How Good Website Can Shorten The Sales Cycle?

Introduction

Many digital companies struggle with a long sales cycle which brings challenges such as:

• Unclear and hard to predict income plan
• Involving too many company resources for too long
• Risk of steering the potential consumer away
• Never-ending agreement adjustments

However, there are possibilities to shorten your sales cycle through one of the first points of contact – your website.

In this article, we’ll take you through the important aspects of how to shorten your sales cycle with a well-organized website.

How website affects sales cycle

Times changed. Customers use the internet to learn more about the product or service instead of approaching a salesperson.

This is why your website is an important base that has a huge impact on your sales cycle, as it all starts from here.

Your website becomes a kind of portal where communication takes place between your customer and what you offer. From this point forward, the process of the sales cycle is born.

You have to remember that the experience is crucial and there are many features which are responsible for good standards as:

• Website speed
• Website personalization
• Good UX and Navigation which has an impact on User Journey
• SEO optimization – to be found where people need it

But let’s get some basics first. How does a digital sales process look like, and how your website can shorten it?

What is the DIGITAL sales cycLE?

In the simplest possible words, the sales cycle is a step-by-step process that starts from the first point of contact between you and your potential client and ends with sales.

Different industries may have different sales cycles, but most of them begin with the prospecting stage and finish with signing the agreement (or getting referrals). If you want to learn more about sales cycles, we recommend reading this article.

Why is the shorten sales cycle so desired?

In a nutshell, a shorten sales cycle impacts sales by reducing the time spent on the process.

Mainly, shortening your sales cycles allow companies to:

• Reach and serve more customers, and ultimately increase the revenue
• Make better sales plans, as closing sales become more predictable
• Motivate sales representatives as potential clients are better informed and prepared to meet salespeople
• Gain an advantage over your competition since it allows you to find a repeatable sales process

How a Website can shorten sales cycle?

Make your website open to customers challenges

Personalization – A client in the center of interest

• Your prospects need to feel that your services, or the product, was made for them.
• Your entire website should be addressed to a specific group of customers, your niche, to which you provide solutions to.
• You must make every effort to ensure that your client feels that the website and the content provided on it are intended for him.

Content

• This is an important aspect of building communication with your audience through a particular channel.
• Content is a set of information pieces that help your clients answer all the quesiotns they may have, in order to make a better informed decisions.
• Through content, you build trust, and, most importantly, strengthen the relationship with your potential client by simply being helpful.
• Therefore, you are able to significantly shorten the sales cycle by a good explanation of how things work, and what needs to be done before you even start a sales pitch.

Landing Pages

• Landing pages provide certain content which is personalized to a given audience.
• The whole idea of Landing pages is to make it super easy for customers to understand what you offer, and what they can expect from the offer.
• In this way, your customers don’t need to spend a massive amount of time gathering information about products or services. There is a straight way to get any key knowledge and to make decisions.

Case Studies and Testimonials

• Show some proof that your work brought good results to companies similar to your potential clients.

• Let your prospects know what they will gain from your company by examples of previous work.

• You can also place positive testimonials in order to showcase the opinion of different customers who decided to choose your offer.

SEO

• Good SEO makes your content appear in Google on specific keywords, providing lots of helpful information in order to answer their questions.
• Thanks to that, if you answer those questions, you get potential clients from the internet, without a need of paying for advertising campaigns.

• Google has its set of rules on how they choose a website to appear high in the ranking. Therefore, building a good SEO strategy is as important as taking care of the technical part of it.

Blog

• Blog is super helpful. It can be an important point in the communication process, which is responsible for shortening the sales cycle through pre-made content that meets the needs of your customers, and explains to them what and how they should do to make the best possible choice and get desired outcomes.
• Your customers will be able to get into interaction with you and get some feedback referring to products or services. There are many other benefits provided through Blogs. If you are interested in them you can read more about them here.

Chat

• Chat enables your clients to reach out to you in a real-life mode, and in a super-easy way. You have the opportunity to speed up a communication process that impacts the sales cycle.
• Remember that instant messaging becomes the norm in business interactions, therefore your website should consider using it.

Integrated CRM and Analytic Tools

• CRM and analytical tools integration significantly helps your website to keep eye on prospects’ progress in the sales cycle. On the other hand, it also helps a sales team nurture the relationship with customers.
• In general, all those tools helps you track incoming leads from your website and the way they interact with each page.
• On top of that, CRM helps you to set up business activities in the sales cycle and keep track of them.
• Using CRM may shorten the period of time that the sales team needs to contact the client.

Optimized for Mobile

• Your website should look great and work well on any kind of platform.
• Keep in mind that we are living in a rapidly growing environment of mobile devices as tablets or smartphones. If you want to get any information on how to correctly optimize your website for mobile devices you can read here.
• Optimizing for mobile is crucial, it also improves the experience of your visitors and SEO ranking as well. Mind that one of the crucial parts of Core Web Vitals is mobile responsiveness.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Enabling people to ask questions and gathering all the most frequently asked significantly improves the sales cycle by getting the information from customers’ perspectives.

• Your customers would love to ask questions about the most important matter directly to your company. That’s how the trust is being built because your FAQ page provides assurance of being open with your prospects for all sorts of issues and does not hide anything.

Make your website functional

In terms of functionality, there are things such as navigation and technology stack that are responsible for the conditions of your website.

Condition is understood as a high performance that refers to website speed and correctly created navigation that supports customer journey. This is ultimately linked with UX described previously.

Functionality, in general, affects how your customer will interact with your e-commerce site or your website.

Navigation & Information Architecture

• The website should support making the decision process and research phases as easy as possible.
• Navigation should be extremely intuitive and easy to follow.
• Remember that outstanding navigation of your website means that your customer doesn’t even have to think about where to go next as it’s all should be clearly explained.

Tech stack

• Tech stack is nothing more than a technology you will choose to build and run your website, and third-party tools you will use for its maintenance and analytics.
• The right technology stack (such as Jamstack for instance) provides the optimal solution and allows the website to work ultra-fast without downtimes, or slowing down. Remember that technology affects the quality of the performance, as well as SEO.
• If you consider Jamstack’s solution you can read more about this approach here.

Design your website to be trustful

In general, your site reflects your services, your product, and ultimately your brand.

Why do we think it’s important?

The “First impression”.

• Sometimes the first impression is the last impression, and we do believe that the good first impression is able to fight many doubts right from the start.
• A comfortable feeling of trust is a great remedy to clients that hesitate and trying to choose between you and your competitors.
• Remember that on the internet you have only 7 seconds to attract somebody’s attention. Scientists define this amount of time as a period when customers decide if something is worth checking out or not.

User Experience

• Your visual aspects significantly impact User Experience. Good quality of design and attractive interface increase the intuitiveness of your website and make the customer journey much easier and clearer.
• User Experience (UX) plays a key role in helping visitors use, understand, and stay on your website longer. Create obvious, logical navigation.
• Site visitors are always in a hurry. Don’t make them work for the information. Use consistent layouts across the site.
• Help users accomplish their tasks quickly with onsite search and keep them engaged by suggesting related content and minimizing dead ends.

Use Visual Media to Evoke Emotions

• Nothing works to evoke emotions in customers like video inserts or photos. Hence, visual media is a powerful tool in your hand. With this, you can significantly revive the content of your website and trigger an immediate reaction from your recipient.

Summary

Taking into consideration all the aspects that have to distinguish your website, they also speed up the sales cycle of your business.

Remember that standing out from the competition is one thing, the other is personalization to the profile of your consumer and ensuring maximum easy participation with your website that drives your business.

However, as you can see it’s not as easy as it seems to be. If you need more information about how to increase your website performance feel free to ask our experts.