No subject

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for about a year we've been offering free website assessments as part of
our marketing efforts.
we have a cold-calling agency call people up and offer them the
assessment.
we usually follow up with a letter too.
we've focused on particular industries too -- healthcare, financial
services, retail, etc.

once we've got a lead i do a half-hour call with the prospect to find
out what they want to assess. [CF: using a premade questionnaire]

there are three types of prospects
1. clients that have a project in mind (these are the best, and usually
can get you an RFP right away.)
2. clients that can be convinced that they need a redesign (these are
surprisingly rare/difficult)
3. clients that want free consulting (too many)

it is very easy to identify #3. they will give themselves away almost
immediately. then all you need is a plan for how to gracefully get out
of doing the audit.

it is very difficult to sell a project to #2. usually they sound
promising but they need you to help them sell the project internally.
that's actually the worst sort of free consulting -- not the free audit
and recommendations, but all the free strategic consulting on building a
business case, meeting people, proving the value of the project and your
work. 

assuming we go forward with doing the audit, the main goal is to keep it
simple.
we have some metrics we use to do the assessment. i'm really not happy
with the metrics but they are fine for the purpose.
typical scenario approach -- couple of user types, follow a key path for
each, then make some recommendations
i have a standard template that i use, in ppt

i've done audits for some big name clients, so that's nice to add to the
case study list
in the year i've been working on this i've maybe done 25-30 audits. out
of those maybe 5 resulted in an immediate RFP, 2 resulted in a long-term
persuasion project that was ultimately unsuccessful, and the rest
resulted in friendly contacts with clients who got some free work out of
the deal.
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-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com