Your Corporate Website: Sales Tool or Information Repository?

Conservation and Transportation Cleantech start-ups in particular are beginning to borrow a page from the technology product start-up playbook and converting their corporate websites from an information only site to an important sales tool.

Many early stage start-ups, due to time and resource constraints, initially launch a corporate website that tells 'the story'. IE: we learn all about the company's offering, the market problem it solves, the credentials of its management team, associated investors, possibly a bit of independent news about it, and even those ubiquitous press releases. A visit to the website might also offer up a few 'down-loadable's' including the corporate brochure, data-sheets and even white papers.

All useful information. However, what's missing? The selling! Tuned properly, the corporate website should qualify visitors as leads, while disqualifying others, and deliver those leads to a further qualification process. Let's look at a few examples... one example is to offer a free or discounted readiness assessment on the website. A SaaS/On-demand-based Cleantech product company in carbon emissions management could offer to its target customers a rapid readiness assessment. The assessment would offer to analyze the prospect's readiness to participate in, and financially benefit from, the growing global carbon marketplace. The deliverable would prove, or disprove, the company's potential for ROI based on any initial recurring or CAPEX costs. The assessment might even model the financial risk of delaying participation in a sophisticated, automated carbon emissions management program. While the assessment and resulting deliverable would be performed by real people collaborating closely with the potential customer, the offer, and call-to-action, would live on the website.

Another lead generation activity on the website that delivers proven results, in addition to loyalty or 'stickiness', is the online calculator. The calculator could be built around a baseline estimate of your company's carbon emissions vs. the 'industry standard' for like companies of similar size, for example, or a simple quality differential between using a legacy, manual solution vs. SaaS-based solution for carbon emissions management. The calculator would require only minimal interaction in the form of relatively simple information in-put by the website visitor. The results, however, are anything but minimal to the Cleantech company running the calculator. Using available Web analyzer tools such as LeadForce, which can give you very detailed information on visitors to your website, it is possible to get deep profile information on the calculator user without requiring that user to fill out an eForm prior to using it. With that information, the product company can profile the user, and prioritize outreach to further qualify. That is important, as it is critical to identify the 'bait' on your website that a visitor will give detailed business information to in order to gain access, and those the visitor will not.

Ahhh, the ever challenging balance between your goals of website stickiness and loyalty, lead generation, intrusiveness and the right to ask for someone's information.