The answer is to emphasize the professional nature of our business. We must make it clear in the beginning that the end product of the contemplated business relationship is not to build a web site but to sell the client's product, service his customers or interconnect his employees. The tasks of marketing, selling, customer service and interpersonal communications are all knowledge based consulting services and not programming. Businesses are accustomed to paying dearly for expert advice from consultants who price their product not on an arbitrary mark up on the cost of time but on the intrinsic value of the knowledge they impart. I'll give a broad view of just some of the areas we have explored and follow up in future articles with more products and detail.
Many developers are reactive.
They ask the customer what they want in the site and finally produce little more than an online brochure. If you offer a complete planning service to your clients you are doing for them what they should already being doing for themselves but you have the experience they don't have. Take my word for it, most businesses spend a large part of their time planning and they regularly hire outside help in that process. You should be the expert on interactive or electronic marketing and sell research, strategic planning, marketing planning, training and implementation planning. We have regularly sold projects where the planning revenue and profits were greater than the web site revenue and profits.