My Old Sales Pitch Doesn’t Work in Scottsdale Anymore

I have a confession, and it costs me money every time I make it in Scottsdale.

For about six years I sold websites with one sentence, and I said it to anyone who would sit still long enough to hear it. Your competitors have one. You don’t.

It worked. It got me in the door, it closed deals, and I never once had to be clever about it.

It also isn’t true anymore, and Scottsdale is where I finally had to stop saying it out loud.

I check every city I audit on the plainest question I have, which is whether a business has a website at all. The evening I put those cities in order, Scottsdale sat on top of it at 90.0%, against the 83% I get across everything I count.

For years I had an answer ready for every excuse an owner gave me for not having one. Up there, nobody needs the answer anymore.

So my old pitch is dead up there. What am I supposed to say instead?

Two shops, same trade, one busy

A while back I looked at two pool companies in that city, a couple of miles apart, both going for years, both with a website someone was paid a decent sum to build.

One of them is booked into next month. The other told me his summer had been thin and he had a feeling the website was the problem.

He was right about the website. He was wrong about which part of it.

Both of them had spent money. Neither of them had spent it on the same thing, and only one of them could’ve told you what he’d actually bought.

Could you tell me what your last website invoice bought you, line by line, without going to look it up?

He wanted to talk about colors and a new logo, and I wanted to talk about the six seconds I spent staring at a blank white screen while his photograph downloaded onto my phone.

What the busy one did

The busy company’s site was on my screen before I’d got my thumb off the button.

Nothing clever about it. Small photographs, a top line saying what they did and which side of town they covered, and a phone number I could tap without zooming in first.

The quiet one opens with a picture the size of a poster, and the words turn up afterwards. On cell data I counted to six before anything worth reading appeared.

Speed is the softest thing about the city that finished first. Scottsdale averages 58 out of 100 on the phone speed test I run, which is exactly where the country as a whole sits.

That score comes out of Google’s own test, run as though your visitor were standing in a parking lot on cell service rather than sitting at a desk on office wifi, and Google’s own scale calls anything under 50 poor.

Which of those two companies do you think your homepage behaves like, on a phone that isn’t yours, somewhere with one bar of signal?

When the quiet one asked me what a fix would cost, I told him the poster was most of the bill. A photograph that big is a decision made in a meeting nobody thought to invite his customers to.

The thing I went looking for next

Both sites had photographs of pools. Both had a phone number. Both loaded over a secure connection, because that arrives with any decent host now and nobody has to ask for it.

The difference turned up when I went hunting for proof that either of them was still open for business.

The busy one linked its Instagram, and the Instagram had a job on it from last Thursday, tiles and all. The quiet one had a Facebook icon in the footer pointing at a page nobody had touched since 2021.

67.9% of the sites I opened in Scottsdale link a social profile, a shade ahead of the 66% I get nationally, and the ones doing it properly treat that link as a receipt rather than a decoration.

An abandoned profile is worse than no profile at all. Would you rather a stranger found nothing, or found a page that quietly stopped in 2021?

The part where you go and check me

None of this is something you have to take on faith, and I’d honestly rather you didn’t. Set the city box on my explorer to Scottsdale, leave the industry box alone, and it prints every rate alongside the number of sites sitting behind it, including the software everybody runs, where WordPress accounts for 40.2% of what I audited. I sampled 4,539 businesses and audited 3,390 websites to get there, which took a couple of weeks and a frightening amount of coffee.

Neither pool company was unusual. That’s the uncomfortable part, because it means the busy one never beat the quiet one with anything expensive.

The city grades out top of my whole list, and a top grade there never did mean a busy phone. My score reads the front of the building.

So what’s stopping you from doing the cheap version of it to whoever you’re up against this summer?

So what do I sell now?

Not the website. Everyone up there already has one, and the ones who don’t have made a decision I’m not talking them out of with a cold email on a Tuesday.

He swapped the poster for a photograph a fraction of the size and moved the phone number above it. I’d love to tell you the phone rang off the hook, and it didn’t, but people were arriving and staying long enough to read a sentence, which is more than he got in June.

I build websites for businesses in Scottsdale, and these days the conversation has to start somewhere else entirely.

What I sell now is the gap between those two pool companies, which turns out to have nothing to do with taste and everything to do with the first few seconds a stranger is willing to give you.

She won’t tell you she left. She’ll just be gone, and you’ll put the quiet month down to the economy.

How would you ever find out otherwise?

Tell me your trade is different

Some of you are reading this thinking your customers are nothing like the ones I keep describing. Older, or wealthier, or more patient, or all three at once.

Salons say it to me constantly, and they finish last of the forty-seven trades I check on owning a website at all. One owner spent forty minutes explaining why she didn’t want one, and she got further with me than she expected.

You might be right. I’ve been wrong about a whole trade before, and I’d much rather hear it from you than work it out for myself a year later.

Jewelers were that trade. I had the shops without a website filed as behind, and they were doing something else entirely.

So argue with me. Send me your address through my audit form and I’ll run the same checks on it by hand rather than by machine.

If your site turns out to be one of the good ones, I’ll write back and say so, and you can forward the email to whoever built it for you.