This is counter-intuitive, but it's true: making yourself available to clients' whims outside business hours won't get you their respect. Why not? Because that's not how professionals behave, and clients can feel it. They will treat you as if you were an amateur if you're presenting yourself to them as one. This article raises awareness to that fact.

When a client calls to ask for a website or an app or an internet marketing campaign, we should not be selling. We should be suspicious, we should doubt that the person has called the right number. Not every caller is a perfect fit for our agency.

Web agencies have a choice: we either continue bitching about clients, or we turn every complaint into a lucrative business opportunity. Clients complain because they have a problem. And what are we if not problem solvers? And because this is not a hobby, our solutions cost money. Always look to turn your current problems into money.

Clients approach web developers with requests for specific technologies all the time. For example, PHP is a popular request and not everybody works with PHP; some people choose to specialize, i.e. for Python only. Could that minor difference disqualify you in your client’s eyes? Absolutely. Is that a good enough reason to give up immediately and send the client elsewhere? Of course not. Let’s explore a few approaches with word for word examples that should help you decide how to best serve that client and land good projects.

How do you know whom you should accept as a client? Half of the answer to this question is knowing whom you won't accept, no matter what. This article is all about that half of the answer. The tool that helps me decide who does not become my client is a written list I simply call a 'showstopper filter'. I let you take a look the one I created for myself. My example will help you make decisions for your own business.

A client contacts you for a potential new project he wants to have developed. You've never talked to this client before and it's not practical to sit together in a live meeting (he lives in another city, in a galaxy far far away). In his email description the project looked like something you'd like to work on, but you can't be sure and there are many questions you need to ask before you commit to creating a proposal. What questions do you ask, in what order and what decisions do you make based on the answers you receive? This article deals with the best first question to ask a new client. This question dictates the course of the whole interview and can make the difference between wasting your time and successfully landing a profitable new project.

Based on the evolution of sales processes in my company, I uncover why a certain manual technique of creating sales proposals turns into a problem. I also reveal examples of exact solutions which worked for us.

tl;dr: don't put the "About Us" section at the beginning of your sales proposal. This page is much more effective at the end of your sales documents, because human psychology.