Are you using your website as a sales lead generation tool? You should be.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jan 19, 2009 @ 01:00 AM
One of the great things about reading new books is that they might give you new ideas well beyond the scope of the book. I just read Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway's terrific new book Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. As Anneke points out, savvy companies now realize that customers and prospects use the web to investigate a company sometimes well in advance of a salesperson's call. Sales prospects are not just looking for solutions, either. They're looking for credibility through corporate transparency, too.
In addition to all the important information about how companies and salespeople are using next-generation technologies to predict and create business results, there's an important subtext hinted at in the book, which is that companies had better get smart on how to empower their websites to get new qualified prospects. To Anneke's thoughts, I'm going to add two additional elements that occurred to me as I read the book. If your own company isn't doing these things, it is probably falling behind in the marketplace:
1) Making a website more relevant through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Making a website into a sales lead generation machine means more than just buying keywords. It involves, among other things, investigating the efficacy of keywords, and creating text, articles, whitepapers, and a blog around these words. This makes the site easier to find through major search engines, and allows, through the blog and whitepaper responses, better two-way communication with prospects and customers. Companies like HubSpot have whitepapers explaining basic and advanced SEO concepts. If your company is not aware of these concepts, it should be, as it's ignoring a valuable sales lead generation resource.
2) Ensuring that your web visitors know the individuals that are running your company. People who are interested in doing business with your company want to know who's running it. It's not just about Corporate Branding either. They want to know who's responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company if they're going to invest in their solutions. If something goes haywire with an installation for example, they want to be able to contact an executive, and they want to know that your executives are proud enough of their solutions that they'll put their names behind them. Over the past few months, I've been shocked at the number of companies that have no corporate information on their websites. Even worse, many of them have no contact information beyond a form to fill out; no phone number, address, or city. This lack of corporate transparency creates a credibility gap and destroys any trust the prospect has in dealing with the company. And it encourages propsects to run to competitors that are more transparent.
Bottom line, if your company is ignoring Search Engine Optimization, it's losing business. And if it has no data regarding the management of the company, it's crippling its brand recognition as well as its credibility. So I invite you to take a look at your company's website and web practices. If it is in violation of the two principles I've outlined above, then it's time for you to have a serious talk with your management.