I had an interesting call with a potential new client today. This director of sales and marketing discovered me through LinkedIn and told me that he wanted to speak with me about some projects. When pressed for detail, he declined to go into specifics, so I went into this meeting only knowing the basics about the 150-person company based on what I could glean from its website.
“Our Website Sucks”
He started the conversation with those exact words: “Our website sucks”. I was surprised, because it was a fairly decent website. It was overloaded with content and the navigation wasn’t as clear as what I would have suggested, but it was functional and reasonably informative. I’ve seen much, much worse. So what was the problem?
“Our sales reps hate the site,” he said. “They say that they go out on a call and can’t find anything that they need on it.”
I thought for a moment. “So you mean to tell me that they’re going out on a call and walking the customer through a website that the customer could check out at their leisure? Without someone hovering over them?” He said yes, although with some hesitation. “What other tools do they have to offer a customer?”
“They usually like to leave behind a printout of the product page for the customer to review….”
Your Website Isn’t the Problem
I started to quiz him on sales tools: datasheets, solution briefs, brochures, whitepapers. Did he have any of those? No. This was mind-blowing. What was left to say? “It’s not your website,” I told him, trying to be diplomatic. “You seem to be lacking a marketing plan.”
He sighed — an audible, defeated sigh — and admitted that I was right. The company had grown from 10 employees to 150 in practically no time at all, and he was struggling to stay on top of the growth. Even though his title was Director, he was the only person on the marketing side, aside from an executive admin who helped him with trade shows and an intern who left in December. We talked for a while, and there was no doubt that he was overwhelmed. He had been so caught up in the day-to-day tactical details, the fire drills and crises, that there was no time to actually stop and think. He needed to re-evaluate everything.
Can You Fix It?
While it would have been easy to give this guy a quote and tell him that I’d revamp his marketing from start to finish, that wasn’t going to be the solution. The company wasn’t looking to bring someone in on retainer, meaning that anything we did needed to be done together because he would need to be in charge of any maintenance and modifications going forward.
I gave him a list of things to think about for our follow-up call next week.
1. Who is your audience? This sounds basic enough, but his website was trying to answer everyone’s questions, without really addressing anyone’s needs in detail.2. What are their pain points? He needed to single out the compelling issue for each audience.
3. How does your company do things differently than the competition? Are you a commodity product that competes on price, or do you have a compelling feature/benefit story?
4. How do your salespeople sell? At what point in the sales cycle do they need support? Leave-behind materials? Items to send ahead in preparation for a sales call? A slide deck to walk through the product benefits? A call script to get them in the door?
By the time we hung up the phone, he sounded like a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Sure, he had work to do (and little to no time in his schedule to do it), but he had a direction. Suddenly, his focus shifted from the huge, amorphous problem that he faced, to manageable tasks that he could devote his attention to. Sometimes, a little bit of focus is all it takes to solve a problem.