Fortune_Hunter - 3:36 am on Oct 31, 2005 (gmt 0)

johntabita:

Great post! You have obviously read and understand Alan Weiss's material. I understand your point about competitive product, great service, and breakthrough relationships, but in this business (web development) I don't know how you cross into that territory so fast.

For example, if I get a call for a new site I may not know the owner and we may have a few conversations before I give a proposal, but I wouldn't say that time frame has put me anywhere near breakthrough relationship. Therefore I doubt it would work to simply quote a value based price and expect my relationship to make it happen. I think I need something more.

Unfortunately in our business prospects don't (in many cases) see the difference between one developer and another outside of simple price. They just don't seem to understand that a developer with considerable marketing expertise is going to provide better value then a guy who doesn't know how to market, but can code anything well if you tell him what you want as opposed to him telling you because of his excellent marketing information.

I run into this more then I would care to count. They hear what I am saying about bringing in more customers, increasing sales, creating more prospects, better qualified prospects etc, but at the end of the day if my proposal is 50-100% higher then the next closest I am pretty confident I don't get the work even though I am bringing exceptional value that will easily pay off over time vs. the lower proposal which will give "a" web site, but fall short of actually achieving a marketing goal.

My questions is how do you work around this in our field in particular?

Fortune Hunter