Number forty-four: Proof of concept
Good day. I'm Troy Dean from Video User Manuals and Agency Mavericks and this is the 101 Ways to Elevate Yourself and Demand Higher Fees: a practical guide for WordPress consultants to start attracting better quality clients, work on better, more interesting projects, and get paid better fees. Now let's go elevate.
Number 44: Proof of concept. I had project with an accounting firm that was just taking way too long to get the client to approve what it is we had proposed and out of pure frustration I came back to the office one afternoon and I loaded up Canvas from WooThemes and I basically built their website with their site map, their structure, a little bit of dummy content, and a slider on the homepage, and a contact form with Google Maps.
Within about 45 minutes, I had a black and white, gray box proof of concept that I e-mailed the client and they immediately approved it and said “Yes, that is exactly what we want. Now go and make it look beautiful and match our brand.” It saved so much time. It would have saved a lot more time if I had done it earlier in the process.
So the idea here is stop communicating to your clients in the written word or verbally about how their website is going to look and feel and actually build them a proof of concept. If you use something like WooThemes Canvas, which is essentially a blank canvas theme, it's black and white with no styling, just gray boxes and black and white text, you can show your client very quickly what it is you're talking about.
You can even install Woo Commerce and show them a vanilla, black and white installation of Woo Commerce and how that's going to work when a client logs in, has a look at their orders, and downloads their files. And you can show them that functionality with no styling to actually get them to approve what it is you're talking about very quickly.
So use Canvas by WooThemes to demonstrate a proof of concept in the browser to get your clients to buy into that concept much quicker than talking about it or writing about it. In the next video I'm going to talk about the importance of deadlines. Until then, go elevate.
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