Full Transcript:
Several years ago now I sat in a boardroom with a very large commercial building company, with the CEO at one end, he had his arms folded and he’s looking at me, and the meeting had just sort of started just sat down he had a pretty grim look on his face. And he said to me, “Jason we don’t need a f#5king website! we do all our selling on a relationship to a relationship, face to face, going out to lunch, doing deals, doing the transactions with our tender processes and all that sort of thing, we don’t need a website to sell anything!”.
So fast forward now to now, and even more recent years, haven’t times changed?! All of those industries, the building industries, that used to actually forget about digital now embrace digital and why is it so important? Now more than ever, and thankfully, I turned that CEO around to actually embrace the web. But what makes those difference, what are the main features of your b2b site that need to really reinforce and validate you? So yes, you might still do all your selling face to face and meeting people and doing deals in a relationship style selling environment and that’s great! We need to keep doing that, but your website is there to “validate”.
So after that meetings finished, they will look you up online, and the website is there to reinforce and validate your business, your positioning. So what are some key features that you need to have on your website to keep that validation rolling?
One is “staff pages”, staff pages are super important… highest statistically, the highest visited pages outside of a home page in a b2b environment. People want to do business with people, so they look people up. So it’s really critical that you have those really solid people pages in place. The second is “projects and service offerings” so your projects make sure you’ve got professional images, you’ve got to highlight, you’ve got a very short amount of time to sell and present your projects and your services… So do it really well! Get quality photography in those projects, and really sell the quality of your work, images tell a thousand words… get those quality images done.
Reviews are really important, so reviews build trust. I’ve done a whole bunch of videos around trust, so look those up, I’ll add a link at the end of the video. But reviews and Trust. Third-party validation helps people connect with you and feel a reason to actually do business with you. After that first meeting and one of the major things are the people often overlooked with a b2b site is “culture”.
So the wording and copy of your site can really describe that cultural fit… is a client wanting to do business with you when they visit your site because they get a sense of that like-minded culture, that they feel comfortable with, and that also rubs off into recruitment, so recruitment is critical because what this guy didn’t know at that board meeting that the majority, at the time, the majority of the visitors to his site were actually people wanting to work for the business ,they had 600 staff they were getting, really trying to position themselves culturally with their teams and build their teams, and recruitment is a critical part of that and if you need to build your site and search sections of your site to really engage that new audience especially the younger generation that again I want to find out a lot more about your business.
So B2B, there’s a lot that’s really important about how you how you position your website.