Converting Clients to Customers
How do you change from selling services to selling products? How do you go from serving clients to serving customers?
This freelance web design business has so many twists and turns. First you’re filled with fresh enthusiasm about quitting your job and landing your own clients. But as time goes by, satisfying all of your clients (often rediculous) requests becomes draining. You (I) start to reconsider your business model.
Working in a service industry such as custom web design doesn’t exactly fit into the “set it and forget it” business model advocated by Tim Ferriss in his (awesome) book, The 4-hour workweek (read my reactions to it here). Serving clients requires constant interaction and personal involvement every day.
As a freelance web designer, you’re not left with many options if you’re hoping to embark on a mini-retirement. But I’ve been kicking around some ideas that may help to relieve some of the of stress of being overworked and bogged down with mundane website maintenance requests.
I’ve only actually tried and tested some of these. I’d love to get feedback from those of you who found yourself in a similar situation.
Product-ize your services
Find your most common form of service you do for clients. For me, the most common jobs are web portfolios and E-Commerce websites. The idea is to formulate a “Web Portfolio Package” and an “E-Commerce Package”. When a potential client inquires about either of these, I simply point them to the web page detailing that package.
The E-Commerce Package would consist of a “base” project scope with a set price. That would include Magento design/development, payment gateway installation, and populating 10 products. Then they can opt for other popular add-ons with set price additions. These would include things like email marketing, WordPress blog, Logo Design, etc.
Standardizing the services offering can speed up the discovery / proposal phase. Your Packages pages might also work well as landing pages for targeted marketing campaigns.
Package your maintenance hours
Offer pre-paid bundles of hours at a slight discount from your normal hourly rate. This can help to plug up the holes in your maintenance billing. All of those 5 minute emails and quick tweaks from clients can easily go un-billed if they take less than 10 minutes to complete. But if they work against a pre-paid plan, then that work is accounted for.
Power to the CMS!
The answer to keeping clients off your back after their site is launched? Content Management Systems (CMS). WordPress is my CMS of choice.
But lets face it. Despite having the CMS, most clients still require lots of hand-holding. You have to provide thorough training, plus documentation for them to hold on to. Even better- video screencasts for how to manage their content.
I’d suggest preparing and perfecting these materials once and re-using them for all of your CMS clients.
Be selective
Coming back to my first point about productizing your most popular services, how about focusing on only those services? Taking on all of those smaller, more specialized and unique projects can often prove to be more time consuming than expected, taking away from your bread and butter projects.
Once you have a good thing going (your freelance web design business), stick to what’s working! Push your most popular services and market directly to those clients (or should we call them customers?).
Over to you…
How do you structure your business? Do you do it all or specialize in one thing? How do you shift your offering as time goes on? Please share…
Good post! Like the thoughts. Some ideas might still seem like a packaged service rather than a product.
Biggest benefit of a product would be to do the work once and sell it over and over. Reducing the marginal cost of sales – phenomenal concept compared to brick & mortar business.
@iaan – Absolutely. That’s the beauty of selling products to customers over and over.
The hard part is transitioning to that when you already have a service-based business. A big challenge, but I guess in this economy that would be a good problem to have : )
I’m of a similar mindset and looking into adding ‘products’ to the mix. One product that, especially lately, has been an easy upsell has been offering hosting and domain services. I’m transitioning over to my own server and offering ‘concierge’ web hosting as opposed to the commodity low cost race-to-the-bottom type of hosting which is an over saturated market. I charge 3 times as much as you could get it elsewhere, but my server is my own and not oversold and there are no control panels to log into either. My clients simply call me or email me if they need something, which is rarely ever. They seem to appreciate the fact that I just ‘look after’ it for them. My goal is to build up a residual income, so far so good.
@Hollis – thanks for the comment
Offering in-house hosting/domain services seems to be a popular way to go. I personally don’t want to deal with all the up-time issues and customer service…
For hosting, I just recommend clients to a trusted web host and give them my affiliate link, which gives me a bit of cash each time.
I personally offer hosting as well in my web design business. Though dealing with server errors and up-time issues is a pain at times, it’s something that I enjoy tinkering around with. I guess you need to have the patience for it. But the idea of using a CMS is a great idea for lessening the burden. I managed my business the same way, dealing with tiny little updates from clients, but I feel so much better now that I moved to installing a CMS on client’s sites. Yes, you need to give them proper training and create manuals but the time saved from not dealing with client requests is worth it. Besides, if you stay with and specialize in the same CMS, like WordPress, you can re-use the material. Try out Screensteps for this: http://www.bluemangolearning.com
@Erica – If you’re into server administration then I guess offering hosting can be worth it. I’m not (more of a design / CSS / WordPress guy).
Screensteps looks great!