DMN3 Blog

Wouldn't you agree that your B2B or B2C Web site should help increase your sales? It sounds simple enough, yet most of us fail to make the effort required to align it with target market sales cycles.

How does your Web site measure up? Unless your Web site is specifically designed to move prospects through the sales cycle, you are leaving money on the table.

Imagine what could happen if you could improve your marketing ROI by 20 or 30-percent. Keep reading to optimize your Web site for sales …

To move online prospects through each sales cycle, you need to:

1. Understand your targeted prospects (targeted markets)
2. Understand the sales cycle for all of your prospects (targeted markets)
3. Determine the stages of the sales cycle that the Web site should support
4. Identify the visitor's needs for each stage in the sales cycle
5. Make it easy for visitors to progress from one stage to another in the sales cycle

B2B vs. B2C Sales Cycle: The sales process in the B2B environment is typically longer than that of B2C. The larger the business, the longer it will take to complete the sales cycle. In the B2B environment, it will involve a “team” of prospects looking to address both personal and business needs.

Let Your Sales Team Design the Site: While there are many sources you can utilize to gain insight and understanding these issues, the one you should start with is your own sales staff. Only the customers themselves are a better source of what needs to be part of the Web site to facilitate their movement through the sales cycle.

Your sales and marketing people understand prospective customers. They can help you determine:

• The specific content or knowledge sought by prospects at each stage of the sales cycle
• What industry segments are meaningful for the offerings of your company
• What are the sales cycle stages for your markets and specific roles of those involved
• What actions do prospects typically take as they transition from one stage to another
• What problems and issues exist for which you have solutions
• What are the objections they need to overcome

Analyze Your Site With What You Have Learned: Now think about how your site is organized and the content that is there. Put what you have learned from your sales and marketing people to work. Your Web site needs to provide information in a way that is relevant to the prospect visiting your site. It also needs to do so incrementally over time, providing the kind of information he or she will need as they move through the various stages of the sales cycle. This allows the visitors to quickly get to the most relevant content.

Your Web site needs to align itself with the needs of target market prospects as they move through the sales cycle.

Note of Caution: Remember, it is critical that you understand what your prospects expect in terms of online support. Otherwise, you might decide not to support an online sales cycle stage that your prospects expect to be supported. That missing step will result in prospects abandoning the Web site.

Make Transitions Easy: Prospects are driven into the sales cycle by “needs” and they progress through it because of incremental satisfaction of their needs. Once the relevant needs to one step in the sales cycle are met, the online experience should facilitate progress to the next step. These transitions between stages are critical to a successful outcome.

If the visiting prospect cannot determine what to do next or where to go to address their new needs, they may simply abandon the sales cycle. Visitors must never feel that they have reached a dead end. Utilize Calls to Action to ensure that prospects easily know what options they have. 

Web metrics are an essential tool to gain insight into how your prospects are dealing with these progression transitions.

Many site visitors appear initially on different pages within your Web site, not just the homepage. Your sales cycle should be mapped to multiple locations on your Web site. Otherwise, your visitors may miss opportunities to engage with the first stage of the sales cycle.

A well designed Web site experience should behave like a well planned sales call. It should contain the content needed and organized in such a way that a sales person could utilize it for their sales presentation.

Relevancy is crucial to the sales cycle: Your Web site's job is to tell your company's story to a prospect in a way that makes the prospect understand, in the prospect's own language, how your company understands them, their business, and their problems -- and why your company has the solutions.