Tag: clients

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How to Align Your Business Strategy Based on Client Feedback

Client feedback is one of your most important weapons to design a bullet-proof business strategy that scales.  The feedback that your clients give you is extremely powerful because you are getting paid for it, meaning that they are willing to invest in you and your services or solutions make sense.  You just need to reverse engineer what they need and how they need it, and figure out every aspect of it, write it down properly, and sell it to other customers. However, it is not necessarily a trivial process, which is why we are going to break it down into… Continue Reading
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Why Clients Shouldn’t Ask for Discounts and How Companies Should Handle Negotiations

Haggling for a lower price is so common that it could even get very challenging to tell the truth from the usual bargain. However, it should rarely be the problem of the salesman, business owner, or entrepreneur. Most of the time, it is the prospect’s problem. In this article, we are going to discuss the reasons why you should not ask for discounts as a customer and how you should handle price negotiations as a company. The graph above by HubSpot shows that there is a dramatic disconnect between the needs of the customers and what most sales reps tend… Continue Reading
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Dealing With Clients: Vendors vs. Consultants

Always being compliant with everything that a prospect or a client says is not the best practice to build a sustainable business.  This is one of the most important lessons I've learned over a decade of running a business and separately running a consultancy—advising small and medium enterprises. Regardless of the fact that clients often want to hear what they're asking for, they're not necessarily in the right position to give the best piece of advice. I had a sales meeting a couple of weeks ago with a former client we used to work with back in the day. He… Continue Reading
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How to Handle New Clients When Overbooked

Complaining about an influx of prospects may sound ridiculous to many. But in reality, growing businesses *can* attract new customers if they need to, considering they’ve been in business long enough to build a reputation or a portfolio, save some capital, and explore a couple of channels that get the job done. In this case, it’s more about investing a lot more into the channels that work, and restoring the long-term pipeline in exchange for a short financial hit. Additionally, ongoing leads are not uncommon—it’s the line up of truly qualified and suitable leads ready to adhere to a specific… Continue Reading
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Retaining Clients vs. Chasing Leads – Mistakes And Solutions

Are you spending too long chasing NEW clients instead of RETAINING your existing ones? A Harvard Business Review report claims that acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. I get extremely annoyed when my telecom or cable provider offers a better deal to new clients than what they would offer me. My cell plan is about 12 years old, and it often gets more expensive without bringing additional perks on the table.  What stops me from switching over? (Nothing really, I'm just lazy and it's a low-cost expense.) Keeping your existing… Continue Reading
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Practical Tips for Selling a WordPress Platform to SMBs

Selling a WordPress-driven platform to small or medium-sized businesses (SMB) is a major challenge for freelancers and small businesses. During my last research, there are over 2 million freelancers offering WordPress development services on major freelancer portals. That doesn't include tens of thousands of agencies selling through different channels. First off, building a WordPress website or redesigning an existing solution is all about solving a business problem. Small and medium-sized businesses usually ask for a new website for the following reasons: Better positioning onlineKeeping all company data in one place (instead of distributing to 3rd party channels)Providing additional solutions that… Continue Reading
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9 Misconceptions By Clients Looking For a Web Platform

The sales process for web development businesses may be confusing. There are endless misconceptions we've seen during sales calls and presales meetings, some more common than others. What Makes Web Development Confusing? Unlike buying a physical product or a service that brings an obvious impact on a physical item (like your home or a car), gauging work quality or time frames is nearly impossible. I've discussed the challenges of estimates several times and this is the leading reason why 95% of our business now is formed by WordPress retainers. Fixed-fee estimates are hardly successful. Tons of unknowns are revealed in… Continue Reading
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The Problem With Having To Educate Your Customers

John Locke wrote an article named "There are no Clients from Hell" referring to the popular site for freelancers - Clients From Hell. I've been following the site for some time and there are plenty of educational stories, both for freelancers and clients. What John says in his post is: This site encourages the idea that clients who make non-constructive requests or unreasonable demands deserve to be lambasted and mocked online. This reinforces the fallacy that the designer is always right, and that clients are better seen and not heard. I find this false sense of smug superiority to be… Continue Reading
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How to Start a WordPress Project?

Starting a new WordPress project requires some initial planning to avoid some common mistakes. Failing to adhere to an action plan may easily incur technical debt (with an unpredictable setup, libraries, and plugins). The WordPress Theme Industry There are tons of themes available - free or premium - and lots of theme markets for premium resources. I even mentioned a script for running your own theme market - that's how popular it got recently. Anyway, as a WordPress developer and consultant I try to select the best options for my clients. And I have some difficulties on the choice of… Continue Reading