Why Your eCommerce Leads Aren’t Responding To Your Proposals
I used to be a designer.
I was a pretty good one actually. But that’s the problem. I thought being a good designer was enough. I’d point potential clients to my portfolio and expect them to hire me right away.
They’d tell me to send them a proposal for a website design. I’d spend hours doing my research and drafting up the proposal. With a big smile on my face, I’d send it to them and I’d keep hitting refresh on my inbox waiting for their response like a scorned lover.
It would never come.
How many times has this happened to you? Whether you’re a new freelancer or an established agency, you still lose potential clients. And it’s even more frustrating when it happens right at the end. They suddenly vanish after you’ve painstakingly created that proposal.
You send those follow-up emails asking them if they’ve “had a chance to look at it” though you know they have and they just don’t want to talk to you anymore. After a while, you give up, swallow your loss, and move on to the next one.
Why does this happen?
Because They Hate You
Ok no, they don’t actually hate you. But they haven’t fallen in love with you either. They just don’t know you well enough.
You see, the problem is you haven’t built a strong relationship with them. You might think you have, and you might even think you’re the only agency they’re interested in. The truth is, you’re just one among many agencies they’ve reached out to. You’re number 5 or 7 or 13.
So while you’re excited that this potential client is asking for a proposal, they’re also asking a bunch of other agencies for the same thing and comparing you on price.
And, guess what? Some of the other agencies are charging less than half of what you’re quoting.
Obviously you don’t want to engage in a price war down to zero. You’ve built your agency up to a point where you can command high prices because the work you do is exceptional. It makes no sense to reverse that.
At the same time, you can’t keep losing qualified leads to others just because your prices are too high. So what’s the solution here?
Build A Relationship
Talk to your clients! At the end of the day, people buy into other people. If you allow yourself to be just a number, you’ll be treated like one. But there’s no rule saying that you can’t be more proactive. That you can’t reach out to clients, get them on a call, or even fly out to meet them.
We spoke to an eCommerce agency here in Vancouver last week, and they had hired a business development person just for this. He flies to three different cities every week, meeting with potential clients, talking to them about their requirements, and building relationships.
When you start doing that, you immediately stand out. The other agencies stay numbers while you become the agency that cares. The client starts to see beyond your price to the real value that you offer. The agency we met with charges well over $100,000 for each project.
Understand Their Needs
When you start talking to potential clients, you’ll understand what they really need. Many times, eCommerce retailers already have a fixed idea of what they want, and so they approach multiple agencies and get quotes for that.
Instead of merely accepting their assumptions, you need to challenge them. Dig deeper to find out what they want to achieve, and then use your expertise to come up with a solution. By doing this, you come off as an expert and clients start to understand your value.
Ultimately, they want what’s good for their business. As an agency that’s taken the time and effort to build a relationship with them and understand their needs, you’re uniquely positioned to do this. When you reach this point, price stops being a factor because it’s obvious that you’ll provide the best solution.
Are You Building Relationships?
It’s time to stop spending so much time on proposals, though you can decrease the time spend by utilising ai proposal generator as well , and start focussing on relationship building. If you truly want to grow your agency and start charging more, you need to stop being like every other agency.
Ask yourself if you’ve been doing enough to build relationships and understand clients. In our next post, we’ll go into more detail on how you can extract the real requirements from clients.
