18 Reasons Website Maintenance and Planned Updates Are Important

As 95% of our development business revolves around WordPress retainers, the topic of ongoing updates and recurring contracts comes up during every presales call. Working with clients who switch agencies is easier (as they already understand the benefits of a technical partnership), but site rebuilds are often a challenge in that department. And the most common question is: "Why do I need to pay for maintenance once our new site is live?" While there are plenty of excuses not to keep your project up to date, my favorite analogy is derived from the automotive industry. You don't buy a car… Continue Reading

On WordPress Development Retainers

With over 40 people working at DevriX right now, we have revised our service solutions and focused on promoting a type of service that combines our recurring revenue goal with iterative development solutions for some of our clients. While we do provide maintenance services, we realized that a development retainer would be incredibly useful for most of our leads. This month we've started a new WordPress development retainer and signed a discovery session for another large one coming next month. There are a few more in our pipeline which our sales rep is looking into, sharing our process with our prospects and getting some valuable feedback for… Continue Reading

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

Talking WordPress Retainers and Selling to SMEs With Curtis McHale

My friend Curtis has been innovating in the sales and marketing space for WordPress consulting for years, and he's literally just started selling his latest book "Finding and Marketing To your Niche". His content is top-notch and I've personally been following his blog closely for quite some time now. That said, we've been talking with Curtis on business and marketing strategies, and I joined his podcast "The Smart Business Show" in order to share more nuggets from our own philosophy at DevriX and what drives us to focus exclusively on ongoing WordPress retainers. For us, implementation wasn't really the problem; it was… Continue Reading

Why Are Estimates Challenging For Custom Development Work?

I've been browsing and replying on Quora over the holidays and one of the questions made me think deeper about the estimation challenges when quoting custom development work: At DevWP I've already blogged about why I avoid estimates and the reason we do provide retainer services for our ongoing accounts. I'm no stranger to budget constraints and upfront expectations, but unlike the products business, services may vary drastically. [caption id="attachment_12201" align="aligncenter" width="1241"] dilbert.com showcases estimates in a nutshell[/caption] In the Quora example, the customer needed a drawing solution for his website. However, there are plenty of variables, such as: What features… Continue Reading