What are the standard steps for selling web design/hosting?

[Nat]

I'm not a novice to internet marketing, seo, hosting, and website editing and things, but I am a novice at selling them. I've never sold website design and hosting work, I've only ever managed that stuff for myself and a few friends. I want to get my foot in the door and start making connections and clients so I can have a portfolio as I build my own ideas. I was contacted yesterday by a services company that wants a new website. I wasn't given much information about what they wanted. She just gave me a site that they liked and some details about what pages they need.

What is the most professional way to go from here? Is there a standard list of questions that are conventional to ask in order to fully know what the client is expecting from me? I would like to do this without using a CMS so that I bill the client hourly for any changes or updates they want to make. If they haven't mentioned a CMS can I assume that I have liberty, and do I include updates/modifications within a contract? I'm trying to figure out all the information I need to know before I give a quote or get screwed over with them expecting the moon.

Once I've given a quote, I'm assuming I need to send a contract. I've never sent out a contract, but this one looks pretty good (with some modifications I guess).

Then, is it normal to give the clients progress updates to make sure they 'like' it, or just give them a finished product and bill them hourly for changes?

 

[Postmortis]

Hi @Nat,

Happy to help out here.

First thing I'd do is provide them a brief to fill in. This brief should ideally include a section about their business/brand to get to know them better and what they're after:
- Client/industry
- Client contact
- Proposal required by
- Project timings (when they do want the work done by)
- Business/Brand objective (what do the strive for)
- Project objective (what are they after specifically)
- Business USP's
- Products & services offered (what do they do)
- Main competitors
- Target market
- Current/upcoming marketing campaigns (which will affect organic traffic to the site)
- Any other considerations

Then it should include a section about their current situation/website, which include things such as:
- Client website
- CMS
- Social accounts available
- Google Analytics/Omniture account (they should ideally share this, later on you can get WMT accounts)
- Has previous SEO work been done? If so, what was done?

Note: the above is more tailored for SEO work and should be amended accordingly. It will make you look more professional though. Don't worry if they don't fill out every requirement.

Once you get the brief back, it's time to create a proposal. A common thing is to create this within Excel and then create it into a PDF file.

At the top of the file, specify your hourly rate.
Underneath it should be a standard project timeline which specifies all individual tasks along with their costs + delivery date. Something similar to the below:

Do they like it? Excellent, time to proceed. The final step is then to create a contract similar to the link you provided. One last thing I'll mention though, make it very clear (in both the project timeline & contract) that client response is required in order for all tasks to finish on time (e.g. client approval for content creation etc). It's happens quite often that some clients don't respond at all when I need their approval/implementation of tasks which can really throw a spanner in the works.

Hope that helps and good luck!

 

[Nat]

@Postmortis thank you. Thank you so, so much!