Caution! Application of these superpowers could cause mass spikes in sales, better marketing information and a more cohesive strategy. Use these superpowers at your own risk.
The ability to detect specific market trends.
Now, for a second, I’m going to assume that your website is targeting the correct audience and pulling in the right customers for you. Once you’re getting the correct audience, their browsing and searching habits can outline new possible market trends. For example, during my time at a computer repair company, I installed a WordPress plugin called Searchmeter to monitor all the search queries that were being input into our search bar. This not only gave me the ability to find out what topics and content I needed to write pages on, but more importantly, it gave me a look directly into what our customers were wanting. As the shift to mobile happened, we were able to see that more and more people were searching for mobile device repair. Combining this browsing habit data with analytics, surveys, contact forms, Google search traffic and a few other indicators can give you a clear idea of what your customers are actually looking for.
The ability to supercharge all your offline sales
One of the growth hacking tricks I use on my clients helps reformat the way the entire company sells. Using some simple web conversion rate optimization techniques, you can test your offline sales documents the same way you’d test your website. If you use PDFs or any print design, do some conversion testing on these designs on your website, then reapply what you learn to your offline materials. When you get into advanced branding and you’re developing your company “voice,” you can conversion test various tones and copy on your website and then reapply that copy to your sales calls, conversations, emails, meetings, printed sales documentation, etc.
The power to secretly close all your sales
Most people think of their website as a net that just pulls in new customers from random corners of the internet. Your website is outwardly facing and is meant to gather people, but real magic happens when you make parts of your site secret and not indexed. For a few different reasons, a separate, secret website and URL could be one of the best tools you have for closing those sales. Some people put their sales materials into PDFs, Powerpoints, Word Docs, etc. For relatively low costs, those same things can be built into a non-public, beautiful “side website” that doesn’t get indexed (so your competitors can’t see how you’re selling). A website sales tool will transcend issues with attachment types, program versions, email size limits, and more importantly, tracking. The flexibility of some of today’s drag and drop web tech means that you can design out the site once and easily train a person in your office to manage the CMS. We sent out proposals this way (“Here’s the web link to your interactive proposal!”) and it not only allowed us to have great, custom proposals, it also allowed us to easily link to other pages and content in the proposal for further clarification.
The other benefit to doing this is being able to build out your online knowledge base to easily support your sales. If you notice certain questions being asked frequently, then you can build pages to answer those questions specifically. When you are having a conversation with that client, you can tell them a few answers and if they want more information they can visit the page.
Side note: With some services or website plugins, you can track exactly what people are looking at, both on your main website and on your “hidden” sales website. That kind of tracking will allow your salespeople to be prepared to have conversations based on what topics customers skipped or what they may have been particularly interested in.
The power of super connectivity.
There are a lot of tools out there for social networking. Some companies have social networking in their intranet; others have private Facebook pages or tools like Chatter. One option that a few companies have implemented is their own internal social networking website. With a platform like WordPress, you can supercharge your company social network. If you install plugins like Buddypress, that gives you basic Facebook-like functionality. From there, you can add questions and answers plugins for sharing information, voting systems for voting on project details, gamification and rewards to incentivize productivity, training courses to allow for better processes, news feeds to relay company information, groups for team communication and sharing, ecommerce to allow employees to purchase branded company items (even with their gamification points), livechat and instant messaging, RSS feeds to your employees from your favorite information sources – the list really goes on. You can take the same tools that others have developed for connecting the rest of the world and use them to connect your employees.
The power to automatically qualify your leads
The dream of every business owner is to put up their site and have it instantly feed them all the sales they want. With this in mind, they usually design their site to be a gigantic net that can catch all the fish ever. No, literally – all of them. Unfortunately, this means that most business owners spend their lives sifting through the dolphins to get to the tuna (or filtering out the minnows to get to the salmon). The information you present on your site will either compel someone to purchase or push them away. By putting up the right information, you can actually compel your target sales to purchase while simultaneously pushing away your non-target customers. With the proper targeting, you can dramatically lighten the load on qualifying your leads.
With these powers combined, your website will skyrocket to super-glory. *Disclaimer: This article is not guaranteed to make your website fly or shoot laser beams. If these side effects should occur, don’t contact me.
