[adrianhoward]

I build websites , computer software and mobile apps

too.... do what?

My top tip would be to stop talking about building web sites or mobile apps.

Instead talk about what those web sites and mobile apps are doing for the businesses you built them for.

When you have that mom and pop operation who are stressed out about meeting their mortgage payments you need to sell them something that will reduce their stress.

You're 100% correct they're not looking to "drop a chunk of change on any kind of bespoke software".

They might be looking for something that's going to regularly remind their existing customers of the great service they had last time, with almost no effort on their part, bringing old customers back into the store so they can focus on new sales. How much did that run of paper leaflets cost them to print and deliver? How many of them do they do a year? How much time and money would they save by trying an electronic newsletter / customer reminder service?

People don't want software. They want solutions to their problems. Sell those.

(This does involve doing lots of "talking to and understanding customers". This is not writing software. However - if you want to have a business writing software you, or somebody else, needs to do it.)

[jiggy2011]

Sure, there are plenty of solutions I could build that would help these people in some way.

The issue really is that you can't charge high rates to these people simply because they probably don't have that kind of money sitting in the bank.

In reality most of the gains you could give to these people by improving their online marketing through various means are going to provide more benefits in the long term than the short term.

That's a difficult sell to businesses that are worried about short term survival.

[adrianhoward]

The issue really is that you can't charge high rates to these people simply because they probably don't have that kind of money sitting in the bank.

You may be surprised if you dig a bit.

One of the problems with selling software solutions is that so many companies don't understand that they need software solutions - because they don't understand what software can do.

To pick some examples from when I was dealing with that sort of client I've seen folk: * spending days every week manually copy/pasting email addresses into spreadsheets * manually adding name/address info to a 1k+ paper mail out campaigns * spending a monthly four digit amount to a print shop to do layout work that a basic template in Pages/Word could do.

... and none of those people understood that the addition of a piece of software - even an off the shelf piece of kit that just needs configuring - could take that pain away. It could save them hundreds, sometime thousands, of dollars a week - every week.

That's a difficult sell to businesses that are worried about short term survival.

Those clients really understand the value of their time. The tedious stuff that you can automate away is usually the stuff that is stopping them doing what they want to do. If you can show them ways for them to stop wasting time on things they are not making them money, and back that up with case studies / references, they will happily find ways to pay you.

But you have to show them the value first.

Back in 1999 when I started my first business my idea of sales was something like "I do X. I need to get really good at X. I need to find people who want X. Ideally rich people who can afford to pay more for X". Much like you this ended up with me wandering around various places going "Hi - I do X".

Having gone through.... some learning experiences... since then - and having seen some excellent sales folk do their thang I finally figured out that this is totally arse-backwards way of going about finding work.

You start by looking for people who have problems that you can solve. Ideally big problems that cost them lots of money/pain. Then you figure out how to get yourself to the same place as the people with that problem. Then you then sell them their life without that problem (and incidentally that you do X that can make that problem go away).

You don't network to let folk know that you're a developer looking for work. You network to understand other peoples problems, and to help them understand that they're solvable.