John Linton In this 'tidying up' phase of the financial year (when you are able to gauge how the year has started vis a vis what your plans said should be happening) it's always important to try and 'polish' the ways you are addressing the different markets by 'fine tuning' all of your major offerings. This doesn't really involve base pricing - which is always done as part of the planning processes but is more 'marketing oriented' in terms of what your various 'selling functions/web site pages should be doing in terms of making some sorts of better impacts. Exetel used to 100% depend on its web site to generate all of its residential and business orders and for the first four plus years of our 'life' we had no sales personnel at all. Things have changed over the past three years to a point where over 40% of our personnel are in either inbound or outbound sales - we have moved from being a company comprised almost exclusively of engineers to something else entirely. Many of our sales people have engineering degrees but many don't and that has provided us with some quite significant training and development challenges which, based on sales results to date, have been dealt with more than adequately to date.
However one thing that has 'suffered' over this period of 'transition' has been our web site because it no longer receives the day by day attention that it did until a year or so ago. By allowing many different people to make changes to it, the cohesion it once had has been gradually lost and its simplicity has been compromised. While any web site is easy to criticise for all sorts of reasons by all sorts of people (over a complete range of 'expertise') the Exetel web site constantly achieved its only purpose which was to bring us enough business to grow month on month for over six years and to allow us to provide information in ways that reduced the incoming telephone calls for sales and support information. By putting in place an inbound sales force the effectiveness of the Exetel web site has been slowly reducing. While this was a conscious decision (to build an in house sales force) it was not a conscious decision to allow the effectiveness of our web site to erode.
It's impossible, at least for me, to estimate how much business we may have lost over the past 18 months by not keeping our web site as tightly focused as we previously did, but I have little doubt it is considerable. So much so that I am having trouble looking at the various aspects and sections of the, now very large, web site content to decide how to return it to its former effectiveness. I have asked for advice from several recommended web site design houses over the last three months and met with three of them to look at their work and discuss our requirements. On each occasion I have not been at all impressed that any of the people I have spoken to have the slightest idea of how a 'selling web site' should be designed let alone presented beyond their concepts of 'prettiness'. So this a tough problem to resolve. Annette tells me that because I designed and have always maintained the web site, I will never be able to accept what other people recommend in terms of changing it - doubtless there is a lot of truth in that observation.
However between now and the end of the calendar year we need to improve our web site's "selling power" across our quite wide product range and our equally quite wide customer demographic. So if you know of a really good 'selling web site' design house perhaps you could send me a url(s) of what they have done plus their contact details?If you do - please bear in mind that we prefer functionality to "professionalism" and results to "beauty". For me, I judge the web site's effectiveness on the number of new orders by product it delivers each day - against that criterion our current web site is far less effective than the version of 2 years ago. While I realise that many other things have contributed to those statistics the fact remains that for five years our web site was the only place that a prospective customer could sign up for any of our products - including corporate services and we grew very 'nicely' using our then much criticised web site.
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