Launching A Website? How To Make Your Website Your Best Sales Person [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 75]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

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Alex, if you just built a website and you think that job is done, we can now start raking in the results and we're going to see everything go in the direction we want, I'm unfortunately going to tell you that you're wrong and there are specific things that we can do and ways that we can look at our website to make sure that we're maximizing the ROI on that big

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investment.

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Welcome back to Endless Customers, the show that teaches you how to earn trust and win more business in the age of AI. I'm your host, Alex Winter, and today we're joined by Vin Gaietta.

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He's head of web strategy.

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He's a coach here at Impact.

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Vin, welcome back to the show.

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Hey, Alex. Great to be here, man. Today we're talking about websites. Surprise. Shocker.

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Crazy.

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Our web experts here. What else are we going to talk about? we need to get into. And I think our audience, we need to buckle up. This is a real conversation we're going to have right now. A lot of people will build a site or launch a site or redesign a site and they spend all this time and all this money and they're like, my website's done. Set it and forget it, right? Wrong. No, that's not how it works. No, not at all.

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So let's talk through, once your website's done, what you need to do to keep it performing at its best, to optimize it, to make sure you're doing all the stuff and things to get a return on your investment.

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Yeah. I mean, let's call it spade to spade. Websites are not typically cheap things if we're going to go strategize, design, build the piece that's going to be a phenomenal marketing and sales tool for the long term.

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Right. And that's it. It's an extension of your sales team. It's a sales tool. So you need to look at it that way and think about it that way.

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And that can be a strategy shift for a lot of people. So we'll talk about what the after launch needs to look like. We'll talk about what your site at launch in an ideal world from my point of view should look like. And before we go there, we have to start at the beginning.

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So that is really the strategy piece. Websites historically are considered a marketing tool. We gotta flip that on its head. Websites are sales first tools. They have to be a sales strategy. If we're not thinking about it that way, we're probably going to leave money and

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opportunities on the table and no one wants that. Nobody wants that. No one. So for that we need to look at our websites as living breathing things. They can't just be launched to be static. You wouldn't hire a salesperson and say, alright cool Alex, you go get after it brother. I'll talk to you in like three months when you hit your goals.

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No, absolutely not. That would be crazy.

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That's what we do with websites right now. We literally will launch a website, and many companies say, cool, we did that, pop the bottles, confetti rains, website's launched, it's gonna do its thing.

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Right. How often do you hear that? I'm sure you must hear that all the time, or more often than not. Like what's a, if you had to say percentage wise, I'm putting you on the spot here.

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I would say probably 80 to 90% of sites that we look at. And that's usually what happens, right? A company has relaunched a website, they expect it to hit the goals and do the things, and they maybe see an increase for three, six, nine months, and oftentimes things change.

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But because we didn't look at the website as a living, breathing thing, a real human, and I'm gonna keep doubling down on that, we need to view it as a human and a part of our team. You basically paid a salary to create this tool, this thing that needs to do its job.

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And when we set it and forget it, your results will go down over time because no one's looking at it, no one's managing it, no one's teaching this thing how to be better. So yeah, 80 to 90% of sites that I talk to or I interact with get launched

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and maybe they get nominal updates

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but usually it's a set it and forget it motion. Wow, that's a big number. So how do we shift the perception? How do, like, what do we need to be thinking about as business owners and as marketers and as sales folks here?

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What's the first step with this website now that it's launched, now that it's done? That's a huge step to take and get it launched and to pay for it and to do all those things. Now what do we do?

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Just like a great salesperson, we need to treat it as such. You wouldn't just put someone in the field without reviewing what they're doing, having some role plays, talking about how to improve the conversations they're having. Same thing is true for our website, right?

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So we need to have someone that is responsible, be it part-time, full-time, for looking at the data, looking at analytics and how things are, are or are not actually working, because we learn a lot from what doesn't work. That's why we need to test, A-B testing, looking at data

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through tools like Microsoft Clarity, Lucky Orange, Hotjar, choose your flavor of choice. There's a wealth of intelligence and knowledge that we can get for what should be our best salesperson, our best sales tool, and sales people out there are probably freaking out and rolling their eyes right now,

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but it's a sales tool to make our lives easier as sales professionals, because if we set this up in a way and we're looking at the data to improve what our consumers, our prospects are getting from our digital sales tool, we're going to have stronger first conversations. We're going to be able to improve our close rate because we're not going to waste time

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on bad fits. We're not going to waste time in the sales process on people that may never be able to do business with us.

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Right. Right. So high level, it sounds like your website, from what you're saying, really needs to be integrated into the overarching business strategy. So it becomes another tool, another facet of the bigger picture that's happening.

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Right. And that's at launch, your website needs to do some basic things. Right. So I'm making the assumption that everyone listening has this as at least a starting point, right? Your new website has messaging that resonates with your end consumer, and it talks more about them and their pain and their journey than it does us. Quick test. If you do a find and replace a command F or a control F on your website page, you have more we and our versus you and your, you probably got a messaging problem

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that needs to be looked at. Because that's a pitfall many salespeople fall into, right? We talk all about ourselves, we feature them, we want to go in and just sell and sell and sell.

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Our people are the difference. Yes. Maybe that is true, but is the end user or the potential customer, do they really care at that moment about that particular piece.

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And that's that is where we see lots of websites fail. We're talking about us and that's never the sales experience any consumer wants when it's all about you. Talk about me. I don't care about you as a company until I know you can solve my pain and I've gotten some trust around that, right? Totally. So messaging is key. Making sure that we have a considered journey on that newly launched website. It's all funneling down to the sales motion. Get a quote, request an estimate,

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schedule a consultation, whatever that is, right? And last but not least, we have it set up where we have the most important services as standalone, what I would call a business page, because it's gonna be the core information around the business offering,

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and we're educating folks in our blog or our learning center to get them to those business pages, right? So you set your salesperson up to have strong messaging, to have strong conversion points, and to guide someone from A to Z in their journey. That's the the base level of

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what our websites need to be doing. Okay, yeah that makes sense and it's got me thinking now too, so you had mentioned A-B testing. I love A-B and A-B-C testing. Part of this is an experiment because if we're not thinking about us, you need to be thinking about the end user. Yeah. And they really should be dictating what works and what doesn't. So where do you find the balance of like, I'm making this strategy,

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but then not getting too in the weeds or like too focused on one thing that you think is the thing but in reality it might be something else

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so that you can actually dial it in and get it correct?

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It's huge, Alex. And everything that we do in all of the websites that I have built, they are fundamental assumptions. They are informed and based on my experience with websites, right? Sure.

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But it is a fundamental assumption, an educated guess on what's actually going to work. And anyone out there that is creating a website is doing the same thing. They are going based on what they believe to be a best practice, what they have seen work in their experience. None of that matters until it's proven. And I have done so many tests with this same starting point thinking, hey, I saw this work for these three other clients.

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It's going to work. And I'm often shocked when it doesn't work. And I'm like, heck yeah, we learned something about this specific audience for this specific market in this geo, right now we can go use that and never do that again.

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And flow that across all the touch points that we have. They're similar. Totally. I see. And I love what you just said because there's a mindset that you have that maybe not everyone has and it might need to shift. So how did you get into that mindset of like, Hey, this didn't work and instead of being pissed or freaked out or upset

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or whatever the adjectives are, it's like, no, this is a good thing. I can learn from this and we can make this even better.

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Yeah, I mean, it goes back to high school science. And for everyone out there that hated it, I'm sorry, but we got to bring it back to, we create a hypothesis, we test a control and a variable. And it's all in the name of creating a better experience, making our sales tool, our salesperson,

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the digital storefront for our business as strong as it can be. And if we're not willing to test or, look at it this way, you have to train your salesperson. This is the training, the testing to see what works, looking at the data, seeing where people are

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or are not clicking. That's training, that's role-playing, that's giving your highly paid employee, you're gonna spend potentially 20 to 120 grand, depending on size of site, your company, what you need.

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Right, variables.

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On this salesperson. And then you don't touch it, because you did the thing. That's crazy town to me.

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It is crazy town. And I love that your sales first approach is so critical. How early in the process, like when you're redesigning a site and as you're launching a site, do you need to pull the sales team in? I'm sure there's instances where people build a whole site

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and the sales team hasn't seen it until it launches and they're like scratching their head going, wait, what is this?

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It depends on the company.

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So typically we want to get some feedback. That's usually going to be around messaging. Or we'll have a client go in and say, y'all know what questions the sales team are getting or are not getting. How do we pepper that into the messaging?

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How do we pepper that into the content we're creating? What are good fit, bad fits for each specific service? Usually that'll come from sales if the marketing team doesn't have that readily available. And then it's the same process, right? We need the sales team to go through the website, see if

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there's anything that we've missed or that they say, hey, we need to double down on this. This is actually a big piece here. And it should become one of their go-to resources in their motions, using the content on the site, pointing people back to it, because we talked about this in another episode, if we have self-service

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tools every step of the way, it makes the sales team even easier to get in touch with, to get the right information and to make that consumer the most educated in their space.

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Yeah. Absolutely. It makes it so it really becomes, your website becomes an extension of your sales team and getting that mindset shift is critical. Once you do that and once you start to understand this and you launch your site, sales teams track and everyone's on the same page, how do you optimize it or how do

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you get the sales team to like leverage it to their advantage and really be bought into it and excited to use it and hopefully help them do their job even

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better? It's something that has to come up in your monthly or bi-weekly revenue team meetings, right? How are we not using the website? Look at the data, look at the most important touch points, right? So you will likely have a guide or a resource on there that helps educate someone deeper in their journey, A to Z, a home buyer's guide for kitchen remodeling, something like that, right? Talk about how sales is or is not using that.

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Talk about how users are or are not using that. But most importantly, you've got to look at the data. We can't make assumptions based on, well, I don't think someone would like that. No one cares about your opinion, dude. Sorry. It's all about what the user cares about. And that is something that's hard for folks to swallow

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because we're professionals. We're paid to know what we know and be experts. But the biggest thing that I have learned in testing is I don't know what I don't know. And one user group may think something works for them and they will show us in the data.

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That's why when we do a test, it has to run for at least four weeks. Even if you're seeing signals that say, this is the right thing, we're getting great results.

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You gotta do four weeks.

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That's what I was gonna ask you, is like when you're testing, how long does it take, and like, can you do something for a week and then be like, nope, that doesn't work. Like, where does it actually start to get sticky in it? Like, you have enough data to say,

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either this does or doesn't work, and how to shift afterwards.

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There's calculators that you can use for statistical significance, making sure you have enough data to give an informed decision. It's gonna depend on your amount of traffic, it's gonna depend on what you're testing.

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I like four weeks as a control group for the amount of time we let a test run because you'll get weekday fluctuations, weekend fluctuations, holiday seasonality, all the things you can get a good view of that trend. Now, you can choose to extend it,

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and we have oftentimes said, you know what, we're pretty close in our results. Let's give it another three weeks, see what happens so we can make a better decision. There's also been times when we see Everything going in the exact wrong direction like we saw a drop where we saw we were gonna see an increase

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Because we're monitoring it and we didn't just say run the experiment and let it go like you're gonna check it week over week if We're doing a best practice there, right? You can stop the bleeding before it becomes critical and that's that is part of the experiment You have to keep an eye on these things. It can't Ron foe peel. We said it and forget it. It's gotta be managed, it's gotta have attention to it. So we stay on top of these things and it doesn't go in the wrong way inadvertently

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because that is a risk in any test. You can get the exact opposite result, we're gonna learn from it, but it's bad if you don't stop that

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before it gets too, too deep. Right, no, and I think the recurring theme is it plays back into what we said at the beginning that your site is a living, breathing thing, it's not a set it and forget it. For companies out there, I have to ask you this,

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for companies out there that maybe don't have as much access to their website, can we talk just a little bit about like, oh maybe I would love to be able to change my site like this and I can't, can we just talk a little bit about that too, because I think that plays

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into this conversation.

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It does, and that's one of what I would say is a table stakes outcome of your website redesign. At launch, your team needs to be able to effect change. Your team needs to be able to update content, change layouts around, add new sections to the page and the journey because we need to be able to update things

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based on the data we're getting, right? You need to have your salesperson change their conversation if they're falling flat on their face in their opening, right? And if you can't make that change or if the salesperson isn't willing to make that change,

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you might have to replace that salesperson. So if your website isn't conducive to your team making edits, to actually getting their hands in there and controlling it for the longevity of your company and the success of the sales team, you might need to unfortunately make a change in your website. And that's hard for people to hear.

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And it's a recommendation we've unfortunately had to make for people that just got out of a website redesign a couple months prior to talking with us. And it's a give and take, right? We can go X amount of the way down the field, but at a certain point, we're going to have to look at is this sustainable for your team.

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Right. And I might be stereotyping when I say this, but I feel like most salespeople want to have that concierge level, let me rephrase this. I might be stereotyping when I say this, but I feel like most salespeople want to accommodate, want to facilitate a good conversation,

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want to be the helpful, guidance person that's going to ultimately convert them into a customer. That's the goal, that's what everybody wants. How can they do that, and how can they start to leverage these tools to their advantage? Because I feel like these good salespeople

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we're talking about would want to have the control, want to be able to tweak so that they can just keep

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optimizing and making the experience better. Yeah, it goes into that sales marketing handshake, right? So if the sales team is leveraging the tool as the content They're gonna find areas that may or may not resonate based on what you assign and sell in that process, right? So if before every initial conversation, I make sure that you have gone through our self-assessment tool You digested this price article and maybe if we have a pricing self-selection tool you did those three things,

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that's gonna change what my first conversation would look like, and if I assign and sold those to you, I assign that before that first conversation, now you're gonna say, wow, they've got their stuff together, they're trying to give me the best experience possible, it should make my conversations a heck of a lot easier

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as a salesperson. And if anything feels weird, in that monthly or bi-weekly revenue meeting, I should, as a salesperson, bring it up to the marketing team and say, hey, these are some changes you all may need to go take a look at, do some tests around.

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But this is what I'm experiencing firsthand because we're leveraging our sales tool.

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Yeah, well and that's something that I've seen happen time and time again where sales folks, usually when the bad stuff happens, before they ask you an answer, before implementing what we talk about, they tend to sweep that stuff under the rug

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and go like, look at my numbers, look at all that good stuff. But where you see real changes when you talk about the, hey, this call didn't go well, let's sit down and look at it as a team and figure out how we can change our language,

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how we can change our self-selection tools, how we can do whatever to make the experience better. Those are those teachable moments that I think a lot of people shy away from, and you almost have to look at the elephant in the room and not be afraid of it.

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That's right, and if we're not coaching our sales team, if we're not optimizing and testing our website, how much are we leaving on the table? How, what could our close rate be? What could our conversion rates be with just a little tender loving care,

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with giving the website a manager it deserves as if it was that real living, breathing salesperson? Because guess what? Your site doesn't take vacations, it doesn't take sick days, it doesn't look around at anything else

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aside from the job that you paid it to do.

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Totally. No, and I love that. So I'm definitely tracking that the website is another salesperson on your team. If you're a sales manager, you really need to be looking at it and thinking it that way.

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So if it's doing that and you have this dialed in, what else can the site do for you as you move forward? Like what are some of the outcomes that are positive? I think we get the why now, so like what's the payout?

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Yeah, if we're really dialing in that journey and we're making sure we look at the most important touch points, we can start experimenting with what additional information can we get, what questions could we ask so that when they do raise their hand and say, hey, I'm actually ready

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to talk to a human, because as we've talked about on so many episodes, no one wants humans in the sales process. 76% of people, according to Gartner, don't want salespeople in the sales process, we want touchless, right? The more that we're optimizing around that, the better we're going to have the outputs, the sales qualified

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leads, the sales close rate go down because we're having stronger conversations. We're seeing where we can disqualify folks before they ever raise their hand and we're optimizing for the folks that do want to raise their hand so that they are way more likely to buy from us because they trust us, because we tailored it to the best fits, not just everyone. That is often a pitfall of a website. We try to get everybody instead of the right people.

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And if we're not looking at the data, we're not managing it, you're never gonna hone it in to make it the well-oiled sales machine that it can be. That's right.

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It's like spray and pray. You never know what you're gonna get when you do that. So it's better to take the time to get it dialed in. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. All right, so what is like the one thing

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or the big thing that people should take away? Launched my site, I'm so pumped that we spent all this time and all this money, what do I do now to make sure that everything we just talked about becomes the reality?

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It's really simple in my mind. You have to be curious. You have to have a wonder around your website of what if we change this? What if we change the messaging? What would work better?

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And then actually track it. The only difference between science and messing around is writing stuff down. Adam Savage from MythBusters said that. It's so true though. That is, right? We can all go mess around and change a lot of stuff on our website, but if you're not tracking the efficacy up or down, there's

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no point. So look at your website. There's no way in really knowing because it just becomes subjective at that point. It's not objective with data, it's just

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your feeling, which may or may not be true depending on how you're looking

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at it. And everyone listening has had the experience where someone comes into the conversation and says, it would be great if we did this thing. And usually it's something where we would be like, I don't know if that's gonna work. But Carl recommended it,

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so we're gonna put that pop up on the website. Well, you know what, Carl, the data shows it doesn't work. So Carl, go back to your desk, I'm sorry. So we're not gonna roll that out long term. It takes a bias out of it, it's the data, it's what the users want.

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And you cannot argue with the people that pay our bills.

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End consumer is what we need to solve for, not our own internal team biases. That's also a great example though, because our Carl character, even if he was pushing this thing really hard and wanted it to be true, you give him the chance to bring it to the table in your revenue team meeting. You entertain it. You even A-B test it.

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You have data to back it up so that if it doesn't work, you can very genuinely be like,

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hey, great idea.

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You tried it, but this is what's up. And then that way there isn't hard feelings of like, oh, well, they don't listen to me. And this, that, and the other. You know, like, it gives everyone an equal, like, level playing field.

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Yeah, and it's not to say that, first and foremost, you don't have to do every experiment. You should create a backlog and prioritize what you believe the outcome is gonna be, right? Always things that are gonna build more trust and help get the sales qualified lead started faster.

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That's a good point, too. You don't wanna get too into the weeds on experimenting like crazy, or then you don't know if anything is actually going to stick.

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And that's the documentation. You need to know what the outcome should be, what the hypothesis needs to be created. We're not just testing for testing's sake. It's got to affect change on the journey. And everyone is welcome to give those ideas, but the human that manages the website's success, either part-time or full-time, they are in control of what gets done when it gets done,

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and they hear all the feedback and their job is to distill it into. I think if we make this change to the messaging and the calls to action, we're going to see this increase in the user journey.

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Love it, man. Great insights.

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Anything else that we need to talk about before we wrap up when we, when it comes to making sure your new website is going to be optimized for success? We need to look at them as real salespeople, make sure that they're doing the job that we're paying our websites to do, whether it be hosting or the redesign cost, we have paid a salary to this tool.

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We gotta make sure it's getting the most out of it. And, best practices or test practices, optimize and look at the data, solve for our end user. So, we have to have the best salesperson in our digital storefront, and we need to make sure that they're living up to their job

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and earning their keep.

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Earning their keep, I like that. Well said, Vin, thank you for your insights and for being on the show. Really appreciate it.

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Great to be here.

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Excellent.

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Well, for everybody out there watching and listening, this is Endless Customers.

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I'm your host, Alex Winter. I'm your host, Alex Winter. We'll see you on the next episode.