I had a meeting today with a potential new customer, and they were just getting out of a bad relationship with their previous developer. They mentioned that he’d “oversold” them on the capabilities of his organisation. In fact, he didn’t even have an organisation – it was only 1 person. His website, and the way he presented his business, made it appear as though it was a more substantial business. Anyway, it turns out he’s going on a long holiday, and their site is supposed to have gone live in 2 weeks, and is not near ready… needless to say, they’re now looking for a new developer!
I guess the point I’m making in a round about way, is that your site can be used to allow people to see who you are (in the above example he was lying, but let’s assume you won’t do that!). It’s not only my opinion, but I’ve seen it time and time again – if your website visitors can see who you are, what your team is like, and get a feeling of comfort that they’re dealing with real, honest, people, your enquiries will go through the roof. Not only that, the quality of the enquiries will be considerably better.
E.g. We run a marketing site using another brand name (email me if you want to know what it is). This particular site is a brand that only generates leads for Salsa – there is no real business behind it. The site itself ranks its butt off in the search engines – gets twice as much traffic as the Salsa site, however the leads are generally very bad in comparison. There are about the same number of leads (in fact maybe even more) but they are much, much lower quality, and equate to about 5% of our sales, while the Salsa site generated about 40%. I butted my head against the wall for years trying to work out why, and one day a client actually told me – after mentioning they’d actually come across the other site, but decided not to enquire; I asked why they did choose to enquire with us?
Their response was “because I felt like I was dealing with real people. The other website didn’t look real”. The site itself is as well designed as the Salsa site, however it does not contain any people – no staff page, no photo’s of clients, not even a stock photo of one of those ladies you see on every 2nd website! Nothing that gives the user the feeling they’re dealing with real people, and so they don’t have any confidence, and don’t waste their time enquiring.
Get your staff onto your website, and watch your enquiries improve.
Here is our staff page: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/about-salsa-staff.html
Tags: lead generation, relationships, staff
This is so true and a common problem in the industry. We only have two people in our company but being transparent about the size is key.
No one likes to be fooled.