The Three Questions Your Customer is Thinking When they Visit Your Website

It’s a common question: why do all these B2B websites look the same? Why is the messaging so vague / jargon-y? 

First, does it even matter?

I’m married to a casting director for theater / TV / film. I’ve overheard enough conference calls to know that the days of actors’ websites being the most important piece of collateral have quickly fallen in favor of a rich, dynamic social media presence. And I think the same thing is true with marketing: anything static is going to get a single touch point and that’s it.

And even when you do want website traffic – I’m reminded of a quote I heard once (I wish I knew who said it) that paraphrases to “any time the customer lands on the homepage, we’ve failed.” That is to say, your myriad landing pages targeted at more segmented customer interests ought to be the way most prospects arrive at your site. Making the “corporate website” matter a lot less. 

And yet…it DOES matter somewhat. In a B2B / Enterprise sales process, your prospect will undoubtedly check out your website to see how you talk about yourself and how you’re presented. It’s what they’ll paste in Slack to their boss to explain why they’re considering you. Or it’ll be in the “Website” field in the spreadsheet they’re using to organize you vs. your competitors in their decision process. Here’s all they’re looking for when they land on your site:

1. Vibes – does this company look like they’re real, care about how others perceive them, or do they seem old/stupid/careless/out of touch?

This is you dressing professionally for the meeting and remembering to shower beforehand. It’s unfortunate, but you’re going to have to spend money every once in a while to merely get your website to not look like it was designed a decade ago. The rest is just checking the boxes: do they have a product section? Some kind of customer validation? An executive team that seems smart? This last one I see a lot of companies skipping nowadays and I think it’s a big mistake. People buy from human beings, and by not having an About Us page that clearly says 1) what you’re about and 2) who runs the company, people start to think you’re not real. 

What goes on the menu bar:

• A Product section that takes the customer to a page that tells them what products you sell

• A Technology page if part of what makes you special or unique is your technology (and if the team you’re selling to has a technology person who is part of the buy decision)

• Case Studies that not only provide social proof, but bring to life the good things you do for your customers (the best way to understand what you do is to hear it from someone who is happy they bought it)

• Resources that brings the customer to some page of white papers or other assets that they’re definitely not going to look at or download but that shows you’re thought leaders

• About Us that tells your frilly VC-friendly story and then has headshots and bios of management. No, don’t put your entire team there, that looks unserious. Maybe I thought you had 500 people and now I see you’re only 12 and you’re doing some cute jump up in the air together. Looks like fun but maybe I don’t want to buy critical enterprise software from you. Put your hiring page here too. Don’t let HR take over your website though.

• Contact Us that’s easy to submit. Don’t ask for their full bio and blood type. Plenty of data augmentors out there that can fill in the blanks in Salesforce.

• Log In is nice if you have a product that your customers log in to. If they’re not customers yet, it’ll further reinforce the vibe that you’re a real thing and not vaporware. 

Have a hero module with your main message. Have an illustration or animation or something to visually convey it in that hero module too. Put social proof in a small section below it. And then literally nothing after that matters as long as it’s not weird. 

2. Is it actually for me? 

If you’re selling me CRM software and I go to your website and it’s talking about “We’re the leading provider of multi-tenant sales management solutions at scale” as your headline, I’m going to wonder whether the specific product you pitched me is what you actually do well, or if it’s just vaporware you’re trying to sell me because you know I’ll pay for it. This is an extreme example, but we’ve all sold certain customers on specific features that our platform has. Often the hero module’s message is a much more diluted version in order to cover more customer segments, but it understandably falls flat for any one in particular.

One way around this is to not talk about what you sell, but who you’re for. Because what you sell may legitimately be complicated and a slightly different pitch depending on the customer segment. At Beeswax, we solved this by striking a chord with our target customer, who we knew were self-proclaimed “Control Freaks.” Then you can continue in a subhead with a more crisp statement of what you do.

3. How are they different than [Competitor X]?

I mentioned spreadsheets before. This is a real thing enterprise customers do: they build a spreadsheet with you and your competitors to go through an orderly decision process they can justify to their boss. Your great message about conquering the world with your enterprise software may work with VCs, but your customer is looking for a very specific solution and will gladly buy it from your competitors if they’re clearer about it on their website. So you have to give them a reason to buy your version of things: what makes YOU better for THEM. This gets you away from phrases like “The Leading [X] that does [Y] for [Z]” and more into phrases like “The Only [X] that does [Y] for [Z].” 

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That’s it. If your website (and really I mean your home page) can answer these three questions, it won’t be an issue and your CEO or investors will stop bugging you about it. It may actually help you in your sales process as you put yourself in the shoes of the person putting you in a spreadsheet next to your competitors. For those interested, here’s a template that synthesizes all the above into a corporate homepage that’s really easy to execute.