The Simplest Way to Make Your Website a Lead Generation Tool Is...

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to talk to a business owner and marketing director about a website redesign they were planning.

Naturally, they had a lot of questions.

They wanted to know about process. They had questions about how to portray their growing company in a more professional light since they just raised their prices and service levels.

We discussed branding and how to make their company’s marketing message resonate with medical practice administrators and other high-level business managers they wanted to reach.

They wanted to know if a website was supposed to be “informative” or whether it should be a lead generation tool.

All wonderful questions.

You might be having the same thoughts. Where should you start? You have a traditional sales organization and while you might be interested in all this inbound marketing stuff -- or at least a website redesign -- does it really make sense for your company right now?

The truth is there’s a really simple way to make your website a better sales tool that will feed your sales team with a growing lead list daily, and it doesn’t involve redesigning your website.

What’s the simplest way to make your company website a lead generation tool?

The companies we speak with that are thinking about website redesign want to make their website a lead generation tool and use it to sell more products or services. They want to be able to know which companies visit their website so they can build their lead list. They want a website that either puts leads in Salesforce or another CRM.

Here’s one trick that’s so simple, you may not have thought of it.

Don’t redesign your website… yet.

For your company, it might be best to “test the waters” with your existing website to see if they can generate leads and increase sales.

Our advice to the company I spoke with last week was to take “baby steps” by first moving their existing website from the current platform (Wix) to HubSpot.

This first “baby step” will provide 6 benefits to their company:

• HubSpot includes a feature that tracks all companies that visit your website, how many times they’ve visited and what pages they viewed. The sales staff can use this visit list as a lead list for prospecting.
• HubSpot includes a free CRM. The company sales staff uses Excel to manage their lead lists now. The CRM will help them be more organized, track conversations and manage sales documents or email templates so nothing falls between the cracks.
• The HubSpot website manager (called the “COS,” or Content Optimization System”) will be easy for the marketing director to update more frequently.
• The HubSpot website manager also provides a platform that’s easy to develop later when new content is needed.
• The company can add call to action buttons and landing pages for lead generation offers as they write them -- even starting with the company brochure, whitepapers and other collateral.
• Moving the website to a platform that gives you lead intelligence requires less investment than a full website redesign.

As the company I spoke with embraces these new tools, they stand a much better chance of identifying and closing new business. As that happens, there’s more money to invest in redesigning the website and adding some lead magnets to significantly increase leads for the sales team.

Did you know that simply putting your website on a different platform can give you insight into what prospects are visiting your website? Do you use your website to build a lead list? Does your sales team prospect companies that visit your website?

If these ideas sound interesting to you, then we should talk. We specialize in websites that produce a return on investment because they generate leads for companies. Once the website is in place, we can help improve brand awareness and get more visitors, resulting in even more leads. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to me here.