Sales management

Why Sales Leaders Should Insist on Having a Say in Their Company’s Website

Closed circuit to researchers in our industry: If you plan to survey sales leaders anytime soon, feel free to include a question about their involvement in the company website. You’d be breaking ground.

Sales leaders should have a bigger say in the company’s website. Sure, we have little way of telling how involved you currently are. But given that today’s debate about website ownership mostly revolves around how various marketing factions should work with one another and IT, with almost no mention of sales, one can’t help but get the feeling that sales leaders generally have minimal say in what B2B buyers see when they enter their brand’s online domain.

“With more information, options and people involved in the sales process, buyers are paralyzed when trying to move forward,” says Gartner’s Brent Adamson. B2B companies need to make the purchasing process easier, maintains Adamson, who says the onus is on sales leaders to make it happen.

But how can sales leaders make the B2B buying process easier if they’re not actively involved (or involved at all) in their company’s primary digital presence? While it may be possible for sales leaders to simplify certain aspects of the buying process, it’s hard to imagine how they can help to ensure buyers get the simplest, most cohesive experience if a pivotal part of that experience, the website, is wholly outside their realm of responsibility or focus.

The suggestion isn’t that sales leaders need to become experts at branding or web development. The suggestion is that those who work on the website should be taking cues from sales leadership. Nobody understands the needs of the company website’s most important visitors better than sales. At the very least, sales leaders should be included in a continuous feedback loop.

While many B2B companies are wise to consider wholesale process changes pertaining to website development, sales leaders can infuse themselves into the process by making sure that the current website stakeholders can satisfactorily answer the following questions.

Is Our SEO Strategy Bringing in the Right Kinds of Visitors?

As you read this, people are visiting your company’s website. How did they get there? Were they referred from other pages or review sites? Were they searching for a specific answer or more information on a particular topic? Can these visitors buy from you or influence the purchasing decision?

Website analytics can answer the first three questions, but it’s hard to know whether we’re attracting the right visitors without input from sales. As of 2017, the company website ranked as the top marketing expenditure behind analytics. Without sales and marketing orchestration, it’s entirely possible that thousands of hours could be dedicated to driving unqualified traffic. Analytics might show that the company’s website is attracting visitors and converting them like crazy. And that may very well be, but if it’s later determined that very few marketing-qualified leads (from any or all sources) are turning into actual customers, we’re talking about a big miss that’ll take a while to correct.

It’s not uncommon for marketers to care deeply about total traffic and form fills because that’s how they’re measured. But success in these areas doesn’t necessarily mean that similar success will follow for the sales team. In fact, misplaced marketing success is often counterproductive for sellers who now must invest their time trying to engage the wrong people. This is why B2B sales and marketing alignment is so critical, especially as it relates to defining and attributing success.  

Sales leaders aren’t responsible for marketing attribution, but they have every right to request deeper insight into this area. By understanding which referral sources, keywords, and web pages are helping their cause and which aren’t, sales leaders can use hard evidence to suggest changes to the website and the content that resides on it.

Is Our Site’s Messaging Consistent with How We Talk with Prospects Directly?

According to research from SiriusDecisions, the inability to communicate a value message is the number one reason sales teams fail to meet quota. It’s easy to pin this on the shortcomings of individual sales reps, but how can sales reps bear the brunt of the responsibility when their company’s website fails to communicate a clear value message?

According to Google, 90% of B2B buyers use search as part of their research. And given that more and more of the buying process is performed online, we can only assume that most B2B buyers will check out our website when considering whether it makes sense to either engage with our company or respond to a sales rep. If our website doesn’t uniquely differentiate our offering in the minds of potential buyers, it stands to reason that these buyers can easily make the decision not to engage with our company, without us ever knowing about it. Our analytics may show a single visitor who didn’t convert. Our CRM may show a single lead who didn’t respond. In reality though, our website may be responsible for our failure to make the buyer’s shortlist. Whether that’s due to a lack of positioning, lack of established trust, or both, it can’t continue.

Of course, change is constant. What buyers care most about today might be different than what they cared about a few years ago. And competitive pressures can quickly make our unique selling proposition less than unique. Our website needs to constantly convey the unique value we provide to the right buyer in today’s market. Who better than sales leaders to help make that happen?

Are We Taking Full Advantage of Conversion-Focused Pages?

By and large, B2B buyers want a more B2C-like buying experience. The growing expectation for B2B buyers is that when they want answers, they should be able to instantly connect with someone who can provide them. This has led to more chatbots and instant messaging functionality on B2B websites. But is all this new functionality as sales-functional as it could be?

Here again, sales leaders know the terms of engagement better than anyone else. They can help web developers understand where this messaging might feel intrusive and where it might be implemented or modified to better meet the needs of a specific webpage’s visitors. Further, sales leaders will look at these pages differently than a web developer or even a marketer would. Where a web developer might simply see a well-built chat function, a sales leader might notice a lack of trust-building elements on the page and suggest a strategically placed testimonial that ultimately leads to a boost in real-time website engagement.

The Company Website: A Key Opportunity for B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment

We’re just scratching the surface of how B2B sales leaders can help their companies create a more effective website. If you currently have no say in your company’s website, proactively involving yourself might be among the most important actions you can take this year. And keep in mind that most of the considerations mentioned above also apply to your company’s LinkedIn Page, which can be another key brand touchpoint for prospects.
 

For more ideas and tactics for meeting today’s B2B buyers where they are, subscribe to the LinkedIn Sales Blog.
 

 

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