Your Website as a Funnel — Connecting with the Decision Makers

In a previous post I talked about how your prospects have split personalities and your website needs to provide different content for different decision makers. Let’s talk about how to do just that.

You’ve got to create a funnel.

A funnel lets you start with addressing a wide audience and then presents branches that can speak directly to different subject matters. You start at a high level and then get increasingly specific by presenting exactly what each decision maker or interested party needs to decide in your favor, but what other decision makers might consider irrelevant or even boring. A website is uniquely suited to do just that-present a bit of information and let your readers decide if they want more. That means the CFO gets information about how your product might pay for itself and your technical staff gets specifications and the right level of detail to help them sign off, too.

This also means that your website and its content probably need to be bigger and deeper than they currently are. Your general or conventional marketing and sales strategy probably aren’t a single argument – your website, the text, and the way people navigate it have to reflect the complete depth of your sales process. If it doesn’t, then you will probably be disappointed in your site, too.

Let’s say you sell industrial sprockets. You’d start with the most general approach by letting the prospects see that they are in the right place and by presenting information about your company, your reputation, and how the industry praises you. You could then present them with options, which allow them to see how your pricing works, see the materials, and engineering behind your sprockets, or how easy your sprockets are to work with and install. Each story would provide increasing amounts of detail and calls to action, letting the prospects tell you when they want to know more. And, at every point, your navigation and layout should make it easy for them to shift gears (or sprockets), to switch from learning about bulk pricing to examining metallurgy and tensile strength. Of course, you will be looking at the web logs to see the paths your visitors follow and then continually adjust and strengthen them to make the paths they don’t follow more attractive. And, your CRM needs to be able to link every visitor from a single company together so your sales team can understand who is in on the decision to say, “Yes.”

Unless your product is very simple, perhaps a commodity, you need to offer your prospects and website visitors options, increasing amounts of information, and even more important, next steps at every point. These steps may include the option to contact you, to give you a bit more information about their company in order to receive white papers or useful tools, or to provide them with things that they can use to carry your sales argument further inside their organization. For example, have you ever considered offering your prospects PowerPoint slide sets that they can use to sell for you?

Yes, that means that your website has to be bigger and deeper than it is today. And it needs to keep growing and evolving. For example, do you have a blog like this? Do you encourage customers and prospects to sign up for a newsletter that contains useful information, not just sales pitches? How well does your site incorporate every interaction you have with a customer or prospect?

You probably know how to talk to each potential prospect, but might not know how to translate that into a website that sells. Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d be happy to show you how we’ve done just that for our customers and talk with you about how you can do the same thing to turn your site into an active part of your sales effort.