020. Is Your B2B Website Leaking Revenue?

Hello everyone, this is your host, Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Bountify Life. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to have a conversation today with all of you. If you are listening or watching this episode live, please leave a comment on the chat. I'll happy to say hi after the end of the episode. And without further ado, let us start right away with the topic for today, a very interesting one. We are going to Discuss if your B2B website is leaking revenue. And what I mean by that is that sometimes I have conversations with prospects and clients and we are discussing discussing that they are not happy with the website and obviously they are looking for ways to improve the amount and quality of leads and business opportunities they're getting from them. And more often than not the assumption is that they don't have enough traffic, good quality traffic that will allow them to have a consistent amount of new leads coming from the website. And don't get me wrong, usually most of the time that is pretty much the reason what happened is that the website itself doesn't have a healthy amount of traffic or they have any. It's not the right one. And that's part of the big reason why they are not seeing opportunities coming from the website. But sometimes I see websites with healthy amount of traffic something above the thousands of visits per month, which for most B2B companies or organizations it's a good start for differently from B2C and I discovered that it's not necessarily that is the reason why they are not being successful and I want to explore today some of the reasons why. Beyond obviously working on new content on organic traffic or setting up some campaigns on paid paid media like social or search. Beyond those basic opportunities to improve your traffic, you might be overlooking some changes, some specific changes, especially in the areas where you have the opportunity to capture leads that might be impacting the amount, the quality of the leads and therefore you are just leaking them because you are not capturing the value that your website is already bringing to the table. So let us start with the first reason and is related to using the CTAs the right way. This one sounds pretty easy and it's pretty basic, but I have found many times where the basics are not covered and and that create troubles. First one obviously is that in my mind every website page should have a goal, something that you want to accomplish with it. However, it's really important that you ideally only have one and not many because if that happened they will be competing for the visitor attention. So once you have defined that goal the page have to match that idea, that specific goal. And the way that you represent or bring that goal into place on the page is usually through a cta. Some basic things that you have to do here is that ideally your CTA is above default, meaning as soon as the page load, you don't have to scroll to actually see it. And that will be a first easy one. It's important obviously that you make it stand out that is easy to see so there's a contrast color where or some little animation that makes it really clear for the visitor what is that you want them to accomplish. It's really important, also very well known that you need to make that CTA actionable. It has to be really easy to understand the action that the user has to take. And finally, it's important that as the user scroll, if it's possible, keep it visible so it can be on the navigation, for example. And you just keep showing that you can be part of the webpage on a desktop version. But in general you want to have a way for the user to be reminded of the general action that you want them to accomplish depending on the goal of your page. So that will be a super basic one. But once you are sure that every single page to some extent have a clear goal and definitely a cta, then after that cta, something will have to happen. And that's usually you have a way of capturing the or recording those visitors that are willing to have a conversation with you. The most popular one is obviously forms. So this is the standard, usually what most websites have. There are many forms that you can have on a website. The standard one obviously is the commercial intent one where you record people that is interested in your business. But you might also have forms for job candidates, for partners, for vendors, just to subscribing to the blog, for example, of your company. Many other things, but obviously here we will focus on the ones that generate leads that generate revenue. So we are thinking about the forms that you have on your website for leads. So what are some of the opportunities that I have found many times here? The first one that will prevent you from getting the right amount of leads that you can take from your website is having too many fields. So it's really important. And that happens usually because from the sales side, obviously the sales rep or the SDR want to know as much as possible about the prospect before having a conversation. That's obviously important because you need to know who the person is if there's an easy way to reach out to them, either through email or A phone number and many other details that you might need. However, if you think from the user or the visitor point of view, especially if they are filling that from a mobile phone, each field represents an obstacle that they have to go around to finally get in contact with your company. Best case scenario, they don't fill that form and do some other action like picking up the phone or starting a chat conversation. Worst case scenario, they are not happy with the experience that you just dropped from it. And especially if you are paying for that traffic that will have an impact on the performance of your website. So really important that you review the amount of fields that you have on your form and if you can help it, if you need to make all those questions, then I highly recommend that you set up a multi step form. That way you can break down the effort and it will be easier for the person to fill. And also they will do a little commitment at the beginning that will incentivize them to finish the whole process. One little recommendation that I have here is that if you have a multiple a multi step form, you ask the less personal questions first and you put at the end the questions are have a personal nature like email, first name and last name, for example a phone number. That way the challenge or the threat to the person filling the form is lower at the beginning and you leave the more personal questions at the very end. That's one way to improve the chances. Now the other area where you might be leaking those leads and revenue from your website is is what happens after a person fills the form. I have seen many times where we are doing these audits that ask the marker who is getting these forms. Supposedly there's a place where we can go and get them. So if you are not getting a real time notification from those forms being filled, that's the first thing that you need to change because most of the time what happens is if it's a real lead or a qualified one and you don't answer as soon as possible your chances are of getting or creating an opportunity diminish quite fast after the first first few minutes or hours depending on the type of business that you are dealing with. So really important that who is getting those forms if there's a notification and if there's a way to make sure that there's a follow up. Another opportunity that I usually find is that the email associated with those forms that they get notification is a share inbox one like for example like sales or info or something like that on the back end. And that's problematic because when you have many people responsible for one inbox, usually it's no one's responsibility. It's just say there because other people think that someone else is taking care of the lead. And we will back to the same scenario where nobody's having a conversation at the right time and you keep leaking those opportunities. One way to prevent that is that you integrate your form. It doesn't matter where your website is hosted and it will change depending on the kind of form provider and website that you have. But my general recommendation is that you save that information into a collective system which will be your CRM. That way you will be able to at least know when are you getting the leads and if there's no one there making following up on the lead and then you at least will have an understanding of the areas that you need to improve to increase the chances. Another big, big opportunity here will be to make sure that if for example your forms are saved on email marketing tool, for example for follow up and automation, but your sales rep work in a different system like a CRM for the opportunities that they find on their own, that you find a way to sync them. Because if not, then that will be another source of lost opportunities. Usually sales rep will not be able to see the leads that you get from the system because they are saving a different database that they don't have access to. And better yet for larger organizations where there is a team of either sales rep or SDRs that manage multiple regions or different products, or they are supposed to take care of leads, different leads depending on the industry or vertical, those all those scenarios, my suggestion or recommendation is that you set up some automation. There's software like HubSpot that allows you to do that depending on the answers from the form you assign it, you assign the content right away to the right rep or to the right SCR or having a person to do that job that can classify or qualify the lead as soon as possible. So you get assigned it to the rep as soon as possible to the right person. Now, around that automation, it's important that you can use those tools to precisely do that and save some time. But even with the fastest system, it will take a human a few minutes, maybe a few hours to reach back to that lead. So one thing that you can do, very simple to improve the chances of not leaking that lead is to set up a little autoresponder or a small sequence where you answer right back to the lead as soon as you get the form. It doesn't have to be super complicated. Some ideas for example, is that you might share a little bit about your company, some case studies if it makes sense, or some sections of the webpage where frequently answered questions, for example from your potential clients. The based on the experience that you have had from previous clients there you can have an understanding of the question that they might ask and you put that on the email and that give them time to explore, understand a little bit more about your company, maybe reply back with some additional questions while you wait for someone to reach out personally. And that way you can take advantage of that space with a little automation. So don't overthink it, don't make it too complicated. It doesn't have to be a 12 step sequence, but start with something and that will definitely help you to reduce the amount of leads that you lose because you don't have enough time to take care of them at the appropriate time. So those are general ideas for form, which I think is the channel that most B2B websites have to manage the best. The next one are the phone calls. And I consider phone calls sometimes overlooked and there are many reasons for it. Part of the reason is that traditionally digital marketers don't see the phone as something that can be worked just as easy as forms. Usually that information you don't store right away on a database. There's no email market, there's no email that you send to unless someone recorded and usually happens to that it's a different person or department that actually answered the phone. And obviously you can get so many calls from so many reasons that it gets quite hard to separate business intentions from any other kind of request. But nonetheless, especially in B2B where each lead is quite crucial because it can become a multi year, multimillion dollar business, it's really important to have a grasp of the kind of phone calls that you're getting and what proportion of them are not just current clients or past opportunities, but actual new leads. So the first question of course that you have to answer is if you have your phone on your website, is who is answering the phone? It's John. Usually the marketing team might be someone that is in charge of communications in general. But you need to have a good idea of who is answering the phone and what's the process or the criteria behind how they answer. For example, what is the schedule for them Answering is a voicemail setup. What happened with those conversations after someone lists a voicemail? Are they same somewhere? What is the criteria in general? You want to really understand all those steps to find opportunities. It's probably the channel That I find the most where there are lost opportunities and leads. Just because the marketing team doesn't have a clear idea of what's going on with phone calls. Because they just assume that most of them are going to be either clients or vendors or leads and not actual business leads. One way that you can start to understand what's going on. My number first recommendation will be to set up a call tracking system. There are many out there in the market, but the one that we have used with much success in the past has been call rail. And that calls call tracking system as a double purpose has a double purpose that you can accomplish with it. One will be attribution. Meaning these systems usually allow you when someone is picking up the phone and the source of the how they got into the website at the moment, they pick up the phone through some technology and that way you can assign to some degree. It's not always perfect, as always with any attribution model or system, but you can get a sense of where your phone calls are coming from and that might inform either the success or the opportunities of your marketing efforts. So attribution is a really important component of what you can do with call tracking to know where are your calls coming from and if they are becoming opportunities or no. Some of the more critical features actually allows you to know things like keywords used or campaigns or social media platforms that are bringing traffic. So very good information just with general form tracking. And the other thing that allows you to do is to really discover that process of the follow up. Right. So you might now you will be able to see for example how many calls are not being answered right or that they are short and what proportion of them come from current clients and what proportion of them come from lost opportunities or new leads or vendors. Because these systems allows you to match any phone number that you get to anything that you have already on your database. So it will help you match conversation. And obviously if the phone call is of a customer and that customer has already a sales rep, that's awesome because that way they will have on the history of the contact on the CRM the conversation saved. So that's for follow up. That will be great. And if it's a brand new lead, it will create a new contact on the database and you can assign that to someone. And obviously if the person having the conversation had time to take some notes, they can record those conversations on the system and it will be more than just passing the phone number information. So for all those many reasons, it's important to have a Call tracking. One last reason will be that if it's allowed in your industry and is allowed in your country or state, then it's advisable to record the conversation. Obviously you share that in advance with the prospect with something like this call might be recorded for quality purposes. And that recording allows you to first have a backup of whatever notes are taken, or if there was no notes, then you can rescue information like name, company, email address, so you can have actual record that you want to start a conversation by email. But second, and most importantly, if there's cell reps answering the phone, then the manager can listen to some of those conversations, not all of them, but some of them to provide feedback on how to answer. Maybe it's not being clear, we are not being clear on the services that we can provide, or explaining what is the right department to call into, or if it's an angry customer or someone that's struggling with something to redirect them to the right person in the appropriate way. So there are many things that that can be improved if you listen to those conversations. And usually it will be of the interest of both marketing to understand what are frequently answered questions from prospects and clients and from sales to understand if the sales REPs and the SCRs are doing their best job into answering and moving along those leads into business opportunities. So many reasons why why it will be advisable to record those calls. And obviously, as you might guessing here, I have a pattern. Not just record it, but also put it or integrate it with your CRM of choice. So you can have those records in those conversations and those sources and you can follow up later. So that's pretty much what's important about phone calls, that you don't just let them on the voicemail or if someone calls and hang out, you just don't leave it there. So that might be a source of revenue that might be escaping your grasp just because you didn't follow up. Now the third source of leakage in your revenue from your website might be surprisingly the shared inboxes. And I have mentioned a little bit about them. Not all website has them, but I have seen some websites where they have forms across the website and they have a phone number, but sometimes they just list directly an email address. And that email address obviously usually is not of one person, usually a share inbox like sales or hello or info. And the assumption is that some people just click on that email address and start an email and a conversation. I have seen those share inboxes decline because it's unstructured the way that the client client reach or the lead reach out and usually there's a lot of spam around them. But nonetheless it's another place that you just at least in the beginning has to make sure. You have to make sure that you understand what happened with those emails. So obviously first, if you have nothing else, just make sure that you're part of the distribution lead for that share inbox and don't make assumptions about who is going to take charge of them, who is going to be responsible. You have to be involved. But in general, my recommendation will be to set up a system that manage those conversations because there are many things that you have to do to make it work for your company. First, obviously you need a system that helps you filter spam. Those email addresses usually get a lot of spam from vendors and other types of senders that obscure real leads. The other one will be obviously have a clear accountability. I think share inboxes are worse than phone calls because at least on a phone call there's someone that is answering. But on a sharing box anybody can answer. So everybody assumes that somebody else is doing it. Which again is probably a recipe for disaster there on losing leads and opportunities. And finally my general recommendation again here with my experience with HubSpot, is that you integrate it in a CRM system where you have those features right, you can filter spam messages so you can focus on their leads are really important where you might have some rules or at least someone responsible for the share inbox to assign to the right person. So this will be very similar to a phone call. That person will have the system integrated and every time that they get a share inbox they will discard the usual spams with some rules. But after that, in theory you have either a lead, a current client, a lost opportunity, or any other of the, you know, potential lifecycle stages of the contact. And depending on that, it will get assigned to the right person, either to a rep or just safe for marketing purposes later. So that will be like the general recommendation is connecting into the CRM, assigning someone to have accountability. And you will start discovering that there might be some leads there that you're losing that you're not aware of just because they were sitting there for hours, days or even weeks and nobody took attention or just were not attended or taken care of. So really important to put some time there. Finally, the last channel where there can be some issues or some leakage from your website is your live chat or chatbot, depending on the situation. And I get asked all the Time. Does it make sense to have a live chat for a B2B website? It feels different because B2B website, you don't have that sense of need for a quick transaction as you can do on B2C where someone might buy out of impulse. It makes more sense maybe to just have a form or even a phone call and just someone leaving the message than being available 24, 7 or just right away when someone writes a conversation. So for me, that will be the first conversation that you need to have if you're going to implement the chat, understanding very well how you are going to work with it. Because if you just implement it and nobody is actually behind it or answering questions, then you again are creating another space or opportunity to just leak those leads and revenue from your traffic. Because they will see the chat, they will think, I can have a conversation with someone right away instead of waiting for the form to be seen or for the phone call to be answered. And you will lose the opportunity again because they will just ask you a few questions and they will never come back. So the first thing that you have to decide is there going to be someone that will be answering these during office hours. When the answer is yes, usually that person is the same question, the same person that for example, take care of the phone, if it makes sense. If that's someone that is dedicated to working with inbound leads both from chat and from phone calls, and maybe that share inbox and form. So that makes sense when you have someone that is their only job is that one. If it's not the case, if actually you expect sales reps to take care of it, and they will not be sitting or waiting on their mobile phones for any particular person to write a chat right away, then in that case you will use a chatbot because that will allow the user to get some answers or get some questions answered. And if they need further help, then you can assign the conversation handled by the bot to a human and then follow up. So if that's the case, but my recommendation with chatbots is very similar to forms. You want to have a good mix of enough questions to be useful for a human to handle. You want to know some of the questions that you might ask on the form reading in a way that they look like more of a human might be talking to you. And obviously some basic personal questions, like at least your first name, email address, and if it makes sense, phone number to have a conversation over the phone. So you need to design your chat to accomplish those questions, to make sure that they answer and that way that will be helpful for your rep. The other opportunity that I have seen is that because chats can be also on separate systems from forms and from chair inboxes and from phone calls, then you run the risk of having once again a different database from where you store the rest of your information. And in those cases, what will happen is that you will have a database of your chat conversations in one place and then a database of your forms, and that is not necessarily tied to your CRM. So as you might guess, another big recommendation will be to connect the information, right? If you have a chat solution that's outside of your CRM, find a way to integrate it or sync with it. So if those conversations are of current clients or lost opportunities, then you don't have to worry about the assignation. Then in that case will be the person that took care of that lost opportunity or client in the past. And if it's right, a new, a new opportunity, a new lead, then you can have something manual, right, where the person getting the messages assign it manually to the rep or to the vendor to the sales rep, depending on the questions being answered. Or you can have something that is a little bit automated and that way you can save time and help your prospect faster. One last thing about chat is because usually you have one scenario and not in chats. Usually you don't have the privilege of a form where you can say this form is for candidates and this form is for potential vendors or partners. And this is a business lead form in chat. Usually you have a mix of all that, kind of like very similar to what you might have on a share inbox or what you might have on a phone call. So one big recommendation when you're building that automation for your chat is that you first ask that question. Are you trying to sell to us? Are you trying to work with us? Or do you want business from us? And so depending on the answers, then you can create different paths and obviously direct that conversation to the right person to purchasing department, or to the HR department, or depending on your configuration, to your sales rep. So that will be a helpful way to make sure that you capture what's yours, but at the same time that the user is being taken care of properly from the website. Those are all the ideas that I have to share with you today. Hopefully you find them useful. Remember, if you like this episode, give us or follow us on social media or in our podcast, leave a comment and I will happy to have a conversation for about this topic and I look forward to our conversations in a couple of weeks. Have a great day.