Think about your sales cycle for a moment, and then imagine the scenario below.
Dave, Sales Director at ABC Services Ltd in Dorset, has just won a cracking new bit of business and now needs to strengthen his team to help deliver the project. He looks online and finds local recruitment firm CMC Recruitment. They look like they may be able to help.
Dave is just about to pick up the phone, but something is niggling him. Hasn’t he seen that home page image before? And why can’t he ‘meet the team’ at CMC on their website? Dave pauses… and decides to look elsewhere. These new appointments are far too important to take the risk.
And how come the people at CMC also work at all these other companies? See below!
(By the way, there are many, many more!)
Every few days, I have a conversation with a company about new business, and they all tell me the same story.
“When we can get in front of the right people, we can usually close a sale”.
Well if that’s true, and I suspect it probably is, then why reduce your chances of getting that first phone call or meeting by having a website with identical images and pictures to1000 other companies?
You’ll always get checked out online, so why have a website without a personality?
So is it just about the pictures?
Unfortunately, no it’s not. It’s just the beginning of the issue.
Imagine you’re away on holiday in a town you’ve never visited, and you’re looking for a bite to eat and a drink. You see ‘Bistro Pierre’, it looks nice and you peer through the window to see if you like it. You make a snap decision that, consciously or otherwise, this looks like the kind of place you’ll feel comfortable in.
When you land on the home page of a website you do exactly the same. And how long does it take before you decide to look elsewhere? About 3 seconds!
So perhaps it’s a job for the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) expert to sort out the home page? Well, no not really, because you’re selling a ‘high value consultative product or service’ and it’s more complicated than just driving traffic to the checkout page!
So we need pictures of our people and we need to tell people what we do?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
Your website visitors know what you do – remember, they searched for you and now they are on your website.
Your visitors need to feel they are ‘in the right bistro’. Not just any bistro. They need to feel sufficiently comfortable and reassured to take the next step. And that’s to ask for a table and to have a conversation with the waiter….!
So how do you create that feeling of comfort and reassurance so that the visitor feels they have landed in the right place? Your place.
That IS the million Dollar question. Why not have a chat with me, Nick Sladek, I’d be happy to share my thoughts with you about your business and what you could do to start more quality conversations.
