Sales Team?

H Guys,

I was wondering if any members of this board offered a sales service or were aware of anyone that offers the service.

Basically we are looking for someone who is able to sell our websites to other businesses across the UK. We specialise in SEO and have a number of pre-ranked websites in many niches across the UK that we are looking to sell (or rent is a more accurate term) to businesses within that niche and town/city.

We are far too busy to do the selling ourselves so were looking to outsource this to someone who specialises in this field.

If you are able to do this or know someone who might be able to help me pls could you let me know. It would be much appreciated.

Thanks

I had to re-read your post, and I think the concept is potentially good.

Do you have any printing sites? What are your rates?

At the moment we don't have any printing sites but it would not be a problem for us to create one for you (we choose the URL name), put your details on it and only start charging you once the site is on page one for an agreed keyword. We then ensure that it stays there (our aim is to actually get it to the top of the 1st page as this is where the high traffic numbers come from).

We usually already have the site ranking, but as you can appreciate there are many niches and many areas across the UK so we can't cover them all. We usually pick one keyword that gets a decent number of searches each month (something like Plumber Halifax, Dentist Chiswick, Solicitor Brixton, Printer in Croydon etc) and have that site ranking before we approach any potential clients in that area. However, we have had people approach us and ask for one to be made specifically. In these cases we only charge once we get the site on page 1 and you get the benefit of having your details out there on the Internet in the mean time. As these sites are only being rented to the client, once they stop being a client we remove their details, pictures, information and look to hire that site to someone else. However, while you are a client we will not work with anyone else from your area who competes in the same niche.

Until we have a sales team in place we are keeping the prices low. At the moment, one of these 'Portal Sites' will cost £150 a month. You provide the content and business photos and will construct the site. All details on the site will be yours and the 'contact us form' will send enquiries directly to your email. We then ensure the sites remains highly ranked. If there are any changes you need done we will also do them.

Though we will only be targeting one keyword directly, it is natural for the site to start ranking for many other keywords at the same time. If you wanted another specific keyword targeted in addition to the one we start with then there will be a one of payment (price depends on difficulty and competition so differs for each keyword).

An example of one we hired out recently can be found at dentistchiswick.org

We have other templates that we use, this is just an example of one we did recently.

more info can be found on our site innocentadvertising.co.uk/services/portal-site/

I know someone else who does this. I am just curious, how many you have sold or rented out so far?

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Hi Scootek.

Do you mean you know someone else who rents out sites like this? It is quite popular at the moment as it is usually cheaper than traditional SEO on your site and gives you the opportunity of having more than one position on the first page (as you could have your official site and the 'Portal site' both ranking).

Not sure how many we have rented out so far but from the top of my head I would say roughly 20, probably slightly more.

Do you know anyone that would be able to make the calls and sell these for us? It's hard finding someone that you know will be able to do the job well.

If I was in the market, I would not be comfortable renting websites. If your site had good stable ranking then I would consider buying it. However, there loads of people out there who will rent.

My view is that it is unlikely you will get someone dedicated to just selling your product. What you want to do is partner up with companies like (I am not suggesting me), who mainly deal with the b2b environment, so it's something they can slip in the discussions of the existing sales process. For example, I am meeting an medium sized accountancy recruitment company in couple of weeks, now if you had a site that ranked well for accountancy, it would not be difficult to have a conversation about that with the MD. However, like anything in life, it boils down to money. Is it going to be worthwhile for them?

You need to give the "possible sales people" a good idea of the average transaction value and what they could make. I have very limited knowledge of the website rental market, so I don't know if it's worth £10 per month or £10,000 per month!

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Hi Scootek,

Your suggestion of working with another company already in the b2b environment is a great idea.

A lot of our rental sites were created for niches such as Dentists, personal trainers, chiropractors, plumbers etc. who can make a good profit from a minimal number of clients and who work on a local basis. It was easy for us to approach these types of businesses when we had the time. The thinking behind speaking with types of businesses is that even though there are a low number of searches a month for let's say 'Dentist Chiswick' this would be considered a very targeted keyword. We have found that many of businesses in the niches mentioned above receive enough business from these targeted keywords to make this type of site worth their while.

As you say, many people would rather buy the site from us (which we have done in the past) but a lot of people don't mind renting. We have found that this is a good option for businesses that don't already have a website, but having said that we still rent sites to businesses that have their own website!

We do have a % in mind that we would offer anyone that 'sells' a site. I will speak with my business partner when he is back and see what we can think of doing.

You will probably find that most have sites. However, if an additional site generated enquiries at reasonable cost, then most small businesses would not turn it down. So that might be a good angle.

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Is your service branded up or can be done white label?

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No not branded at all so could be done white label for sure. How would you suggest this would work best?

The only problem we found was that if we bought the site before having talked with businesses we boxed ourself into a corner because we could only sell that site to a specific niche in a pre determined area as the domain names had both the niche and area in the URL (like the example of DentistChiswick.org). As we don't have a 'Sales Team' we were finding it hard to make time to do the SEO and sales.

However, the good thing about having the pre-ranked sites is that if someone wants to rent it today we could put their details on there in a couple of hours and away it goes, already at the top of Google, instant traffic. So we have found ourself in a catch 22. That's why I thought a sales team (or even a couple of sales guys) would work best as they would know what sites we have available and can go out and target specifically.

We still have a number of sites available (but haven't been buying any new ones recently. They rent well but we don't have the time to contact people) but what we have started doing is buying a domain name and creating the site specifically when someone wants it and only charge them 'rent' when the site reaches an agreed position/page. The only draw back with this is they have to wait for it to rank, which is usually between 2-4 weeks.