The other day, Tom and I were driving to a client meeting and I got a call from a lead who had found my local marketing agency on google for the search term 'Maui SEO'.

I told her as I do all leads, to go to my website www.nickponte.com and fill out the SEO discovery form (Local Fee Finder Form) at the top of the page. With the LFF Form I can do further analysis and I will be able to give her a more accurate quote for her business. I do not talk any pricing to anyone at this stage. Not even a little. If asked again I say that I have no clue how much things will cost, until I can take a can get a better idea of what her online presence looks like and get a feel for how competitive her market is. I am able to gather this info from my Local Fee Finder Form.

The form is designed to pre-qualify any of these potential leads and to give me a little more info about their business so I can price accordingly. IF someone is just shopping around, chances are they will not fill out the discovery form and I won't waste my time. Also my discovery form is a 3 part form so it increases the click through of my site for an added SEO bonus 🙂

One of the questions in the form asks about what the lead's budget is on this project. Having this info can often times make closing a sale much easier.

I do not talk pricing until I get the discovery form back. Only then do I give the client a call and talk pricing. Here is the audio file from that call:

She also asked me to put together a proposal which often times takes a lot of time to put together. And those of you who have put together a proposal only to never hear back from somebody know that it can be EXTREMELY frustrating.

So I've been paying with the idea about charging for proposals and decided to throw it out there that I would charge her for the proposal unless she was super serious. (Playing with this idea, you try it out and let me know if you have success with it)

At any rate I think it went pretty good, and always an opportunity to grow. Here is my exact follow up email where I offer her my Local SEO White Paper & Menu of my services as I promised her on the phone. If you'd like to pick up my white paper you can pick it up by clicking the button below.

I received a call wanting to go forward at $833/month which comes out to; wouldn't you know it $10k/year. No problem, all I have to do is adjust my fulfillment a bit and we are good to go. On to the next one..!