Your sales team probably answers a lot of the same questions every day. How does this work? Who is this for? How much does it cost? Those conversations are important, but your website can do some of that early work. A good website should answer some broad questions right away, and can advance conversations between sales and prospects from the start. Let’s take a look at how to answer some of these questions, and how to present this information on your website in an intuitive way.
How Your Website and Sales Teams Can Work Together
Think of your website as an introduction to your business. Before a prospective customer ever fills out a contact form, calls your office, or schedules a meeting, they may spend considerable time researching your company. They’re trying to understand what you do, whether you’re a good fit for their needs, and whether they can trust you to deliver.
A good website prepares prospects for better conversations. It answers common questions, provides useful context, demonstrates your expertise, and gives visitors enough information to decide whether they want to take the next step.
This is particularly important for companies that sell complicated or highly specific products or services. Your organization might have all the information a prospective customer needs—but that information may be spread across your sales team, engineers, product managers, brochures, presentations, specification sheets, and years of institutional knowledge.
The challenge is turning all of that knowledge into information a customer can actually find and understand.
Sorting Information on Your Website
Knowing what your website should say is only part of the challenge. You also need to make that information easy to find.
Prospective customers aren’t going to scour every page. They may land on a specific product page from a search engine or they might start with a case study someone sent them. Wherever your prospect first lands, it should be easy for them to find additional information.
For example, your service and product pages can explain what you offer, who it’s for, how it works, and what customers can expect. Your About page can provide information about your experience, people, history, and approach. Projects and case studies can demonstrate what you’ve accomplished for customers with similar needs. Contact and conversion pages can clarify what happens when someone decides to reach out.
The goal is creating intuitive information architecture where visitors can discover answers as they explore the site.
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8 Things Your Website Should Answer for Your Sales Team
1. What Exactly Do You Offer?
This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy for a company to make its offerings difficult to understand on their website. In some cases, the content is too thin to provide much useful information. In other cases, useful content is there, but it’s too spread out or buried in a content library.
Your website should give visitors a clear understanding of your core products or services and how those offerings relate to one another. For a manufacturer, technology company, engineering firm, or other organization with complicated products, answering this question is often complicated as well.
Consider a company selling specialized manufacturing equipment. A product page that simply gives the equipment’s model number and technical specifications may be accurate, but it doesn’t tell a prospective customer what the equipment actually does for them, what problem it solves, or what advantages it provides.
A stronger product page that better explains the company’s offerings might answer:
- What the equipment does
- What type of process it is used for
- Who typically uses it
- What problem it solves
- What materials or products it works with
- How it fits into a larger process
- What makes it different from other options
Technical specifications still matter. But they are much more useful when a visitor understands what those specifications mean in the context of their own needs.
For complicated offerings, consider creating an overview page that provides context and then directs visitors to more specific product or service pages. Individual pages can go deeper without forcing the homepage or overview page to explain everything at once. This additional context and explanation can also be important for improving SEO value, and making your website easier for prospects to find.
We’ve helped manufacturing, agricultural, and technology companies improve clicks, traffic, and qualified leads year after year.
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2. Who Is Your Product or Service For?
Your prospective customer doesn’t just want to know what you sell. They want to know whether it’s relevant to them.
This can be especially important for companies with specialized products or services. A manufacturer might serve several industries. An agricultural company might offer products for different crops or growing conditions. Whatever your situation, your website should help visitors recognize themselves in your content.
Industry pages, application pages, and case studies can all help answer this question. By showing your specific products or services and how they relate to a specific industry, prospective customers can more concretely understand how your offerings fit into their tasks and needs. You might show this in a case study by explaining what you’ve done for previous customers and how you solved their problems. Or, you might elaborate on this in an industry-specific page by providing details on your products’ capabilities.
This information helps prospective customers place your products or services within the context of their work. They can see how your business relates to theirs, and form more specific questions or queries for sales teams.
In short, a visitor should be able to look at your website and think, “They work with companies like mine.”
3. How Does It Work?
A prospective customer doesn’t need a textbook explaining every technical detail. They simply need enough information to understand how the product or service works, how they would use it, and whether it can solve their particular problem.
Answering this question becomes especially important when your offering is complex or highly nuanced.
A good product page might combine a plain-language explanation with diagrams, photographs, B2B video content and technical specifications to give more detailed insights. A service page might use a step-by-step process to explain what happens from initial consultation through completion. These details help to flesh out the actual activity and process behind your products or services, and help customers better understand what you do, and also give them more accurate expectations.
A variety of useful content can help to explain how your products or services work on their respective web pages. These can include:
- Process diagrams
- Demonstration videos
- FAQs
- Product comparisons
- Downloadable guides
- Technical documentation
- Step-by-step explanations
- Before-and-after examples
Your website should provide a path to more detailed information for the people who need it. When visitors can understand how something works before contacting sales, the later conversation can focus on their specific situation instead of starting with the basics.
We are experts at becoming experts, and we can help you translate technical expertise into compelling sales and marketing content.
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4. How Much Does It Cost?
Pricing can be one of the most difficult topics for businesses to address online, particularly when every project or engagement is different. But you don’t need to publish an exact price list to give prospects useful information.
Depending on your business model, there may be several ways to provide useful pricing information without pretending that every customer will receive the same quote. You might provide starting prices, typical ranges, examples of past projects, pricing factors, package options, or an explanation of what goes into determining a final price. Ultimately, explaining what affects the price or how it is generally determined is valuable.
The goal is to make the eventual pricing conversation more informed, and to show the prospective customer that your business is (or isn’t) within their budget. Even if your business isn’t the right fit for the prospect, having this information available at the start means saving time for everyone.
5. Why Should Someone Choose Your Company?
This is where many websites fall back on a collection of generic claims: quality, experience, customer service, innovation, integrity, and commitment to excellence. While these qualities are, of course, important, it doesn’t give your prospects anything concrete or informative.
Your website should give prospective customers reasons to believe you are the right choice, and those reasons should be supported by evidence.
The evidence you provide can include a variety of things. You might include:
- Certifications and credentials
- Years of experience
- Specialized expertise
- Customer testimonials
- Reviews
- Awards
- Guarantees
- Memberships
- Measurable results
- Notable projects
- Case studies
The key is to show rather than simply tell.
If your company has decades of experience, explain what that experience has allowed you to learn. If you have specialized expertise, explain what makes it useful to customers. If you’ve solved a particularly difficult problem, show how you solved it.
This can be displayed on your website in many ways. You might highlight case studies or video testimonials on services or product pages, so customers can immediately see what sets your business apart. You might show pictures of awards or guarantees on product or service pages. The key is to highlight your distinctions and achievements in places where your customers are already looking for information, so they don’t have to seek them out.
If your sales team frequently hears “Why should we work with you instead of another company?”, your website has an opportunity to start answering that question before the sales call.
6. Have You Worked With Customers Like Me?
A prospective customer may understand your service and still wonder whether you have experience with their particular situation.
This is one reason case studies, project examples, and portfolios can be so powerful.
Instead of simply saying that you have “extensive experience,” show visitors what that experience looks like. Highlight projects involving similar industries, products, challenges, locations, company sizes, or customer needs.
A strong case study can explain the customer’s situation, the problem they were trying to solve, the approach your company took, and the result. Even when confidential information prevents you from sharing specific numbers or customer details, you can often describe the challenge and solution in useful terms.
A portfolio or project gallery can serve a similar purpose, particularly if you have powerful visual elements. Videos can be useful when seeing a product or process in action communicates something that text alone can’t.
7. What Can I Expect If I Become a Customer?
People aren’t only evaluating what you sell. They’re evaluating what it will be like to work with you.
How responsive will you be? Who will they communicate with? How long will things take? These details can have a major influence on someone’s decision, particularly when they’re choosing between companies offering similar products or services.
Your website can address these expectations through process pages, FAQs, onboarding information, service descriptions, customer testimonials, case studies, and more. For a complicated service, a downloadable guide or customer roadmap could walk a prospective customer through the experience from initial consultation to completion.
Consider what concerns your customer might have, or ask your sales team what questions they often receive. Then, consider how you might intuitively answer these questions through a roadmap, process page, guide, or something else. This might be a separate page of your website, or it might live on your Contact page, Get a Quote page, or even your home page.
8. What Should I Do Next?
A visitor who has spent ten minutes researching your company shouldn’t have to figure out what they’re supposed to do next. It should be clear, immediately obvious, and as low-friction as possible.
Depending on your business, that might mean requesting a quote, scheduling a consultation, calling your office, downloading a guide, purchasing a product, or simply contacting someone with a question.
The appropriate call to action (CTA) will vary depending on the customer’s needs and where they are in the buying process. Your website can provide different paths for different visitors. To accomplish this, it’s important to assess how your prospects typically move through your website, the steps in your sales process, and what next steps you offer. Then, you can connect the right CTA to the right page, and allow your prospective customer to move at their own pace.
For example, someone who just discovered your company may not be ready to “Request a Quote.” A helpful guide or educational article may be a better next step, and offering this content on a common entry page or landing page can improve clicks and engagement. Someone who has read several product pages and case studies may be ready to talk to sales, and providing a clear path to do so may be crucial for this audience.
Let Your Website Do Some of the Explaining
Your website will never replace the personalized, detailed conversations your sales team has with prospective customers. But your website can make those conversations better, faster, and happen sooner.
When prospective customers can find answers to common questions, understand your offerings, see evidence of your expertise, and understand what happens next, they can arrive at a sales conversation with a much stronger understanding of your company. This helps everyone save time and ultimately make each interaction more valuable. When your website is a tool for both your sales and marketing team—as well as your customers—everyone wins.