I see websites as one stop of many on the sales journey, useful to help get customers from Point A to Point B in the sales process (or maybe from Point D to Point E). If you are wondering about what to put on your homepage, start with these basic sales-related questions:
- Who, specifically, will be our most-important customer?
- Who is second?
- Who is third?
Who gets the prime real estate?
If you are targeting enterprise customers as your #1 customer, then we need to craft the messaging to meet them where they are at and give that messaging the top-of-homepage real estate. If our #1 target customers are medium-sized businesses, then let’s give their pitch the prime real estate.
One criticism that Marketers correctly level against webpage content is that company websites talk too much about their products and not about their customers’ business needs.
For example, if you sell cleaning services, maybe talk more about your reliability than the actual cleaning service. If you sell car maintenance, talk more about your easy scheduling rather than about your muffler certification. If you sell website design like I do, then for heaven’s sake talk about your quick response times rather than your maintenance plans!
What does your #1 customer need to hear today?
Once you figure out who your #1 customer is, you need to figure out where they are on their sales journey. For example:
- Do they know exactly what they need in terms of product specs and are looking for someone who can produce to those specs?
- Or are they business people who need a partner they can rely on and trust to make decisions on their behalf?
- Are they just getting started on their service-provider research, or are they far along?
- Can they make the hiring decision, or do we need to craft words/pictures in a way that helps underlings not look dumb in front of their bosses? Fwiw, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screwed up business deals by assuming the person I was talking to was a decision-maker when they were, in fact, an underling. Underlings need you to appear Very Professional; decision-makers need to trust you can do the job – decision-makers have a very different set of needs than underlings.