Matthew C. Egan (@ImageFreedom at Twitter) recently tweeted:
Recently a client chose Image Freedom over another SEO company. Why'd they choose us? We use Basecamp from @37signals. #TrueStory
We asked Matthew to share the rest of the story with us. His tale provides good inspiration for how you can use Basecamp to help pitch clients, regardless of your industry. Here's what he wrote:
I was sitting down with a potential client who was interested in Search Engine Optimization for his business. My company Image Freedom had been in business in a new town for less than six months and I didn't quite have the name for myself that any new business strives to build. This potential client had told me that he'd been speaking with a well known local company regarding SEO and he wanted to get a second opinion before locking down his choice.
I began to talk about my service, my game plan for optimization, and he told me essentially I was telling him much of what he'd heard, link building, the Google Local Business Center, optimizing each page for popular search terms, etc. This firm he'd spoken to had been around a lot longer than I had and had to answer these questions a hundred times over. I was sweating a little bit, what made me different? I wasn't about to lose this opportunity.
It occurred to me that I'd spent much of the day working with another client, MadeInSATX, and that they'd been commenting and coordinating some SEO ideas of their own through this new software I had been turned onto, Basecamp. I think I'd been using the software no more than a couple of weeks and I tapped in the address into my laptop and spun it around to this potential client. I told him that in my experience web development came with a certain mystery. You pay a guy, he says he is going to do X, Y and Z but after you meet with him you may not know what progress has been made or where your project is in being completed. I told him that for me Basecamp was my way of including the client every step of the way.
I created a new project, I generated a username and password and sent it to his e-mail which he immediately got via smart phone. I showed him how I had the Chieftent application on my iPhone and I went about creating milestones and to-do lists for his project. If we begin today, I'll have the design document for you by this date, entered it into Basecamp, if we begin today, I'll have a mockup via development server for you by this date, entered that into Basecamp too. He was clearly impressed.
See he thought the way that I did, that when you hire someone to do web work for you, it is often because web work is foreign to you. Having a tool like Basecamp allowed him to feel connected to his project, and while he didn't sign with me that very minute. I believe that Basecamp put me over the edge in his eyes. He called me just a few hours later saying he'd chosen Image Freedom to handle his SEO, and at the end of the call he said that not a whole lot made my company different from the one he'd previously spoken with. Our prices were more or less the same, we both offered a non-competetion so we wouldn't be off helping his competitors with their SEO, we both said we'd do essentially the same thing, but it was Basecamp and how I was applying it as a customer service resource that gave him the confidence that I was the right company to work with.
Basecamp made a believer out of me that day, and while my business is smaller than many I've seen highlighted on the 37Signals site, I know that as I grow Basecamp will grow with me, already capable of handling situations I haven't run into yet. There are a lot of competitors out there who do great work, mine is a field filled with some very talented people, I needed something that made me different, I needed a something special: thankfully I had Basecamp.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
