By Nick Nelson

It’s not unusual to see large web hosting providers offering 500MB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth for $7.95 monthly in today’s web hosting market. Because of this extreme overselling, newcomers to the web hosting industry often feel the need to compete solely on price, which sparks the question of how one compete with such a large corporation. The answer is simple – don’t compete on price, instead focus on selling the sizzle, instead of the steak.

“Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle” is an ancient marketing maxim which means, instead of focusing on simply selling hosting to your prospective customers, sell your prospective customers the advantages you provide over a larger host. However, before you can convince your prospects of the benefits you can provide, you must first determine their priorities and needs, which will only be achieved by listening to them.

You have two ears and one mouth, use these proportionally. Listen to your prospects, ask them questions about their company, personal goals, or any concerns they might have had with prior web hosting providers and then listen more. Once you are able to gain a lead on what your customer wants, appeal to their emotional needs, most consumers buy on emotions, not logic.

If your prospective customer has strong ties to the community, sell them on the benefits of putting money back into the community. Tell them about what you have done for the community, tell them any organizations of which you are a member, or any current charitable work you do in the community such as hosting community church sites, sponsoring of a small college scholarship for the local high school, or simply your membership to the local PTA and Chamber of Commerce. The prospective customer will be much more likely to disregard the price difference if they know it’s going back into their community.

If your prospective customer is not tech savvy, has had support issues with their prior host, or is in need of frequent computer assistance, they will be easy to sell on the value of a personal relationship, and the fact you are only a phone call away is just icing on the cake. Many of the people in charge of purchasing for companies may not be tech savvy, but do know the pain involved in receiving support through an outsourced call center. Make sure your customer knows that you want to  establish a personal relationship by listening to them both pre-sale and post. Most importantly, treat your prospective customers like current customers, and your current customers like guests in your home. Remember, your customers can also be your most effective sales team if you gain their respect and trust.

Use your features to convince your leads how you can benefit their company. As a exercise, make a list of the features you provide, with each feature, list a benefit. Telling a customer that their site will be hosted on Dual Xeons with two gigabytes of RAM won’t be nearly as effective as telling the customer that you use only the best servers to ensure that they never lose a sale due to their website being unavailable. In the end, customers are not concerned with what the server is built with, they are concerned with what’s in it for them, and what advantage they will gain from it.

By focusing on how you can benefit your prospective customers as a local market web host you will have no problem competing with the monster corporations who can provide hosting for less than $100 a year. By pushing the benefits instead of the features, you will be able to appeal to your customers emotional needs. Once you can do this, the consumer’s emotions will start to outweigh logic, and you’re chances of selling to them will greatly increase.  Remember, selling the sizzle is important, but don’t discount the value of a great T-Bone.

About Nick Nelson:

Nick Nelson is a freelance author and owner of HostingJobs.com .  Nick Nelson is employed by Voxtreme.com  who also owns HTTPme.com .  Nick can be reached at Nick [@] httpme.com  (a non-spam friendly address)