How to sell websites to local businesses
Selling to a local business is nothing like selling to a company with a marketing department. There is one decision-maker, they are busy, and they will decide in under two minutes. Everything below follows from that.
Sell the outcome, never the build
Nobody wants a website. They want to stop losing the customer who searched for them and found a competitor. Open there. Responsive design, page speed and CMS choices are not selling points to someone who runs a bakery.
Name a price on the first call
Refusing to quote reads as expensive. Give a number and a timeline immediately — a few hundred, live in a week. You will lose the ones who were never going to pay it, which is the point.
The three objections, in order
'I have Facebook' — ask what happens when someone searches their name on Google. 'I don't have time' — the answer is that you need one hour of theirs, total. 'It's too expensive' — compare it to one month of any other thing they already pay for. None of these are really objections; they are the shape of a yes that has not been asked properly.
Go back in six months
A no from a business with no website is almost always a not yet. Keep the list, call again later. The second call converts far better than the first, and you already know their name.
Keep the build small on purpose
Five pages, their real photos, a map, a phone number that works on mobile, and hours that are correct. That is what a local business needs and all it will notice. Every extra feature you add is a week of your time they did not ask for and will not pay more for — and it delays the moment the site is live, which is the only moment they care about.
Where the list comes from
All of this needs a list of local businesses that have no site, by city and trade, with phone numbers. That is what this site sells — 2,165,514 of them across 20 countries — and the count for any market is visible before you pay.