Your website

Disciplines > Sales > Prospecting > Your website

Description | Example | Discussion | See also

Description

You can use your company website as an automated prospecting tool. Here are a number of things you can do:

Generally make the site attractive and easy to use.
Put your full product catalog online. Also let them download a .pdf and order a paper copy.
Make sure there is a 'contact' link on every page.
Allow them to make both free-text queries and guiding them through a product tree.
Add 'call me' links, whereby they enter their phone number and you call them back. Do this as quickly as possible.
Use cookies so you can track the person and offer customized information.
Use analytics programs to give more sophisticated analysis of overall customer activity around your site.

Also differentiate between websites that are designed to sell online and those which are designed to create leads and find prospects. If you want the latter, then design your site to achieve this, not the former. If necessary, set up a separate site or subsite designed for professional buyers.

Example

Discussion

Websites such as Amazon are benchmarks for personalization as they not only remember your name but where you have gone on the site.

Usability of sites is very important. People will start abandoning the site if they cannot find what they want within three clicks. The further information is down a page, the less likely it is that they will read it (and especially if they have to start scrolling for something that is not visible).

You may have noticed that websites are replacing sales people! Whilst this is an unstoppable force and companies that fight it may go out of business, there are also many companies where a direct sales force is still very important.