Yep. Understand conversion. Figure out what the business needs the website for and how you can deliver that. 90% of templates cover the generic business needs.

Yep. Understand conversion. Figure out what the business needs the website for and how you can deliver that. 90% of templates cover the generic business needs. Make your money by explaining the difference between warm and cold leads, how 98% of the website traffic will be warm leads (unless they are blogging/content generating all the time, which they probably aren't if Squarespace etc is an option) and how creating a set of specific lead pages can be used with AdWords etc etc., which could be built in to your offering. I don't know how relevant "field of dreams" is for a bunch of people here, but "if you build it they will come" absolutely does not apply to the web anymore. Explain that to your client, explain that a Squarespace site or WordPress template relies on pretty much that - and you'll make something that they can a tally generate leads from. Of course, if it's just brochureware you'll need to tailor this a little better - "what are they looking for, should this be all on the homepage? Do we need lead gen pages?" etc - this is the custom solution.