Losing 50% of your potential buyers due to your website (IDC)
Finding relevant content
Losing 50% of potential sales due to inadequate online information is what IDC claims for technology vendors.
The key considerations for technologists and business buyers during the purchase process are:
- Content type: in-depth information to white papers, case studies, articles and vendor collateral
- Content format like: audio, video or a document
- Accessibility to different information
Only 42 percent of the time people find relevant content.
Due to lacking of relevancy the chance to close a sale is reduced by 45 percent.
During the purchase process there is also a change of content types: from documents in the early stages to webcasts during implementation scenarios and shortlists.
And strangely documents rule again during the final decision.
Thus the best your website could are documents.
Different content for different people
Make sure your information is what they require as this would satisfy 56 percent of the respondents.
The problem with providing the required content in B2B sales, which is a complex sales process, is the number of people involved in the process. Thus you need different documents for the different people: evangelist, purchaser, influencer, manager, VITO, recommenders, advocate, naysayer, …
The best sources for information are your sales people, who actually meet most of these people. They should help to define the content for each of the people involved in the buying process.
Next you should know what parts of the website are being visited by people from companies, not the residential surfers. There you need to put your content – apparently documents (pdf) are good enough.
You can download the IDC report “Technology Vendors May Be Losing Close to 50% of Their Potential Sales Due to Inadequate Online Information” here (after simple registration).
What content and documents your company website provides?
Could you indicate or define the different content for the different people involved?
