Tips for Creating a Sales-Focused Website

A website is a means to an end.

When startups take the plunge and build their website — or when more established brands consider their second or third version of a website — they need to always have their end goal in sight.

For B2B brands and those in the SaaS industry like us, your end goal is typically to convert web traffic into a lead for a salesperson to act on.

If that is indeed your end goal, your website design, content, and features should all prepare users to want to learn more and get on the phone for a sales call and demo.

With that in mind, here are several quick tips for small businesses seeking to create a sales-focused website.

With a sales-focused website, know your ideal customer profile

This is perhaps the most important step. If you don’t know the prospect you’re selling to and what motivates them, you will not be able to create content and highlight features that are going to grab their attention and make them take action.

You’re going to want to start with an Ideal Customer Profile, which is essentially a model account whose characteristics indicate that the company is likely to be interested in your offer now.

A detailed ideal customer profile will help you maximize your sales and get satisfied customers that will stay with you for a long time, increasing the lifetime value (LTV).

Reviewing happy existing customers and finding common attributes like revenue, number of employees, type of business, web technologies in use, geography, or sales signals can be a good place to start.

Perhaps most importantly, an ideal customer should be ready to buy what you sell. If you know the problem decision makers face and you can help them solve it or seize it, that message should be at the heart of everything on your website.

Have prominent calls to action across the site

But no matter how good your message is, you need to let people know how they can get a hold of you (and why they need to right now).

It is not enough to include contact info in your footer or on a Contact page — a sales-focused website has calls-to-action strategically placed all around the site. They have content that demands download, too.

For example, they create an essential e-book on how to achieve an essential task or reach a goal in their industry. Part of their lead generation strategy on the site is to entice users to download that book, in turn moving those interested visitors into the inbound sales lead funnel.

People want relevant content from your brand; the trick is to create educational and informative materials that perfectly straddle the line of teachable material and subtle sales tool.

In order to draw eyes to these materials, a sales-focused website uses design strategies such as showing a modal window after a short time delay or perhaps a subtle popup window in a corner of the page that draws enough attention to itself.

Include a chat box manned by customer associates

Many brands are realizing the power of chat boxes when selling. In a 2016 study, the American Marketing Association concluded that live chat can increase conversions by 20 percent. Customers who chat were also 3 times more likely to purchase.

Chat can educate prospects and, ideally, move them to take action and learn more information.

It can be a useful tool on any sales-focused website, so long as it is manned by authoritative, sharp team members who know the product or service well and are good in on the fly situations.

Leverage marketing automation

It is critical for websites to tie into the larger sales ecosystem. Marketing automation tools like Hubspot and Marketo help companies coordinate efforts across the system; they ensure that every lead through the site has a path and that the sales team is fully connected to all inbound activities.

They also ensure that every prospect online receives a systematic digital follow up, in addition to the personal calls and follow ups from sales team members.

For a sales-focused website to truly be effective, all of the leads, data, and traffic coming to it needs to be properly analyzed and vetted.

If you want to provide your sales team with the best possible chance of landing deals, it is important to create websites that not only address the needs of your target audience but systematically move them closer to the sales funnel through consistent, well-positioned calls-to-action.

The content you share on your site should speak directly to them and you should also make sure that you understand your audience. Provide your sales team with the kinds of tools that offer sales intelligence that will in turn better help you know your prospects, and integrate the knowledge from that data into your website.

This is a way for you to see results across the board — you will see higher conversions and more conversations between your sales team and your ideal prospects.

About the author

Mikko Honkanen is the co-founder of Vainu, a sales intelligence platform that uses machine learning and open data to help sales people find the right accounts to target and the right time to reach out to prospects from a database of more than 100 million global companies. Starting as an idea between three friends in 2014, Vainu has since grown to nearly 150 team members across seven offices in Europe and the United States, with $1 million in monthly revenue and bookings. The company received the Nordic Startup of the Year Award in 2017 for “Best Bootstrapped Startup” and was named a top 100 European startup in Wired’s 2017 listing.