How to turn your website into a well-oiled sales machine
Imagine a prospect walks in off the street to tour your space.
It just so happens, you are available to give them a personalized tour immediately.
What do you do first?
You ask them some questions. You find out what they want and need, and you let their responses inform the rest of your tour. In other words, you customize your tour to their needs.
So, you start at the beginning.
You give them an overview of the business, explain what your general story is, then proceed to walk around your space showing them all the unique features of your space.
They continue to ask questions and you continue to sprinkle in more information as you go. Everyone has different questions based on their level of curiosity, needs, and preferences.
You accommodate them.
By the end of the tour, you’ve shown them the full range of services and amenities of the space.
The prospect agrees to consider joining and takes your contact information for the next time. Maybe you get theirs too so you can follow up with them personally.
Then they leave.
Maybe you’ll see them again, maybe you won’t, but at least you gave them all the information they need to make a more informed decision.
How does this apply to marketing?
Your website has the exact same job that you do.
The only downside is that your website can’t ask probing questions. It can’t learn more as a visitor tours your site.
Instead, your website needs to anticipate the needs of your prospects and answer questions before they even arise.
While this might seem like a fairly straightforward job, it’s not. In fact, it requires a lot of time, research, feedback, and iteration to really turn your website into a well-oiled sales machine.
So how do you turn your website into a well-oiled sales machine?
The best way to make your website into a better sales tool is to:
- Collect questions asked in your website’s chat widget (if you don’t have one, get one)
- Collect questions asked during tours
- Collect prospects’ primary needs, wants, and objections during the sales process
- Collect survey responses and feedback from your actual members
- “Shop” your competitors’ spaces to see what things you offer that they don’t
When you have that information, you bring it all back to your trusted marketing team and have them infuse the answers to those questions into your website copy.
You don’t need to throw everything and the kitchen sink into your sales copy, but you do want to populate your pages with answers to the most popular questions people actually ask.
Call out what people tell you they like most about your space. Talk about the unique benefits of working there. Overcome objections before they even arise. Tell people your basic pricing before they have to ask—they can’t truly consider your space without it.
In closing
Writing effective website copy can be extremely hard. Getting it perfect the first time is almost impossible.
But thinking about it in terms of a living, breathing document is a great way to make sure the copy on each page gets smarter and more in tune with your prospects’ needs over time.
You do that by collecting and using real data in your copy. The sales process is where the magic happens.
This might sound like a roundabout way to write copy, but the goal is to get people to simultaneously feel like you’re reading their minds while speaking directly to them at the same time.
The only way to do that is to gather intel from your sales process, research, and surveys, and then publish the information people need to make informed purchase decisions.
Refine, refine, refine–marketing is not an activity, but a process.
P.S. After writing this, I remembered that I wrote on this concept before. There are slightly different but overlapping ideas. You can read that article here if you wish to dig deeper: https://www.everspaces.com/sales/
