When marketing and sales leaders come together to prepare a sales enablement plan, they typically include efforts like writing case studies and email templates, fostering interdepartmental communication and hosting sales training. While these are necessary endeavors, there’s another critical initiative many businesses overlook: website redesign.
If your site already has plenty of compelling content and strategically placed conversion points, you might assume it will fulfill your sales enablement needs. Even high-performing sites can undermine sales team efforts if they complicate lead flow and allow eager buyers to slip through the cracks. Unless you’ve specifically designed your site to align with your current sales strategy, there’s a good chance you’re missing opportunities large and small to boost sales efficiency and generate revenue.
To maximize the power of your sales enablement efforts and reach your revenue and deal targets, you need to consider a website redesign. Here’s why it’s vital to align your website to your sales strategy and how to do it right:
Sales enablement is a cross-departmental effort between sales and marketing teams in which marketing pros create and deploy resources. Then, sales pros strategically leverage those tools, initiatives and assets at crucial points during the buyer’s journey to nurture leads and close deals.
When Kuno worked with RapidAI, a website design yielded success on multiple fronts, all feeding into sales enablement as reviewed in this case study.
A sales enablement plan determines how your business will equip salespeople with everything they need to meet revenue goals. A comprehensive plan outlines specific content assets, campaigns, the technology you might employ to streamline and automate sales efforts, specific integrations and processes, and how you’ll track and optimize performance.
When brands undergo a website redesign, marketing leaders tend to focus on efforts like enhancing SEO, improving accessibility, modernizing the user experience and ensuring the new design reflects the company’s voice, tone and visual brand. These initiatives are vital to ensuring your redesign generates a healthy ROI. But it’s also essential you integrate your website into your sales enablement plan, or you could create inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the sales process.
For example, suppose your marketing team crafts and publishes plenty of enticing content that seamlessly guides visitors to request a demo. Now you’re raking in heaps of demo requests, which is great! But what happens to all of those juicy leads after they fill out the form? How are sales teams notified? What are you doing to ensure all website leads are quickly addressed? What processes do you have in place to scale lead management as the number of website leads grows?
If you haven’t baked the right processes and automation into your website to connect these dots, it can quickly upend your sales enablement efforts. On the flip side, including the right integrations will streamline the experience for everyone involved.
Take fastener supplier Big Bolt, for example. Before their website redesign, prospective customers had to fill out a contact us form and wait for a salesperson to reach out before receiving a quote and making a purchase. This process was cumbersome and frustrating for buyers — especially those who needed products right away.
To overcome this challenge and better support the sales team, the company partnered with Kuno Creative for a website redesign that overhauled the quoting process. The new Request a Quote page includes fields for all the information the company needs to prepare an accurate quote, thereby eliminating an entire step. Additionally, the Kuno team leveraged HubSpot workflows to automate lead assignments and track how quickly reps responded to help ensure qualified leads weren’t left waiting.
This is just one example of how your website can power sales enablement, but there are several more opportunities worth considering.
Here are a few elements of a website redesign that can support your sales enablement efforts while also ensuring a flawless user experience:
Today’s buyers don’t simply enjoy personalized experiences — they expect them. A report from Segment found nearly three-quarters of customers are frustrated by impersonal experiences. Personalizing the user experience by tailoring content and recommendations to each visitor can significantly improve engagement and conversion rates. By the time a buyer reaches a salesperson, they already feel appreciated (and the data collected and used to provide personalized experiences can ensure a smooth marketing-to-sales handoff).
Interactive content such as quizzes, assessments and calculators can engage visitors and collect valuable data, which you can use to inform sales and marketing efforts. For example, a SaaS company might offer an ROI calculator to gather data about buyers’ revenue or average deal size.
Given the explosive popularity of platforms like TikTok, it’s no secret people crave video content. In fact, a new study from Wyzowl found 91% of consumers want more video content from brands. And video content is beneficial from a sales enablement standpoint because it allows you to showcase products, explain complex concepts and build brand awareness in a way that’s immersive and enjoyable.
No one enjoys sitting on hold or waiting hours (or days) for an email response. And while you’ll always need human beings to answer complex questions or solve complicated issues, AI chatbots can provide quick and personalized responses to customer inquiries, improving the customer experience and reducing response times. Live chat can also offset some of the customer service workload by offering a communication touchpoint, helping buyers feel acknowledged, and quickly routing questions and comments to the right person. HubSpot says, “The bot can help qualify leads, book meetings, or create support tickets by sending a series of questions and automated responses. Use the bot to gather initial information about the visitor before a member of your team takes over the conversation.”
There are many ways you can leverage automation within your website to enhance sales enablement. For example, you can set up automated email sequences to trigger each time someone submits a form for a quote, demo or consultation to ensure all leads receive an immediate follow-up. You can also automate appointment setting and lead scoring to further support the sales team.
It’s vital you track website performance and visitor behavior to identify where you need to make improvements and further optimize sales enablement strategies. This data can illuminate pain points in your process, such as where customers might be getting frustrated and bouncing, as well as areas of opportunity, such as which pieces of content customers engage with the most.
Sales enablement is most powerful when it’s a holistic strategy that accounts for specific content assets, the user experience, the sales team’s workflow, and the technology necessary to make all of that possible. Factoring a website redesign into your sales enablement plan will help you bring all of those moving parts together and ensure you’re doing everything possible to foster sustainable revenue growth.
Learn more about how the experts at Kuno can help your website redesign drive sales.
