Can you lose a sale simply by having a bad Web offer?
I think we’ve all had the experience of following a link someone sent us on Twitter or Facebook only to discover that it’s just another poorly disguised attempt at hucksterism.
You land on the page and get bombarded by a long, endless page of marketing drivel, punctuated with flashing neon sign graphics, and a late-night infomercial vibe.
While most B2B Web marketers are much more professional in their approach than this, it doesn’t mean that the concept of “the Bad Offer” can’t apply.
No matter the context, a Bad Web Conversion Offer slows down the sale, gives potential buyers a bad taste, puts them off, or even sends a good buyer to a competitor.
So what makes a Bad Web Offer?
- It doesn’t provide any value to the visitor.
- The process to get the perceived value (the whitepaper, webinar, free trial) takes too long, or requires too much user input.
- There’s no compelling difference between your offer and what they could get elsewhere.
- The presentation is sub-par, unprofessional, difficult to navigate, or just plain boring . . . .
Lots of great resources have addressed the question,”What, if any differences exist between the style and content of an SEO versus a PPC landing page?”
SEO.com states that a typical SEO and PPC landing page should serve the appropriate purpose, contain the right mix between content and call-to-action, and provide links to outside information and to the main home page of your Web site.
SEOBook.com says the only major difference between an SEO and PPC page is that the call to action should come early, and much more often on a PPC page— but that otherwise the concept is the same.
But how does this formula change from a B2C site, where the goal is typically an instant transaction, to a B2B company site, where a prospect’s buying decision may still be weeks or months away?
An outstanding article by Proteus B2B states that B2B decisions are “driven by risk and the avoidance thereof.” As a result, a B2B landing page must be more complete, holistically-oriented, and must present a clear, competitive, consistent message through content, style, and feel . . . .
I’m going to share a little secret about a mistake we made about a year and a half ago when we redesigned our Web site.
On the surface it was a beautiful redesign. Oh, so very beautiful.
Slick, shiny, “the new hotness,” slick, and slick (did I mention it was slick?).
And it killed our Web site conversion rate.
After two months of awful performance, we finally bit the bullet and furiously rolled the old site back out, and started from scratch . . . .
Sales 2.0 – Psychology, Self-Selection, and “Getting There First”
19 July 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
I’ve read, heard, and studied lots of talk about the psychology of sales and marketing.
What makes buyers tick.
How decisions are made.
Prestige, Pleasure, Pain (relief), Profits, or Preservation.
But I was reminded today of another key psychological aspect of sales:
Get there first.
“Getting there first” is a simple rule that Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook talks about.
Want to be a budding (sales) rock star?
Get there first.
When it comes to lead management and generating new sales, showing up last is often worse than not showing up at all . . . .
I came across a great article by Stoney deGeyter that states when it comes to SEO Web content, there’s really no such thing as “perfect.”
There’s no “perfect” content page, no “perfect” landing page, no “perfect” fix for a Web site that turns it from a bland SEO performer into a conversion gem.
Other than split testing, “targeted tinkering,” and adapting a site as new technologies, audiences, and ideas show up, there’s no perfect way to do SEO.
And being what I consider to be a fairly proficient writer, I was both intrigued and disturbed by the proposition . . . .
If 100 people go to your website, how many of them fill out a form or buy something? If 2 out of 100 fill out a form, then you have a 2% conversion rate. This is slightly better than the average for most corporate websites. We were lucky (or blessed) to get the name InsideSales.com and tap into a large flow of web traffic from our very first day. In fact, we got 8 leads their first day we turned up our website.
The process of converting visitors to leads or sales is the process of website conversion. And designing your website to do this well is called conversion design. Most companies make a fancy website that looks like a nice electronic brochure but hardly generates any leads at all.
I just spent an hour on the phone with Tim Ash, the founder of http://www.sitetuners.com as he walked me through an express review of the home page of InsideSales.com.
The good news is that we have lot’s of room for improvement. We convert leads at 3-4 times better than the average. The sad news is that our previous website, though not nearly as good looking, converted somewhat better than this one does. Hmmm, look or […]
I just got back this afternoon from a great workshop on SEO techniques by one of our favorite partners on the topic, www.SEO.com. I have tweeted a bunch of the epiphanies I gathered but one that came up that I get asked a lot about is the topic of this post:
How to get the most for your money with a SEO-optimized press release.
You may not know about how frugal InsideSales.com is; we have built our company without ever taking venture capital and we were recently ranked by Utah Business as #10 in Utah for growth (See September Issue of Utah Business). I bring this up because we did it organically by scrimping and saving yet keeping one foot on the gas pedal when everyone else in our industry is just trying to find ways to spend their venture money (rather than their own earnings.) Not us, this is our money and we are very careful with it. Or, to put it another way; we are very “fiscally efficient,” and proud of it.
Why is SEO important? The best leads that close into the biggest deals.
Why is PR important? The 2nd or 3rd best way to improve SEO.
The players in the market for SEO optimized […]
Technology has trained us to expect things, NOW. When I have a question I’ll Google it and millions of possible answers will be at my fingertips in .27 seconds. I forget that I used to have to go to the library or call a company by looking through the yellow pages.
I forgot my cell phone one day when I went to work. I was lost, unable to do things that not too long ago were impossible with a land line. I can call, text, email, tweet, find a restaurant, make a reservation, get turn by turn directions … hey there’s an app for just about anything.
A prospect who fills out a form on your website is looking for a solution, NOW. They have a problem and it’s unacceptable to contact them 2 days after or not at all.
inside|sales has done research with MIT professor, James Oldroyd, covering the topic of Lead Management with a goal to discover the best time to contact an interested prospect. The results surprised us, as we learned that companies don’t have the luxury of waiting 2 days to contact: or 2 hours. Whether you are a B2B company, or a B2C company, […]
The web has disrupted everything we know about sales and marketing. Even the time-honored practice of cold-calling has fallen by the wayside, and face-to-face selling, advertising, yellow pages, and direct mail are limping along. But in return, the Internet is opening up the greatest opportunities ever available for sales organizations who learn it’s secrets.
InsideSales.com was originally founded to generate cost effective leads through outbound cold-calling technology. We were the first web-based sales tracking Lead Management CRM system with fully integrated dialers and voice messaging tools … and though far ahead of the competition, we were obsolete before we launched.
Why? Because we thought we were building the ultimate system for cold-calling, and cold calling had already become obsolete, we just didn’t know it.
At the end of 2004 my partner Dave Elkington and I had developed nearly two dozen telephony ‘Power Tools’ like automatic dialers that we embedded within online CRM solutions and we were getting crazy productivity increases helping our clients with cold calling. Our sales were picking up and things were going well. So much so, that we decided to pull together a test to see just what we really could do.
We had already built a sales team of ‘closers’ that worked […]
How do we get people to engage in a discussion, to write comments on our blog?
We honestly didn’t know.
So we asked our friends at SEO.com, the experts.
