Finding website projects worth having, not just any enquiry

3 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

Web enquiries are easy to attract and mostly not worth having. A steady flow of people wanting a five-page site for very little money, with no clear idea of what it should achieve and three people who need to approve everything, will keep an agency busy and unprofitable indefinitely.

The projects worth having share specific characteristics: a commercial reason for the work, one person who can decide, and a budget that reflects what they expect. Those clients exist and they do not arrive through the same routes as the cheap ones. Chasing volume finds the wrong ones.

Finding them is largely about where you look and what you filter out. The filtering matters more than the looking.

Finding website projects worth having starts with qualifying hard

The filter matters more than the volume.

Publish a starting price. The single most effective filter available. Clients below your range will not enquire and the ones who do are qualified. Most agencies avoid this and pay for it in wasted calls.

Ask what the site is for, commercially. A client who can answer — more enquiries, fewer support calls, online ordering — is a client with a reason to spend. One who cannot answer is not ready.

Find out who decides. A project with three approvers and no owner will consume twice the hours for the same fee. Ask who signs the invoice.

Ask what they have now and why it is not working. The answer tells you whether this is a real project or a vague intention. Vague intentions do not become projects.

Look where budgets already exist

Better projects come from businesses already spending on something.

Businesses spending on advertising. Anybody buying traffic has a commercial reason to care about conversion, and a budget mindset. They already understand cost per enquiry.

Businesses with an operational problem. Booking, ordering, quoting, portals. Functional work pays better than brochure sites and is harder to compare on price. Ask what wastes their staff's time.

Businesses that just changed. New premises, a rebrand, a new product line, new funding. Each creates a reason and a budget. Watch for these locally.

Use the referral routes that reach them

The best projects rarely come from search.

Other agencies and freelancers. Designers, copywriters, photographers and marketing consultants all encounter clients needing build work. Refer work to them in return.

Accountants and business advisers. They see businesses investing and are asked who to speak to. Give them something short to hand over.

Past clients and their networks. A client whose site produced results will recommend you, and their peers have similar budgets. Ask for the introduction directly.

Sell the outcome rather than the build

Clients cannot judge code and can judge results.

Talk about what the site should produce. Enquiries, orders, saved admin time. Anchor the fee to that rather than to page count. Page count is how you end up being compared.

Propose in stages. A discovery or strategy phase, paid, before any build. It qualifies the client and frequently improves the project. Charge for it properly.

Offer ongoing work from the start. Retainers for improvement and maintenance are worth more than the build and they change the relationship. Include the first year in the proposal.

Conclusion

Publish a starting price, because it filters more effectively than anything else you can do, and qualify hard on three things: whether the client can say what the site is for commercially, who actually decides, and what is wrong with what they have.

Look for projects where a budget already exists — businesses buying advertising, businesses with an operational problem worth solving, and businesses that have just changed something. Build referral routes through designers, copywriters, accountants and past clients rather than relying on search. Then sell the outcome rather than the build, propose a paid discovery stage before any development, and offer ongoing improvement work from the beginning.