Why We Stopped Selling Websites

A few years back, we changed how we sell. It felt counterintuitive at the time and it still does when I try to explain it. We stopped leading with the thing that actually pays the bills.

For most of our first decade, we were a delivery business. A client wanted a website, we built them a website. Brief in, site out, invoice sent. It's how most agencies work, and there's nothing shameful about it.

The problem is what it does to the conversation.

When you sell a product, you have to sell the product

If your business is built on delivering websites, every conversation quietly becomes about getting a website out of it. You're not trying to mislead anyone. But the incentive is always there in the background, nudging every recommendation towards the thing you bill for.

It's hard to give genuinely honest advice when the honest answer might be "you don't need what you came here for." If that answer costs you the job, you'll start to avoid it, even without meaning to. We didn't like what that did to our advice. So we changed the order of things.

Leading with the answer, not the build

Now we lead with knowledge. The first thing we offer isn't a website, an app or a quote. It's a straight answer to the question the client actually has, which is usually some version of "what should I do about this?"

Sometimes that answer involves us building something. Often it doesn't. Sometimes the right move is a small fix to what they've already got. Sometimes it's a platform we don't even work in, and we'll say so and point them in the right direction. Sometimes it's "honestly, don't spend the money yet, here's what to sort out first."

The delivery work still happens. We still build websites and applications, and it's still where most of the revenue comes from. But it comes second now. It comes after the advice, as a result of it, rather than being the thing we steer everyone towards from the first hello.

Why this works better, not worse

The obvious worry is that you'd talk yourself out of half your work. In practice, the opposite happens.

People can tell when they're being sold to, and they can tell when they're being helped. Give someone a genuinely useful answer with no strings attached, including the answers that make you no money, and something shifts. They trust you. And when they next have a problem that does need building, they already know who they're calling.

It also makes "platform agnostic" mean something. Plenty of agencies say they're independent and recommend what's right for the client. It's a nice line. But it only holds if you're not quietly dependent on one outcome. I've written separately about agencies that only build one thing, and the same logic applies here. If your whole model relies on selling websites, "I'd recommend what's best for you" has an asterisk on it whether you admit it or not. Leading with knowledge takes the asterisk off.

The trust is the business now

Eighteen years in, the work that comes our way is almost always because someone trusted the advice first. A conversation, a recommendation, a problem talked through honestly. The build is the thing that follows trust, not the thing that creates it.

I'd recommend the shift to any agency willing to make it, though I suspect most won't. It means being relaxed about turning down work, comfortable saying "you don't need us for this," and patient enough to let the relationship do the selling. That's a harder business to run than brief-in, site-out. It's also a much better one to be part of.

If you've got a problem you're trying to solve and you'd rather have an honest opinion than a sales pitch, that's exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy. Get in touch and we can talk it through, with no obligation either way. If you want a sense of how we approach the more involved work, here's how we think about it.