Recipe: Making Your Website a Better Sales Tool

An ongoing challenge with marketing professional services on the Web is the lack of personal, ongoing contact with visitors to your website. If a prospect only visits your site once and never gets past glancing at your home page, it has no more impact than seeing a one-time ad for your service in a magazine. In order to convert site visitors into interested prospects who are open to a conversation about what you can do for them, you need to keep them on your site longer, encourage them to return for future visits, provide a vehicle for following up with them over time, and provide a clear path to taking the next step toward a sale. What you need is better website conversion.

Converting more visitors into interested prospects can involve any or all of four different approaches:

Provide useful information that first-time visitors will want to explore. This will begin to build the know-like-and-trust factor, keep them on your site longer, and increase the likelihood that they will inquire about working with you. Helpful articles, case studies, videos, or facts about your profession or industry will keep them engaged and acquaint them with more of what you have to offer.

Offer fresh content or interactive features that will encourage people to return to your site again. Post new content regularly, such as a blog, articles, videos, tutorials, an event calendar, or links to items of interest for your niche. Encourage visitors to interact with you (or each other) by enabling comments on your blog, providing assessments or quizzes, or hosting a message board. The more value you provide, the more likely it is that visitors will return.

Capture the e-mail address of your visitors by offering them a subscription bonus. This will enable you to follow up with them to provide additional information, continue to build their trust, and determine their level of interest in working with you. See Chapter 8 for more about offering a bonus to online subscribers.

Provide a clear path to visitors for taking the next step to explore working with you. The core purpose of a professional services website is not to do all your selling for you, but to get prospects to tell you they are interested so you can have a sales conversation. Tell visitors exactly what you want them to do, and make it easy for them to do it. You might point them to your contact page, include your phone number in multiple places, provide a contact form for them to fill out, allow them to make an appointment on your calendar, or even offer a live chat feature.

Actively maintaining a website with many different features can be a significant undertaking. Be careful that you are not investing more time and money in your Web presence than the resulting sales are worth. Remember to ask yourself the essential question needed to evaluate any marketing tactic—is there a cheaper and easier way you could generate the same amount of revenue? If most clients find you online, investing more in your presence there can be worthwhile. But if your best clients all came to you via referrals, putting too much effort into your website could be an expensive mistake.

BASIC INGREDIENTS FOR HAVING SALES CONVERSATIONS