Website overhauls –
considerations for sales-ready lead generation

For B2B services companies

Thinking about overhauling your website to turn it into a lead-generating machine?

Then I’ll challenge you to re-think your strategy.

Re-doing / overhauling your website likely won’t get you more sales-ready leads.

Why?

Because getting sales-ready leads knocking on your door isn’t a project. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it sort of thing.

It’s a complex, long-term, high-uncertainty process. One that carries with it a fair amount of exploration and change.

Sometimes people say they want their “website optimized for SEO” or inbound marketing.

That’d be like renovating a restaurant and expecting it to do well because you made it look current with new lighting and seating. If you want that restaurant to stand a chance, what you need are reliable and personable wait staff, solid reviews on Yelp/Google, a great head chef, and the right food quality-to-price ratio. And if you’re in a competitive city like Portland or Manhattan, you need to have some kick-butt recipes.

Getting sales-ready leads from your website is more complicated than that, but the point stands: it’s more about what’s on the inside.

It’s fair to assume you need a decent stable structure for a website, but that’s an insufficient condition to achieving your goal of sales-ready leads.

So what do I really need to do to try to bring sales-ready leads in the door?

You need a functional marketing machine.

What does that mean?

For starters, you need to develop the right content (over time, not a one-shot project).

So what is the right content?

It’s information that potential customers want to engage with.

That could mean targeted landing pages, articles, case studies, FAQs, etc.

How do you develop such content?

Three of the more important elements are:

  1. Aligning with the needs and interests of your potential customers.
  2. Understanding the purpose of each piece of content.
  3. Building up the necessary credibility/authority to be seen and believed.

This will be harder than you want it to be. Acknowledge that reality, and charge forward.

You want your website to be a digital reflection of who you are and want to be as a company.

The raw content is likely to come mainly from your SME’s heads.

You want to express your voice, your perspective. Not someone else’s.

From there it’s mainly about:

  1. Empathy
  2. Exploration
  3. Testing
  4. Analysis

You’re going to need some marketing methods to layer over the website foundation.

So what marketing methods should I be considering?

Well, foundationally you’re going to need content, so start digging into content marketing.

It’s worth noting that content marketing generally isn’t a complete solution on its own because you need to get your content in front of people.

So how do you get your content in front of people?

There’s a good chance you’ll be interested in inbound marketing (see Pros and Cons of Inbound Marketing and Inbound readiness calculator), whether paid search or organic search (SEO).

A few other methods that could potentially leverage your website content:

  1. Social media marketing
  2. Email marketing
  3. Account-based engagement
  4. Partner channel marketing

You’re probably seeing now how this may be a longer journey than you were anticipating.

Okay, but I’m re-doing my website now. Is there anything I can do to help prepare for thinking about sales-ready leads in the future?

Yep. Several things:

  1. Don’t do the initial development yourself. There are many companies that do this all the time.
  2. Use an off-the-shelf CMS if you can. There are several options. Unless you’re a large company, like >$100M/yr sort of size, you should probably start down the path of an off-the-shelf platform and convince yourself that it won’t work for you before you go custom.
  3. Make sure your site structure is flexible and that you don’t need to pull in your webdev for every little thing. What I mean is:
    1. Can you relatively easily add/remove the business segments you’re showing on your site?
    2. Can you easily update the navigation and footer menus from the CMS (as opposed to having to modify code)?
    3. Can you modify title tags and meta descriptions?
    4. Can you easily build a new page layout from scratch or are you reliant on the templates your webdev provided during the site build?
  2. Can you easily clone / duplicate one of your existing pages to create a new page with the existing page as a starting point?
  3. Do you understand how to add new images to the CMS?
  4. Do you understand how videos can be embedded on your site?
  5. Do you have a category/tag structure that you can easily modify it over time?
  6. Do you have different types of posts for different purposes (e.g. pages vs case studies vs articles)?
  7. Can you auto-populate content?
  8. Are contact forms integrated with your CRM?

So now what?

Now you understand that overhauling your website is just the starting line for trying to bring in sales-ready leads through your website. Check out Good and Bad reasons to overhaul your website and Website Strategy for Engineering Companies for more thoughts on this topic. Feel free to reach out if you’d like help trying to get sales ready leads knocking on your digital door.

Yes, let’s chat

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