Use your website to shorten the sales cycle

Sales prospects use company websites to research products before they make purchasing decisions. With prospects visiting websites, looking at your products, and comparing them directly against your competitor’s products, it is very important to make it easy for prospects to get the information they need independently of talking with your sales team.

Your website is one of the most important tools in your marketing program and should be looked at with a very critical eye. Company websites are now the primary marketing tool that consumers use to research products. This means that your website is your most important sales agent that is tasked with providing product information, answering sales questions, and highlighting differences between your products and those from your competitors.

You should visit your website with a very critical eye and make sure that prospects can find the information that is most important to them. Make sure that the product area is easy to navigate to and that product images are crisp, clear, and provide details that competitor’s sites do not. The goal is to get prospects familiar with your products and to answer as many questions as possible about the products and how to buy them.

To make sure that images are easily viewed for details make sure that the product photos are not too small and that they are appropriately sized. A good feature to incorporate is a zoom tool that allows site visitors to zoom into detailed areas of your products. Images also need to be optimized for web delivery so that their file sizes are not too large and too slow for web delivery. Large file sizes with slow download speeds cause people to click away and leave your site.

Finally, remember to include all contact information on every page. If site visitors want to contact a member of your sales team finding out how to do it should not be a challenge. Include information in a highly visible part of every page to make it as easy as possible for them to find.

The time and work spent on your site will help prospects by answering their questions and educating them about your products. It will allow them to better understand your products and help get them to making a buying decision faster.