The Formula to Increase Sales Qualified Leads on Your Enterprise Website

You have a great product and your initial customer base loves it. You have your target audience narrowed down and you have plans in place to advertise to this audience with custom messaging. Your Google Analytics shows that people are visiting your website, but none of these visitors are converting to leads.
A crucial element of converting website visitors to leads is a strategic narrative. You can begin structuring a strategic narrative by doing a positioning exercise called “Who/Why/What/How”. This will help you to discover a company story that can be used to portray your company vision and related products to your audience.

It is important to ask yourself these questions:

1. Who are you selling to?
2. Why are they visiting your site?
3. What does your target audience want to know about your product before purchasing?
4. How do customers hear about your product?

Answering these questions will help you to strategically develop a compelling company story that fuses together different elements of your organization and tells a powerful narrative about your business. Let’s take a dive into the four questions and see how we can derive some meaning from this process.

Who Are You Selling To?

One of our clients is a recently funded company that markets and sells a sales automation software solution. Theoretically, its market can be defined as all of the companies with a sales team. However, this is unrealistic because of the companies finite resources in sales, marketing, and software support.

The initial step was to define our client’s market segments –  US-based companies with more than 1,000 employees and a sales team with more than 20 reps or high-growth technology companies with 100 to 250 employees and at least 10 people on their sales team. 

There were 3 significant advantages of breaking down the market into segments

1. We were able to pinpoint the requirements of each group
2. We could identify a few target segments where our client could effectively compete in
3. Identify segments that could be targeted at a later stage 

After you have identified your target segments, you need to thoroughly break down who your ideal buyer is.  While the C-suite usually has the final sign-off, according to a 2014 study by Google, 81% of non-C-suiters have a say in purchase decisions. The research phase is usually done by Directors and Managers who prepare an RFP and evaluate competitors.

Why Is This Person On Your Website?

The “why” is different for researchers and final decision-makers: The researchers, for instance, visit the site to learn about your product and to compare the features and benefits of different options.

The final decision-makers are usually concerned with the high-level benefits of your product or solution. Typical questions that they would ask are –

• “Will this solution help my company win more deals?”
• “How will this solution help make the processes at my company more straightforward?”

Usually, decision-makers don’t have the time to learn about how each feature works.

Therefore, it is of utmost importance that your website highlights the high-level benefits of your solution as well as having easy-to-access feature-specific information.

What Product or Solution Information Does Your Target Audience Need To Know About Before Purchasing?

Before making any purchasing decision, people usually compare different options against a set of criteria. Therefore, your website needs to address these areas that visitors will use to evaluate your product or service. It is important to answer your customers’ questions in the right order. By mapping out your ideal customers’ evaluation process you will be able to narrow in on the “what” for your website and business.

How Do Customers Hear About Your Product?

It is of utmost importance to understand the different channels that bring traffic to your website. This helps paint a clear picture of what channels bring the most effective traffic to your website.

Let’s take our software automation client as an example. If someone lands on their website through a Google search, it means that this person is actively researching sales automation software. This could mean that they are either evaluating a few vendors or just researching the technology behind your solution or product.

We identified that quite a few website visitors were arriving from various social profiles. Most of these visitors were not converting as leads and only showed an interest in browsing the content on our client’s website. This highlighted that social media visitors are probably not too keen on signing up for a demo or a product walk-through. Taking this information into consideration, we tweaked the call to action to persuade social media visitors to subscribe to our client’s blog.

Quick Recap:

In order to create a captivating company story that will persuade site visitors to take certain desired actions, it is extremely important to understand:

1. Who is coming to your site?
2. Why are they visiting your brand?
3. What product information are they searching for? 
4. How do visitors get to your site? 

By answering these four questions, you put your business in a position to create unified company messaging that drives tangible business results.

It is important to ask yourself these questions:

1. Who are you selling to?
2. Why are they visiting your site?
3. What does your target audience want to know about your product before purchasing?
4. How do customers hear about your product?