How we lost a $60k web project

The perfect project?

It’s always exciting when a "perfect" opportunity gets passed your way. It's an chance to sink your teeth into a meaty project for you and your team and more importantly - it's an opportunity to help someone's business big time.

After putting in a lot of energy, creating proposals, providing extra value and guidance to the decision makers - you can see the finish line and are certain you've won the project. 

A few days later you find out the project was awarded to another supplier

Why? What went wrong?

We had one of these exact scenarios recently. We were handed an opportunity to build a $60k web project for an organisation and were certain we had it in the bag, only to find out that we'd lost it.

In this situation, we were fortunate enough to keep our close working relationship with our contact at the organisation who shared some insight into where we could have improved. This insight was an invaluable lesson for us.

The organisation put out a tender to redo their website. It was a large international website with quite a few working parts - a perfect website project for us.

During a review of the tender's brief, we quickly realised the website needed a refresh of its structure, its content and its look and feel. We knew this would spread into other aspects such as branding and strategy.

At each stage of the sales process, we diligently ticked all the boxes and shared our solution to their brief, hinting that they need to review their overall branding an strategy.

This is where one of the other agencies took a different approach and won the tender. They took a leadership role, and told the organisation that they needed a full brand refresh before even considering their website. It was exactly what the organisation needed to hear. They were so impressed by the agency's insights that they decided to bring them on board.

So, what have we learnt?

As a service provider, clients value knowledge and experience AND sometimes they will challenge you. You need to back yourself enough to believe in your solution and lead with your solution knowing that it will deliver the best outcome for them - even if it risks the client pushing back and saying "no". In the end, aren't we all in business to help organisation better themselves?

Planning to redo your website?

This handy checklist will help you get there faster and achieve a significantly better result:

• Identify who your right fit customer persona is
• Map out a typical customer's journey
• Choose three websites you like and the components that you'd love for your new website
• Identify all elements of the website: content / page structure, integration with your systems etc.
• Come up with at least 3 strategies to get the right traffic get to your website
• Write at least 3 goals that identify whether your website is successful or needs refining
• Review your checklist with a web agency - they'll provide deeper insights