms like us can't do everything under one roof either well but in most cases what's been great about the evolution of this industry take healthcare as an example reason why we never would go near a hospital 10 years ago is because they needed they needed us to actually develop like their electronic medical records and patient portal systems and we were never going to get into that business well now here we are 10 years ago where those systems are so mature where we can comfortably say oh no we don't do that we're the website guys we could create we could create for you the most compelling public marketing website you'll ever have but we put a wall up there and don't touch that stuff in most cases they're fine with that and I would say the very honest candid approach has been appreciated by so many clients that so real quick story this big big hospital project out in Phoenix that we're working on right now they came to us a year ago they actually found us so inbound marketing can work they found us and they needed us to build their website and a very complex custom application we said sorry we can't we'd love to work with you we're gonna have to turn this down they came back to us not exaggerating begging us to do business with them please what do you mean you won't what do you mean you can't do this we really liked you guys and we said we just don't do that thing and they said okay please just do our website so they really love the honesty of saying we can't do that we want to focus on the good stuff the stuff we're good at yes bigger companies those are all additional services of ours so it's really just been I mean we literally again I probably limited on time here I mean this is a very interesting story and it's an extreme one but when I say just bigger companies and perception we had a technology company they're in the healthcare IT field up in Cambridge Massachusetts so we started talking to them a couple years ago and they needed a website nothing granted it's a complex website it's a thousand page website and they have a ton of content so the so from a word press perspective there's a lot of filtering of case studies and white papers and all that but this is not real complex application development they had a pretty big website we gave them a proposal for $150,000 okay they liked us so much the people did the contacts that we had there that my guy called me directly and he said bill it's not going to be enough you're not going to get this deal and and we would have made plenty of money on that deal I said okay well okay let me go back I literally went back to my proposal opened up word changed the document from $150,000 to $200,000 I did not change anything else in the proposal I delivered it he called me again he said build this isn't going to be enough you're not going to get this deal we ended up at close to $400,000 on this exact project that I had priced at $150,000 so it's not about what you're doing for people it's about talking to the right companies now again this is an extreme example this is a big company close to a billion dollars in the high tech field but it's perception they felt it should cost that much so we got it yeah we don't get a lot of that we were very lucky that we had him ma'am you had raised your hand in the back politely but we do it a lot we just we don't we at one point in time we used to refer to maybe some other firms that was too risky that could tarnish our brand if we referred them to someone we just simply say you know we start here and we wish we could help you but we just can't and again most people appreciate that honesty you know it's not easy though you do feel bad saying that yeah exactly yes sir so I'll say sometimes it's size of site just like a 50 page site versus an 800 page site sometimes it's functionality some very specific cool things that we're gonna have to build in for them that require a lot of custom programming sometimes again it's just perception of the company we have a pharmaceutical company we're working with right now again I hate to throw out these ridiculous figures because it sounds a little like I'm bragging these are 20 page websites for their for their drugs they have two drugs and they felt that that's supposed to cost $250,000 because they're a drug company we could have done them for $20,000 so it's crazy how just perception of a company and what something could cost when you're talking to the right companies it can be really crazy you know how much that impacts the pricing I'll be outside the room here it'll probably be easier I think at this point I'm being rushed up yeah I was just gonna ask you where you just told us how much is this how much are you gonna make off this drug right if they're gonna make $20 million out of that drug then you just say we haven't we used to do a little bit of customer lifetime value analysis and how many you'll need to get yeah they still we realize that that argument they still would say okay that's all nice we realize how we're gonna make from this but you're $20,000 the other guys 12 why you know so it really didn't matter how much we could convince them they'd get if they were convinced someone else could get that for them as well you know so it's really mostly about selling the value of us as opposed to what they were gonna get out of it if that makes sense yes thank you everybody I appreciate it thank you