For B2B businesses, a great website can be like adding a few more people to your company’s sales team.
After all, your website never sleeps. It’s always on the job—providing your prospects with up-to-date information, engaging content, and proof you’ve delivered quality products and services for other companies.
At the same time, your website vets and prepares your prospects, so your sales reps have a much better chance to close a sale when they reach out. But some websites fail to engage and nurture prospects because they’re technologically outdated and not aligned with your sales team or company strategic initiatives.
Many of these websites don’t even attract the right traffic (or any traffic to speak of). Nor do they:
- Identify what you offer and who it’s for.
- Provide a compelling argument that you can solve the prospect’s problem.
- Provide the right mechanisms for prospects to get in touch or stay in touch throughout their research and purchasing stages.
Choose a Good-Better-Best Approach
What can you do to turn your B2B website into an extension of your company’s sales team? To transform your website into a “closing machine,” we suggest you take several steps to add particular features and capabilities to your website. We’ve divided those up below into three checklists that build upon each other.
If you’re just getting started, begin with the table stakes list. As you evolve your site you can slowly add more capabilities and functions. Ultimately, choosing which is best for your company right now depends on a combination of your current state, budget and overall sales or revenue goals.
Good—Table stakes
- Provide a compelling mobile-responsive user experience (UX) on smartphones, handhelds (iPads), laptops and desktop browsers.
- Ensure your website loads quickly (a few seconds).
- Show viewers you have what they’re looking for (clearly delineate your positioning front and center); and they fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).
- Tell the story of what you offer; don’t hold back on details because they won’t call to fill in the gaps.
- Provide numerous methods for prospects to contact you and talk to sales—(online form, email, phone). Include names, contact info and photos of your sales rep(s). Forms are best for tracking. Pictures of sales reps and individual contact info is a nice-to-have for putting faces with names. Provide multiple CTAs, but be careful not to overwhelm.
- Provide proof—case studies—that you’ve solved a similar problem for someone like them (I.e., a similar industry and application).
- Provide easy access to data sheets, 3D models and technical specs. if an engineer downloads your 3D model and builds it into a product they’re designing, you’ve just supported a future sale.
- Feature colorful and useful images that provide detail and relevant information, especially for products.
Better—Intermediate steps
Our Better checklist includes everything from Good, plus the below.
- Attract highly-qualified leads using tactics such as on-site SEO, thought leadership articles, case studies, promoted webinars and gated content.
- Continually review the website UX to make sure your content is aligned with corporate priorities. Are the products and services you’ve targeted for strategic growth prominently shown on the website, and built-out to attract targeted SEO traffic?
- Prominently promote what you most want to sell to your targeted prospects. The website UX should be a combination of what you most want people to do and what they are most interested in.
- Ensure your website copy (narrative) is aligned with the language and key messages your salespeople are using. Your prospects should experience the same story, whether read on your website or heard from a sales rep.
- Answer the questions you most frequently hear from your best prospects during the sales cycle. Additionally, answer questions that may weed out unqualified prospects before they contact you, and slow your lead intake process.
- Allow prospects to stay in touch with you through nurturing tactics (soft conversion) until they’re ready to buy.
- Give prospects a look inside your head so they can understand how your company thinks, your point of view and where you stand, with compelling thought leadership content. Educate and inform.
- Tell them about your process — how it works and what to expect.
Best—Next level
Our Best checklist includes everything from Good and Better, plus the below.
- Where applicable, provide a rough idea of pricing for customized solutions and services, as well as products.
- Establish programs to build audiences using tactics such as remarketing to site visitors. To do so, use platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
- Tie-in your website with your CRM to eliminate manual entry and improve your ability to track leads from the website.
- Incorporate marketing automation tactics to serve up gated content, exit-intent forms, email newsletter subscriptions, progressive profiling and lead scoring to identify your most highly-engaged prospects.
- Include multiple options for gated content and other soft conversions that support segmenting a marketing list.
- Use personalization techniques to offer readers the most relevant content to different industries, geographies, interests, personas based on geo-targeting, ad history, or past behavior.
- Create account-specific landing pages for salespeople to share personalized content featuring hand-selected case studies or capabilities information.
- Provide hidden or private pages for easy access to sales materials by your reps or distributors.
Turbocharge Sales With an Aligned Website
Modern B2B websites can turbocharge any sales organization and help you grow faster with better marketing. Start with our Good-Better-Best checklists to build a website that’s aligned with your company’s strategic initiatives and sales messaging. The result: motivated prospects and more sales.