One product nobody ever wants to buy is WordPress Maintenance.
For the record, I haven’t sold WordPress Maintenance in years!
Because who in their right mind would buy a maintenance package?
I don’t subscribe to maintenance for my rickety old car or my fancy phone.
I don’t even buy maintenance plans for my expensive-ass house!
Why on Earth would I buy a maintenance plan for a website that is working just fine without it?!
Yet maintenance is a required part of owning a car, phone, home, computer, and website.
Maintenance is a part of my main product, because it’s an important part of owning a website.
But it’s a throw-in product that included in everything I sell, because it’s the right thing, not because anybody every wanted it.
Ya know who people hate calling? Maintenance people, that’s who!
Every single conversation I’ve ever had with my air-conditioning maintenance person, my car-repair person, my roof-repair person has been a conversation that has cost me thousands of dollars. Every single time.
I don’t like those conversations, and neither do your customers.
“Maintenance” Implies “Broken”
You don’t need maintenance unless something’s broken or woefully-out-of-date.
When’s the last time you needed to fix something that wasn’t broken or upgrade something that wasn’t out-of-date? Never.
So every maintenance conversation is about fixing broken or deficient stuff. Those are bad conversations.
Provide maintenance, because you are honest and you , reluctantly, must.
But don’t sell it. Nobody wants it.
Websites need maintenance even if their owners think they don’t.
Website maintenance is business overhead.
Everybody hates business overhead.
In fact, a primary goal of every single business on Planet Earth is to reduce business overhead!
People don’t want to pay for additional overhead.
But at the same time, it saves them and me hundreds of headaches and ugly “you’ve been hacked” conversations per year.
How to Sell WordPress Maintenance
Since no person in their right mind would buy “maintenance,” I decorate my WordPress Maintenance product with all sorts of features that customers will buy.
The WordPress Maintenance is a required throw-in, more-or-less, that provides no value to the sales conversation.
But ya know what does add value to a sales conversation? Fear! That’s what!
Effectively, it’s our God-given duty to scare our customers into taking the action that they must take to avoid future embarrassment, loss of sales, hacked SEO, etc. (i.e. We’ve got to get them to buy Website Maintenance).
Things like improving SEO, SEO security, website speed improvements, security guarantees, avoiding the embarrassment of seeing Viagra ads in your google results for your site, and unlimited website support… They’ll pay for that stuff!
And that stuff is, literally, WordPress Maintenance.
My Maintenance Products don’t have “Maintenance” in their names, but their core function is still maintenance.
