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Websites are an optimal place to learn, test product positioning, test marketing
and, most importantly, attract prospects by engaging them in an interactive
dialogue. They enable a more proactive approach to business-to-business selling
that I call ProSultative Selling, which minimizes the consultative elements
of B2B sales by building constant dialog and interaction between buyer and supplier
across all channels of communication.
Websites deliver a blend of accessibility with low cost of contact and interaction
while also producing metrics from which it is possible to learn and improve.
When working to gain a basic understanding of the suitability of a product to
meet their needs, prospects prefer a website to a face-to-face meeting. The
website has replaced at least eighty percent of the interaction that used to
occur at the first meeting between a salesperson and a prospect. Your website
is the first crucial building block in changing your current sales process to
a ProSultative conversation.
Prior to the advent of websites as business tools, at a first sales meeting,
prospects would arrive ten minutes late and leave ten minutes early, giving
me, the salesperson, forty minutes. In those forty minutes, I would spend five
minutes on introductions and five minutes on wrapping up, leaving just thirty
minutes to pitch my product. The outcome of nearly every first meeting was re-direction
to another more junior person. The prospect would spend the meeting deciding
with whom you were going to work after the meeting.
After websites became common, these first meetings started on time with minimal
introductions, used the entire hour, and often were attended by more than one
person. The people I previously would have met with at subsequent meetings were
already present.
For example, I worked for Tenfold, a software and services company selling large-scale,
vertical applications, at the time the Internet was first becoming a business
tool. I had a first meeting with Paul Bench, a senior manager in the IT group
of National Westminster Bank. Paul walked into the meeting, greeted me, and
moved straight into a detailed discussion about our solution. At the conclusion
of the meeting I asked what drove the efficiency and productivity of this first
meeting; Paul explained he had visited the Tenfold website as he now always
did prior to vendor meetings. He had read about our solution and thought it
had use. He would not have granted me the meeting if he had not believed so.
The due diligence and deep questioning that occurred at a second or a third
meeting was happening at this first meeting.
From a sales process and productivity perspective, this was a tremendous advancement.
Unfortunately, even a decade later I do not see this knowledge being integrated
into sales processes. Marketing and Sales continue to act as discrete operations,
often with Sales seen as Marketing's customer. The website content is built
by Marketing who must work with sales to understand what information to provide
to replace this first meeting. The result is the first sales call is now run
by Marketing.
According to research from Marketing Sherpa, eighty percent of decision makers
find suppliers rather than suppliers finding them. Decision makers conduct this
research online, starting with search, which in turn leads prospects to the
vendor website. To reflect this dramatic change, current budgets for generating
new prospects need to be re-balanced across Sales and Marketing. Marketing and
Sales need to work together to create a path toward a prospect finding your
business rather than the cold-calling shotgun approach of your business trying
to find prospects.
To determine if your website is highly sales oriented, follow these steps:
- Ask someone who knows nothing about what you do to look at your website.
What do they say? Do they understand what you are selling?
- Look to see how quickly you can get to every piece of information on the
site. How many clicks are required; how long does it take? How easy is it?
Note that most website visitors rarely click through to a fourth level.
- Is all the data on the site appropriate for customers and prospects? As
all information on your site is about your company, consider if it is too
much information. I have found sites that make user guides available to prospects.
No prospect wants a product to be difficult to use, though they may accept
a learning curve if it delivers enough value. A user guide running to four
hundred pages may reflect a thorough support document, but it may also scare
the prospect into thinking a product is complicated.
- Are you drawing the customer through the information into an information
conversation? How easy have you made it for them to talk to someone? Starting
from the home page and seeing how quickly you can get to talk to someone if
you are a prospect is a valuable test. What happens if a prospect wants to
talk to a person immediately? Have you provided online chat or a phone number?
- Use a slow connection to connect to the website. Many times prospects will
visit your site in their own time. If a customer is accessing your site from
home, they may not benefit from the same web access speeds they enjoy at the
office. Reducing complexity, ensuring bandwidth-heavy animations and videos
are opt-ins, and simplifying downloads become good marketing principles.
- Hold some information back. The web allows your competition to review your
products and positioning and respond immediately. If you have something new
in your product and announce it on the web, your competition can react very
quickly. It is a delicate balance to put enough information on a website to
encourage a prospect to want to do business with you, while keeping enough
back to differentiate when engaging in a dialogue with a prospect.
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