The Secret
I have a secret which has served me well for a long number of years. Knowing this secret and putting it into practice has helped me grow my consultancy company year over year while creating very happy clients. It has helped to eliminate the feast or famine cycle and is the reason the majority of my clients are repeat customers who are happy to refer my company to their colleagues.
So what is the secret??
Good consultants make money off their clients, great consultants make money for their clients. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.
There are three types of web projects:
1) Those that don’t make money. These are generally static, brochure-type websites which are not updated often or actively maintained.
2) Those that cost money. These are expensive web projects without a positive Return On Investment or simply an unmeasured ROI (due to lack of available analytics, lack of clearly defined metrics, etc).
3) Those that make money for clients.
Take a look through your 5 most recently completed web projects. Which of the three types of projects were they? At the start of the project, did you identify the client objectives to be used to measure the success of the project? Did you track the relevant metrics throughout the project? Can you identify a positive ROI resulting from your deliverables? Does the client understand that the ROI is a direct outcome of your work through clear, consistent reporting?
If these are not part of every one of your client projects, you are missing not only the opportunity to best serve your clients, but a powerful growth engine for your own company as clients will readily come back to you with more work opportunities when they know you can make them money.
Your Job Is Not To Write Code
People who work in the web industry generally love exploring new technologies and enjoy new technical challenges. At the start of a new project, they may say, “I could build this using the new Twilio API!”, “I could learn that new JS framework!”, “I could use this new tool I just purchased!”
Too often, the desire to learn and use the latest shiny new toys and playthings conflicts with the client’s objectives for the project. Increasing the technical challenge while creating a solution does not automatically benefit the client.
Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the Pragmatic Programmers, said it quite well in a 2004 IEEE column:
“Users don’t care whether you use J2EE, Cobol, or a pair of magic rocks. They want their credit card authorization to process correctly and their inventory reports to print. You help them discover what they really need and jointly imagine a system.”
For New-Age Web Professionals, ROI is King
We don’t sell web sites anymore. We don’t sell pretty designs or responsive layouts or quality code. We don’t sell Facebook Likes or Twitter shares. Web Professionals provide technical strategy and solutions (E.g., increasing customer lifetime value, reducing cart abandonment, conversion optimization, improving user experiences, etc) with quantifiable value to their clients to help them meet their business or organizational goals.
When you simply sell and provide responsive layouts or Facebook Likes, you are commoditizing your business as clients evaluate you versus other agencies or freelancers who may have lower rates. However, Web Professionals who are able to provide sound, technical strategy and solutions will always be in high-demand.
That all sounds great! …but how?
How can you identify the real client objectives and measure and determine ROI? In upcoming articles on the Web Methodology Project, we’ll take a deep-dive into these topics and discuss specific strategies to put this into action. If you have not done so already, be sure to subscribe and we will notify you when new content is published.
Did you miss the previous article? Be sure to check out the rest of the guide.
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