By Rob Hamshar
If your web site was one of your sales reps—out there on the road, entering prospects’ offices, and making his best pitch—would he be a high-performer: informed, thought-provoking, and persuasive? Or would he behave more like the typical low-performer: talking at length about your company’s history; describing products and services in an indiscriminate, “dump truck” fashion; asking unnecessary, tedious questions; making bold claims that outstrip anything your company can actually deliver on?
Essentially, your Web site is the hardest-working representative your company has—out there day and night, in every market, engaged in countless battles for mindshare among potential customers. But if your site is the equivalent of the low-performing rep (i.e., the online warehouse for product information and sales brochures), then that’s a serious handicap for Sales.
In our recent work on B2B website effectiveness we see two waves of evolution in site design among the most progressive B2B companies:
1. Solutions Configuration—These sites are designed to help prospects visualize the value of broader combinations of products and services. They dedicate more real estate to the company’s full breadth of capabilities and provide different mechanisms (often interactive) for visualizing how different combinations can work together to solve certain customer issues or create certain capabilities for customers. This approach helps the supplier create exposure for a broader set of products and services, but it also helps the buyer who is midway through their buying process and still trying to get a handle on how to think about solutions to their problems. Many B2B sites make some attempt at solutions configuration within their site—Avaya is a good example.
2. Decision Support Centers—These sites are designed to facilitate entire buying processes, providing useful information for buyers and directing them along the way. Beyond just solutions configuration, these sites are useful early on in the buying process (when it comes to helping prospects conceptualize the problem they should be solving for) and later in the process (when buyers are trying to reach internal consensus on purchase decisions and anticipate what it will look like to become a customer). The web site for Akamai, a leading IT company, is very advanced in providing decision support for prospects up and down the purchase process.
The sites in this last category are very broad in the types of decisions they support, extending up and down the purchase process. In doing so, they can create dynamic, sustained interaction (what some might call “stickiness”) and gradually influence and shape buyer perceptions in a way that ultimately helps the supplier win business.
In other words, these sites are helpful and valuable for buyers, but at the same time they are directive as to what is and is not important—and so the web experience itself leads buyers on a learning journey that arrives at YOU as the logical choice in suppliers. It seeks to reframe how the buyer assigns value to different things in a way that makes you appear most favorable. In short—it does what the best sales reps would do.
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