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Is there a market for selling web design and development together? How to find new clients in Paris France? How can we find clients outside France?

You can check my website http://navuni.fr, we're able to make everything from conception, to on-line services... We already have some clients but I found very difficult finding new customers online, the only things that works effectively is to meet and talk with people personally... Any advises will be very appreciated. Thanks.

Filed under: Web Design & Development: Business Development, Customer Development
3 answers • 11 years ago
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Answers

Lara Littlefield, Community organizer, ceo answered:

It sounds like you just have a simple sales issue, and thankfully a high quality product :)

The solution is simple, and you seem to have realized it already: you need to reduce the friction in your location for getting customers into your "front door" and providing them with (what I'm assuming) is a proposal.

Also, feel free to use the word "agency" to describe your combined services. It's what we do :)

So, my suggestion is to try reaching out to sales professionals in your area (Paris), and more importantly, with experience in your industry. You'll need to figure out how commission or payment will work, and then let them work their networked magic.

Achieving sales leads is really just about your network. So if a sales person simply isn't within your budgetary reach, the next best thing you can do is just have every employee of your agency be their own salesperson. This means reaching out to colleagues from completely different industries, friends, successful people in business that you may have known from grade school, etc....

While sales seems like a crappy process at the start (yes, you are just asking for work from people), what you're building is long term, quality relationships with these people, especially if your final deliverables really wow the end client. From there, you'll find that your happiest clients will do most of the traditional 'sales' work for you :)

Hope this helps! Feel free to give me a ring any time.

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Hernan Jaramillo, Raised $100M for startups, BTC since 2013 answered:

I used to own a webdesign agency in Miami and to get clients in, we did several things that at the time worked pretty well for us. Instead of focusing on having a website that showcased our knowledge and portfolio we started blogging about the many different aspects of web design and web dev. We did this under a very disciplined shedule. We used wordpress to write our blog and we often wrote things such as: top 10 flash websites, best black and websites on the web. Eventually our audience started to pick up and we started gaining traction on the "long tail" for many keywords. We went from having just clients in Miami to clients all around the states.
We also complemented this strategy by building as many freelance profiles on several design markeplatces such us: odesk, freelancer.com, fiverr.com, 99designs and many more. As we interacted more and more with each platform revenue became "predictable" and it got to the point that both strategies were fulfilling or business leads.

Happy to discuss more strategies on a call :)

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Chirag Kulkarni, Serial Entrepreneur and Advisor answered:

Interestingly, the problem you face is probably the #1 problem that many businesses face - how to grow a customer base through marketing.

For your specific business, the three channels that I would diligently try and TEST OUT are;

1. Word of mouth ( you're doing this)
2. Content Marketing
3. Traditional Banner, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

With my company, C&M Group, we are able to reach clientele outside our immediate network in the US just by using these 3 methods. The best part - the top 2 that I mentioned are absolutely free and just require immense time (which is why people don't do it).

Let me know if you would like to hop on a call and discuss this further.

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