Be(e) Strategic: Your Website is Your Best Salesperson

13 May 2021

It's time to talk about the most important member of your sales team: your business website. 75% of companies say that closing more deals is their top sales priority, yet 65% of sales leaders have identified non-selling activities such as admin to be one of the biggest time sinks for salespeople. How can you get down to closing when your schedule is backlogged with low-value tasks? Perhaps you haven’t considered how your website affects sales productivity. We show you how it works.

Besides the obvious, what should a website do?

A website isn't just a beautiful digital brochure, filled with educational content and well-lit pictures of your products and services. Its job is to act as a lead generating machine, a prospecting tool, and it should help your sales team close more deals faster. If your website isn't doing all of those things, then you may as well go back to print advertising and cold calling.

Having a website isn't just a box-ticking exercise that those dreamy creatives in your marketing department insist on; it's a critical path to access your target market and convince them to become paying customers. Sure, it's marketing's role to conceptualise the website, create all that essential content and make sure everything is brand consistent. But at the heart of it, a website is a tool within your greater digital strategy that is motivated by conversions and sales; its design will be based upon the psychology of your buyer, their pain points, and the questions they need answering in order to commit to a purchase.

Your website is a 24/7 sales rep

Salespeople have to sleep. Websites don't. Customers are looking for solutions to their problems at all hours of the day and night. This means there are at least three things you have to get right:

Make sure your website ranks high on the search engine results page (SERP).
There's enough content on the website to help the customer self serve –– at least on the basic questions around your product or service.
You have a data capture function to collect the visitor's contact details so that your sales team can get in touch during working hours.

Point 1 and 2 can be solved by utilising topic clusters and publishing high-quality content that will boost your organic SEO. To increase your website's interactivity, you can design your own HubSpot chatbot to answer your customer's FAQs and collect the necessary contact details required from your leads when the sale's team is offline. A discoverable,content-rich website will be a huge ally in your efforts to sell more and to sell faster.

Be(e) strategic: How your website revs up your sales strategy

If you've used inbound best practices to design your website, you'll find that sales happen a lot quicker. Some customers may enjoy speaking to your salespeople directly; others just want to answer their own questions, make the purchase and get on with the rest of their day.

With content specifically aimed at your buyer personas as well as targeted, automated workflows, your website can nudge the buyer towards a purchasing decision and help you leverage opportunities you may have otherwise missed––like upsells or cross-sells.

Your website helps you capitalise on the buyer's expressed interest by guiding them towards precisely the thing they're looking for, without interruptions or delays.

Tips to boost website sales:

Display customer reviews: Nothing sells your brand like a happy customer. Include testimonials or reviews on your website to increase the buyer's confidence in your product or service.
Use CTAs and pop-ups: It's important to be strategic about where you place your CTAs and pop-ups and how often you use them. You can drive the lead towards the "Buy Now" button by offering discounts and utilising CTAs that create a sense of urgency.
Upload videos: Content is king, and video is one of the most engaging ways to showcase your product or service. What's more, videos bring in 66% more qualified leads per year.
Continuously improve UX: Designing and publishing your website isn't where the buck stops. 89% of consumers hopped over to a competitor after a poor website user experience. Ensuring your UX is always of the highest quality will keep customers engaged. You can do this by optimising your website for both desktop and mobile devices, checking that your pages upload quickly and making your website intuitive and easy to navigate.

Why is your website an important sales tool?

Your website covers many of your salesperson's blindspots. It can collect important data about your leads interests and intentions so that when they reach the point where a purchase looks imminent, your salespeople can focus on adding value to the customer's experience rather than still pitching the product or service.

A website can help you establish your brand's credibility and support the customer throughout every stage of the buyer's journey. In the case of B2Bs, where several stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process, directing these individuals to the website and allowing them to learn more about your product or service independently helps to get everyone onboard faster and assists the salesperson in establishing a deeper level of rapport with the potential client. Instead of having to demonstrate the value of your brand and win over each stakeholder individually, your website does much of the talking on your company's behalf until the decision-makers are ready to have a more purchase oriented conversation.

Big takeaway

The big takeaway is that a lead generating website is very much the collective effort of both the marketing and sales team. Building and designing your website strategically will help to optimise your efforts across both departments, helping to increase sales and ensure that your business is positioned for growth.

Before you start hashing out your dream website, take a look at our Marketing and Sales Alignment Template to ensure that your website project benefits from a goal-oriented strategy.