In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

If a sales manager needs to justify a training expense to his CEO and CFO, wouldn’t it help to provide your inside champion with messaging and tools to help him make his (read “your”) case?

It’s usually good to have sections of your website and messaging designed specifically for those secondary decision-makers and influencers that need to sign-off on the decision of your inside champion.  As an analogy to the consumer world, would you really want to construct a website that sells engagement rings without providing content and messaging for the prospective fiancee?

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

To keep with the consumer analogy, let’s say you’re considering having a pool put into your back yard.  Assuming that one of your local pool suppliers/installers had a website with valuable early and middle stage content, how many times might you visit their website before actually contacting them and becoming a lead?

• You might come to them early on when doing preliminary research regarding what type of pool you wanted, what size, shape, depth, etc you should look at, what kind of associated expenses and purchases are involved, etc.  Reading this stuff might take 3-5 or even 15 different visits.  How would you know if any of these visits are successful?  How could you measure or get a handle on your Website’s influence on such a buyer?I’d normally suggest having a goal for these types of visitors.  Maybe it’s downloading a pool planning or pools for dummies report/PDF.  Maybe it’s playing with an interactive pool builder or pool cost calculator.  Whatever it is, having a trackable (and helpful) event for these early stage buyers helps to track your Website’s success in attracting and engaging

• Moving to the middle stage of the buying process, you might touch the site again when you are closer to buying and constructing a short list of potential contractors/installers.  This time you might drill down into why you should do business with them and not someone else, reading up on their installation timelines, the skill of their install crew, etc.You may or may not feel like filling out a lead form at this point.  But a valuable and well-merchandised free download titled something like, “10 Questions to Ask Any Pool Contractor,” might look far more attractive to you – especially if you only had to provide a name and e-mail (rather than the lead forms more detailed info requests) to get it.

• And then at the late stage of your buying process you might look at the site a third time to fill out the form or get the phone number to actually buy the pool. What a waste if the pool website only had the lead form as a conversion point, without ever providing (let alone tracking) any of the early and middle stage downloads and conversion events.  Questions would go unanswered, and prospective buyers would go unengaged / go somewhere else.

Needless to say, the exact same patterns of behavior occur for B2B sites as well.  And yet most B2B sites don’t have defined content and conversion points for their early and middle stage visitors.  Your prospective leads are going to go somewhere to get their questions answered, shouldn’t it be on your website not your competitors?

3)  Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

While early and middle stage conversion points help a Web analyst/website optimizer get a better handle on a sites overall success in engaging early and middle stage buyers, it still leaves them guessing at the big picture, simply because they can’t track a lead generation or sale all the way back to that prospect’s first visit to the Website.  This can be crucial for gauging the real success of a PPC campaign.  Key words that might look unprofitable (because they target earlier stage buyers) might be spectacularly profitable – but only after the 8th (or 20th) visit to the site.  Unfortunately, if you can’t track visitor behavior over multiple visits, it’s difficult to get a handle on real – vs. false- measures of keyword performance.

While I love, love, love Google Analytics / Google Ad Words, this is exactly one of these tools shortcomings.  And it’s one reason that we insist that our OnTarget clients install our software in addition to GA/GWO: OnTarget can bracket visitor behavior through keyword entry and track individual visit behavior over multiple visits.  It’s a wish-list come true for us Future Now Persuasion Architects and can be a positive boon for our On Target clients.

So there you have it: start matching your B2B and complex sale website to the real complexity of your sale.  I’ll be writing follow-up posts with exercises and steps on how to do this, but in the meantime, would it be too forward of me to suggest you sign up for On Target?

One thing jumped right out: Across the board, the percentage of those surveyed who had negative things to say about shopping online was higher among older shoppers, with one exception. Can you guess?

“Online shopping is still too complicated.” Unbelievable, huh? But it’s a sentiment evidently shared by 18 year olds and 65+ year olds equally.

To me, this just shows the opportunity that still exists in the e-commerce space. The burden is really up to us as marketers to understand who our visitors are and what they what to see in order to be comfortable purchasing. It’s a challenge that keeps me passionate about this space and I hope motivates you.

Her firm does content development for websites, so she’d never literally been at a loss for words — not online, anyway — until a new client hired her to write some search engine-friendly copy. For the first time, she questioned whether her client’s site actually needed Web copy to do its job. She was stumped.

The client sells new and used industrial drill rigs, augers, hammer grabs, oscillators — stuff they sell at construction equipment auctions (and, no, you can’t find it on eBay). The current website consists of a few image galleries and, thus far, the conventional wisdom has been that all they need to do is show pictures of massive, earth-moving objects, list some basic technical specs, and that’s all their audience needs to know before buying one of these things at a live auction.

A 100-ton drill rig is a 100-ton drill rig is a 100-ton drill rig, right?

Here’s how our anonymous friend described the situation:

According to the [client], there’s not much to say, and the pictures are apparently more important than words in conveying a description of the item. I suggested adding content — a product description — to each picture, so I could get in keywords and so forth, but there’s so little to say about it, and that’s part of [the] problem.

Their visitors are construction companies who already know what kind of equipment they’re looking for. It’s mostly a matter of price competition and whether they want new or used equipment. So descriptions are hardly necessary, especially with the descriptive pictures telling most of the story.

I’ve worked on a ton of web sites and never encountered this before. Any suggestions on what I can do to help them increase page rank?

Let’s start by unpacking some the dangerous assumptions she’s making:

• There’s not much to say
• Pictures are more important than words
• The problem is that “there’s so little to say”
• Their visitors are all from construction companies
• Their visitors already know what kind of equipment they want
• It’s mostly a matter of price competition
• Visitors already know if they’re looking to buy new or used
• It’s unnecessary to describe such products with text
• Pictures can tell most of the story
• Page rank and content are independent variables

Still, the most dangerous assumption she’s made is that the client’s assumptions are true. Yes, they know their business better than she (or any other consultant) possibly could, but that doesn’t mean they know how to market. Whether they can imagine a scenario where someone might need more than just a picture before purchasing 100 tons of construction equipment is irrelevant.

Besides, has a search engine ever bought an oscillator at auction?

Since this was taken on as an SEO gig, not a strategic planning and copywriting project, it’s based on a false premise (”We’ll pay you to help us rank higher, but you shouldn’t have to do much writing to accomplish that”). Until this client understands the value of Web copy — to both humans and search engines — this blog post will likely rank higher for relevant search terms than their website.

Here’s what Seth Godin says about this common SEO myth in his latest book, Meatball Sundae:

My position is that the clients are the problem, not the consultants. That’s because they want shortcuts, not hard work. The best SEO is great content. Don’t do that and you don’t get much.

Do they really believe “there’s not much to say” about a used hydraulic rotary drill rig that (probably) costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? Where has it been? What type of condition is it in? What sorts of jobs is it best suited for? What distinguishes one design or manufacturer from another? Are the needs of a big-budget construction project manager the same as those of an owner-operator of an excavation company? What should I know about each model before I show up to the live auction to bid? If it breaks, do you sell replacement parts? Is everything being sold “as is”? How long have you been in business? Why should I trust your brand?

These are fair questions, and the current site doesn’t answer one of them. There’s not even an ‘About Us’ page.

Of course the client’s customers “already know what kind of equipment they’re looking for.” Those are the only people who would ever be persuaded by a site with no content!

Could you imagine if a real estate website listed houses that were to go up for auction, but showed nothing except for a few pics of the exterior? This is how Christie’s hypes an upcoming auction. Her client should take a look.

Think that’s a stretch, comparing the way 20th century British art is sold to how one should sell drill rigs online? Volvo Construction Equipment begs to differ.

When Volvo hired Future Now, we started with an uncovery session to get to know their business and its key metrics. Then, based on what we learned, we developed personas to match various customer segments. We then performed a scenario analysis of the site to see how it met the expectations of each persona, and to identify fixes that could be made without a redesign. Once they could see how visitors’ needs were unique, they were able to write copy that sold gigantic new and used construction vehicles, machinery and parts.

There’s still work to be done, but with these adjustments, Volvo CE’s lead generation went up 700%. (Here’s the case study from Web Trends, if you’re interested.)

If her client wants rank well and sell more construction equipment, she needs to know more about their business. The client needs to be more forthcoming and she needs to push back for answers. Of course, it would have been better if they’d discussed these things before she took the job, but if both parties continue to look for quick fixes, the site will continue to be “nothing but pictures of drills, augers, and oscillators.”

. .

[Editor's Note: This has been the first post in our new "Ask Future Now" series. If you have questions about interactive marketing optimization, let us know in the comments or contact us directly and we'll start a dialog via email. We'll answer your question in a new post.

Hat tip to Dave Young for reminding us of the Meatball Sundae excerpt.]

Selling and Buying: “I Do”

A sales process includes steps to achieve a close. Not every business has a sales process, though admittedly some are more effective than others. Only you care about your sales process. It’s internal. It’s about you and your goals. It’s not about your audience and their goals.

Everyone in your audience has a buying process, steps people go through to satisfy their needs and feel confident they made the right decision. Sometimes this buying process happens in the blink of an eye. Other times it takes months. In some cases, it takes only one person to make the decision. In others, five different departments and a C-level executive have to sign off on the decision.

On top of that, not everyone’s in the same stage of the buying-decision process when she arrives. Some come to you during the late stage, knowing exactly what they want. Others turn up during the early stage, when they’re narrowing their choices. And some are in the middle stage; they’re not intending to buy just now, but they could be persuaded.  Continue reading my ROI Marketing column at ClickZ…

I recently overheard a fellow talking about “the simplicity of the B2C sale.” He was comparing it to the complexity of the “considered purchase,” B2B sale. I had to chuckle, not at the thought one sale might be more complex than another, but at the thought that B2C sales, simply because they are B2C, are inherently less complicated. I wonder if that guy has ever bought a house or a car, booked a cruise, applied for a loan or tried to research dietary strategies that might remediate cancer.Your business category is not the issue. The complexity of your sale is not the issue. Whether your sale is impulse or a considered purchase is not the issue. Buying into these notions as determining factors when it comes to your ability to design persuasively is thinking that will lead you down the garden path.

Understanding and managing your sale as a persuasive process is the only relevant issue.

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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 105

A news clip just informed me: a phenomenal 80 percent of all purchasing decisions are made or influenced by women! I can’t actually verify that statistic for you (the talking head certainly sounded credible enough), but I can tell you that women - in one way, shape or form - are behind the majority of actions folks take on your Web site.

The question is, are you helping these economically powerful people accomplish their tasks on your Web site? Do you really know what they need? How would you even start?

Your Web site’s persuasion architecture must begin with an understanding of your audience, not in the aggregate, but in the specific. So, meet Danielle. A specific if there ever was one!

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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 100

It’s not just a line, it’s the essence of your relationship with your visitors. You think you’re talking to the hordes, ’cause you’ve got big numbers every month. But your Web site is not a lecture hall or a convention center. It’s an intimate little space where you and a visitor interact one-on-one. And there’s no such thing as an average user!

So if you have thousands, even millions, of visitors to your Web site, how do you talk to each one as an individual? Join me for an interview with Holly Buchanan, Future Now’s Vice President of Client Services.

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