Daniel Murray (4:50)

Yeah, let's go into what is one or two things that someone can do to fix that problem, because I see it all the time. I. I've been in B2B for a long time. I've been to B2B conferences a long time and you see five of the same companies saying they're number one. And that is impossible, that five of the same companies could be number one in the same space.

Sam Dunning (5:12)

So yeah, man, like we're the number one in this vertical or the homepage is just jam full of G2 badges or awards, or we're cutting edge reward winning. You know, everyone listening has probably seen the same thing. So a lot of it is just down to a lack of, lack of research really. So the best websites are built on rock solid research. So what they tend to do is the marketing team or whoever's working on it will interview target clients, that is folks that fit your target Persona or clients that you've very just recently onboarded. So then you can actually understand things like what are the main problems that they came to you to solve? What were the frustrations they were having around that issue? What was the tipping point when they realized that they needed to solve it? Was it costing them money? Was it cost them internal problems? Was their job on the line? Was resources being sucked up internally? And how did your offer kind of help them fix a problem? How did it help them get a job done? How did it improve your life? All that kind of good stuff and other things you can ask on these kind of interviews is like, how do we stack up to competitors in our space? What do you think is different about us? What was it that made you decide to work with us as opposed to other companies? So the reason you're doing this research is so you can understand your points of differentiation and problems people come to you to fix and what they actually care about. And once you do kind of, I don't know, 11, 12 interviews with these target clients, you'll start to notice patterns. And from those patterns, people say a lot of the same kind of words. They'll say, this is the common problem and this is the common kind of job I wanted to get done. And these are the results you brought to the table. And this is what we care about seeing on a website in your sector space. So you can leverage those patterns of feedback to understand and aid your messaging, your copy, your headlines. So when someone flicks onto your homepage, for example, putting this into a practical case is you might have heard of it as something called the grunt test, coined by a chap called Donald Miller. There's a book called Building a Story Brand. And that basically means, could a caveman sitting in his cave in caveman times, could you stick a laptop in front of him while he's warming up by the fire? And could he quickly see your homepage in a couple seconds, grunt exactly what you do, how your offer helps him, how it's going to help him improve his life or his business. And thirdly, how could he learn more? How could he book a call with sales or take a next step with you? If it can't do those three things to a caveman, then how the heck is it going to do that to your target prospect? So it's all about getting your homepage headline crystal clear, above the fold on what you do, how it helps, and how to take the next step. And there's a bunch of frameworks that you can use for your homepage messaging so you can go problem centric, I. E. In the proposal space it might be are you tired of endless back and forth of sending proposals in one click? Get proposed sales proposals signed off by your idle clients. Another framework is we do X to bring Y result. Another framework for homepage headlines is talking about a enemy in your space, something you hate about your sector that is in the SEO space. Are you tired of SEO agencies promising the earth and delivering Jack, we don't work with everyone. We talk to you first to see if we can or can help you. So there's a bunch of ways you can do it, but that's kind of how you can put that into play for making sure your homepage resonates in terms of the messaging. And then of course there's other things that you want to do, including kind of layering that with social proof so when someone scrolls they can check out brands that you've helped, check out client testimonials and eventually flick through to learn more on the service offer and detail pages on your website, which we can dive into in a sec.

Daniel Murray (8:59)

I think also doing that research upfront also can help get over that ego that leadership has because you can go with them with research and say hey, these 30 customers are saying this. It's a little different than what you've been telling me. I, I'm going straight to the sources data. This is not my opinion. This is what customers are saying instead of trying to convince them with no research that this is what the homepage should be. So I think it gets over the first humble sort of hey, let's put our ego aside. Customers are saying this. Let's, let's do what our customers are saying or our buyers are saying. I I, I like that a lot.

Sam Dunning (9:40)

Definitely. And not only does that research aid your website and your messaging and your copy of your site, but it informs your marketing in general. Right. If you're understanding the the key juicy problems that you fix and that's going to help you Outbound messaging for cold calling or cold, cold email. It's going to help your ads. If you're running LinkedIn ads to target Personas. So you know what juicy problem resonates, you know what kind of features they care about, what jobs they want to get done. So it informs everything. So it's really, really useful for sure.

Daniel Murray (10:11)

Let's go into number two problem that you see. Deadly Sam.

Sam Dunning (10:16)

Yep. So lack of research, designing for yourself and then we've got, I mean another one which is pretty common and pretty easy to fix is just a slow page speed. So if you go onto a site, I don't know, perhaps you open it on your mobile or maybe your laptop on the go and you've waited a couple seconds, still not there. A few more seconds, still not there. You can maybe see part of a video or a scrolling banner and eventually kind of 10, 15 seconds left and you've eventually got to the home page. And the thing is, if someone's clicked through an ad or maybe they found you on social or you've been recommended to them, if your website's super slow, painfully slow to load, then it's just going to frustrate prospects. It, it's going to leave a bit of a sour taste in their mouth as their first experience of your brand and a frustratingly slow website and they're probably just going to bounce off to a competitor that gives them a better experience. So there's a number of culprits that slow down websites. It's things like embedding a ton of video, doing a ton of animations, maybe not optimizing photos or imagery that's on the site, perhaps having tons and tons of plugins, especially things like WordPress sites where you've got endless plugins that aren't well supported or updated, perhaps not updating your platform as well if it's WordPress or similar. All these kind of things can gradually slow down your site. But there's there's a tool called Page Speed Insights and there's other ones as well and you can literally type in your URL and it gives you five to seven actionable tips that you can do to improve that page speed. And ultimately it's going to improve user experience, it's going to reduce bounce rates so people are going to have a better session time on your website, thus improving the likeliness that they convert. So that's probably another common one we.

Daniel Murray (11:56)

See and especially in a world where people are buying things the e commerce way and they want to one click purchase, they want Things fast. They want things now. If you're slow on a B2B website that is not even selling in two seconds, it's going to screw you over. If they used to these B2C websites where they can just go and everything just works seamlessly. So it's the same thing for B2C but it's just people are used to getting more and more used to speed optimization, doing things fast. There's so many choices out there so they don't have to wait for you like 10 years ago where you were the only probably choice in the market and they could wait for your speed to be a little slower than most. But now they have have 10, 15 options. That's different than you.

Sam Dunning (12:48)

Exactly right.

Daniel Murray (12:49)

Let's go into number three. So we have lack of research site speed and then we could go into number three.

Sam Dunning (12:57)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So next one is a bit of a controversial one, something I talk about on LinkedIn a lot, but it's hiding your pricing. So so many B2B companies are scared stiff to share their rates in the SaaS space, in the tech space, in the service provider space, in other spaces too. They've even got a pricing page which makes it even funnier. So you go onto their page, you think, okay, it's looking good. It looks like they can fix my problem. Their offer looks interesting. Flick onto the pricing page. Hey, we'd love to discuss pricing with you. Fill out this seven field form and a sales rep will be in touch to share pricing. It's like I've come onto your page to get pricing to see if I can afford your offer. I don't want to sit on a 30 to 45 minute qualification call to then realize that you're just 10 times what I've budgeted. Why not just share it? So I mean typically in low ticket SaaS you've got three options, right? A starter 10 bucks a month, medium 20 bucks a month, maybe pro, 45 bucks a month and then maybe enterprise options. But when it gets when companies get scared to hide, pricing is usually for higher ticket offers, especially for service providers in the B2B space. They'll often their argument to me will be, well Sam, all of our offerings are custom tailored and bespoke. I'd say fine, but why not give two or three brackets? So I, I, E. Our custom option one is 10 to 15k, that typically covers this. Option two, 15 to 25k and option three maybe 50k plus and you give a couple ideas about what's included, what's not. But the good thing about a pricing page is if you look at your analytics, when you've got them up, it's often the most viewed page on the site. So not only is it a chance to qualify people in and give an idea of what bracket they might fall into, but also you can back up your claims with social proof. So you can use things like relevant customer stories and videos, tailored testimonials, and make sure they've got a picture of the person and of course their job title and problem. You fixed how you helped results after. What's another thing I like to do is address sales call FAQs head on. So I normally involve FAQ section in the page, probably towards the bottom, which will quite literally answer questions and objections that will get on sales calls. So in my case, why are you folks so expensive for SEO? Isn't Google Ads like 10 times faster to get leads? How long does it take to get SEO results? My cousin can do it cheaper. Literally, on my FAQ pages I'm putting these things I get on my sales calls, addressing them head on so I don't have to waste time or my team doesn't have to waste time. So pricing pages are not only good to qualify prospects in or out, but they can build trust with those social proof elements and they can save your sales team time by handling objections and questions upfront.

Daniel Murray (15:45)

Yeah, and it's funny because I've heard also a lot of people dump a pricing on because of that. They think that the sales team doesn't have negotiating power. If they don't, they put pricing on there. Which is funny because it's like, don't you want your sales team to have more time to actually work with people who are actually in your. That's a qualified buyer. Not that they have to swindle their way to try and get the right price for someone. It is. And I love that FAQ question because you could just go ask your sales team what are the six objections you get? And they, they can give it to you and you just put that as content on your website. It's that easy.

Sam Dunning (16:33)

Definitely.

Daniel Murray (16:34)

What are some other things that people have told you of why they hide pricing? And because I, I feel like besides the things you said, what are some other things that you would tell them A don't for not hiding pricing?

Sam Dunning (16:48)

Yeah. Yeah. So some people say, well Sam, that's if we hide pricing, then we're going to get less leads come in. Which is usually true. But then you've got to weigh up your time or your sales team's time depending on the size of your business, if you're getting tons and tons of leads, but then when you look at your CRM, the amount of go that goes from initial conversation to then, I don't know, successful demo or proposal, depending on what your sales process is to then one, revenue, it's going to be substantially lower. If you're hiding pricing on your website because a ton of those leads that come in will one not be able to afford your offer and secondly waste the prospects time annoying them and waste the salesperson's time. Another is looking at it from a different angle is transparency. So on my podcast Breaking B2B, I think I've interviewed maybe 350 or so B2B marketers, execs, VPs, CMOs, et cetera. And from my experience, most of them want to flick onto your B2B website. They want to get a quick idea of what you do, problem you fix, how it helps. They want to see your offer in action that we'll talk about in a sec as one of the deadly sins. They want to see proof of results, case studies, testimonials, video reviews and all that kind of good stuff. They want to get answers to their questions, whether that's FAQs, resources, articles, videos and more. They want to check pricing, check they can actually afford your offer. And then lastly, they want to easily book a time with sales, which again is another deadly sin we can dive into and book time with your sales rep and strike up that conversation if you've successfully checked those boxes. So that's why I think it's almost a crime to hide your price in B2B.

Daniel Murray (18:32)

I'm in agreement. I think trust is the number one asset you have marketing. And if you're hiding your pricing, you're already lowering your barrier to trust. If you're not going to do that, well, we've already gone with three, so lack of research, site speed, hiding pricing. What's the fourth? Dead.

Sam Dunning (18:53)

They say yeah, yeah. So I've merged a few in, but the next one is hiding the goods. So what I mean by that is in SaaS, in tech and software, 99% of the time, Daniel, the call to action is get a free demo, book a demo, get your demo. Some variation of get a demo, right, that is that big orange button at the top right of the website. Now, prospects want to try. Your potential clients want to try before they buy. They don't want to sit on a 30, 40, 50 minute call to get qualified and then eventually see your offer on a screen Share. So with the rise of companies like Navitech and others that allow you to actually put a live tour like a taster of your offer in action. So almost like a preview of a demo where you can click around, try a few features out. So my recommendation is not to hide it because first of all prospects want to check it try before they buy. They want to see if it's for them, if it can do what they want before they speak to a salesperson. Now there's a bunch of ways you can do that. You can get an interactive demo for your site or you can do interactive gifs so as people scroll through your website pages you can have different GIFs outlying each feature. Maybe you've got videos for each specific feature problem it fixes or use case or maybe you've got another way of presenting it. So that's something that I strongly recommend. Rather than forcing everyone to have a sales conversation just to see the offer and check it can do what they want, why not give them the experience? Again just like your pricing, it shows transparency, it gives people a little flavor and if anything it encourages them more to want to speak to sales. Or if you're a service based business then it's going to be a bit different. So you might want to do things like in depth case studies, maybe walk through video reviews of how you helped, maybe interviews of your customers of kind of why they chose you, problems you fixed, outcomes that you brought, frustrations they faced, why they recommend basically as many examples that you can give that give people a taste for what you do and encourage them to strike. That sales conversation is going to be more of an asset for you. And that the old school way of just forcing sales calls at all costs is just not the way in B2B anymore.

Daniel Murray (21:07)

And I think the whole part of your job as marketing is driving demand. And demand means that they actually want to use your product, not that they like semi interested in your product. And they, when they're interested in the product they, they want to ask a bunch of questions. I saw this feature, what does it do? Like how do other people use this feature? Not they had to see that the demo and then you say to them, oh, there's no time for questions now you have to take another call to get these questions and then you're in four calls before you can get your answer. A sales call should be basically you being their guide, their consultant, their on how you can help fix their problem, how these features are going to do this, answer any questions they have that are piping they're not supposed to come with the whole world because then marketing hasn't done their full job before they get to sales.

Sam Dunning (22:06)

Agreed.

Daniel Murray (22:08)

So lack of research, site speed, hiding pricing, hiding the goods. Let's go to number five.

Sam Dunning (22:16)

Yeah. So this is one that's particularly ripe in the SaaS and tech space, but many B2B service companies are guilty of it as well, and a lot of websites in general and it's just being too light on content. So most of us with our business, we want it to generate inbound opportunities, be it leads or demo requests for our site. And obviously a natural way to do that is through organic search SEO. But it's unlikely that your website is going to get a decent ranking for those juicy search terms that your ideal clients are going to be searching for when they need your offer, when they need your service, when they have problems you fix, when they're comparing you to alternatives. If your website only has a couple pages, I. E. Maybe home, couple feature pages, demo page, and about us, you've got 4, 5, 7 pages on your website. It's just not really going to rank on Google. So a lot of, a lot of companies, especially in the tech space are guilty of this when really you want to make your website like as I often say, your website can be your best Salesperson, right? It's 24 live, 24. 7. And it can be either be representing your company well, building trust and converting, or it can be doing literally the opposite of that around the clock, especially if you're driving ads to it, marketing to it and more. So back to the point, light on content, I mean organic search, Google wants a decent amount of content that's fresh, that's relevant and it's, that's going to help the prospect. So a lot of companies kind of neglect that, especially in the tech sector. They go super hard on things like ads, outbound sales, demand gen, but they neglect organic search is a route to market when the truth is a lot of prospects are searching for your offer. And if you neglect SEO, then your competitors are just going to steal all that traffic and all those inbound ops. So what you got to think about is like many things, it starts with research, understanding what those target prospects are searching on Google when they need your offer now, when they're comparing you to alternatives, or when they need a service similar to yours. So you always want to start with the bottom of the funnel, I. I. E. Those prospects most likely to want to speak to a sales rep now and then you want to build out in very simple Terms as we're covering a lot on today's show is you want to build out all those key pages for all those use cases. So if you're a service provider, building out a dedicated page for each service or offering you provide or what. Likewise, if you're in the tech space, building a page for each element of your offer and then building out a page for each use case, I referring back to my business, that might be one page might be B2B. SEO for SaaS companies, or SEO for service based companies, or SEO for fintech companies. So I'm literally building out pages for each and every competitor, each and every sort of use case or Persona or icp. And that's one of the big mistakes because a lot of companies just don't do it. And then if you're in SaaS, another quick win is to do alternative pages. So if you're in the sales proposal space, then you want to make sure that you're building a name alternative page for every option. So proposify alternative. What's the other one? There's the Panda doc alternative, right? There's loads. So building out your website is a useful resource that not only gives prospects information, so when they land on those pages, it's going to say, look, hey, we fixed this problem. This is how we do it. This is how we're going to help get the job done. These are some answers to your questions. And this is actually our offer in action. So if you want to try it or book a demo, you can a quick way to actually build content that ranks. Very, very simple technique is once you've determined the keyword that you want, that specific page that you're building out to rank, you literally type into Google, you check what is number one, an organic search, you look at the ways that they formatted their page and you make notes on each and every way that you can one up this page, that you can spot this page in every way possible. It could be depth of content, it could be putting more case studies, it could be using unique data points. Maybe you've got surveys, maybe you've got reviews analytics that they don't have. Maybe you do a bigger FAQ section. So for example, when I was at Web Choice, when I wanted to rank for B2B SEO company, I literally just typed into Google, looked at the competitor that was organic search and then just made an FAQ section that was 10 times as big as the current number one and literally just took all the questions I get on sales call, made the biggest FAQ section Ever plus covered a bunch of other useful topics above that. And three weeks later I was organic page one and started getting a steady flow of inbound leads. So it's not that hard to rank on Google once you've got some domain authority and once you're building pages for buyers. But a lot of companies sadly start with blog articles, start answering prospect questions and those don't generally drive bottom of the funnel high quality leads. It's the service pages, the offer pages, the alternative pages, the integration pages that are going to drive those bottom of the funnel sales calls. And that's something that a lot of companies are just too light on on their content.

Daniel Murray (27:15)

And I think the whole point of Google now is capturing demand that's coming in for buying because people are searching for things that they're trying to buy or trying to answer questions so they're really kind of in the research space. That type of content, blog content is more normally attention based content trying to get people to build expertise which is great but if you don't have the first part which is helping them decide whether to go with your product or not, it's harder to get then the attention doesn't even matter because you got to drive them somewhere and if you're driving them to nothing, it's not going to work. So yep, so, so the first five we cover like a lack of research, high speed, hiding pricing, hiding the goods, light on content. What's number six?

Sam Dunning (28:07)

Let's go for. We've, we've kind of covered this now but zero proof. So social proof. I've mentioned it a bit but I think you should look to weave in social proof on all relevant pages. Naturally on your home page like the typical B2B tech homepage flow is what we call hero area above the fold or banner area where you've got your headline, got your value prop, then you've probably got a bar with these are some of the logos that we've helped like trusted by X amount of tech or service companies. Then you've probably got some feature cases or use cases. Then you maybe got some video reviews. But the thing with social proof is weave it into nearly all your pages where you can be it video reviews be it testimonials, make sure you've got make sure you're weaving in the prospects picture or video or whatever you can to make it relatable and make it of more human and make it more trustworthy but make it tailored. So if you've talked about a feature and weave in a piece of social proof whether That's a testimonial review, video, whatever that's relevant to that feature or that problem that you're talking about fixing. So make it relevant, use a lot of it and use it to back up your claims. So when you're claiming that you can do something, why not put a nice piece of media that's one of your customers talking about it to kind of strengthen that cause? So it's just something that a lot of companies do it, but a lot of websites, testimonials are generic. And it kind of looks like if you copy and pasted this website from one tech company to another tech company, could you tell the difference and would you believe it? That's quite a good stress test. Is this social proof believable and is it relatable and is it tailored to the use case?

Daniel Murray (29:39)

Yeah, I think everybody just does. Oh, I need social proof. But they don't understand social proof has a reason to convince. It's basically a review on something that they want to see. That's what it's like Amazon review. So you can't just be like, oh, I. This person saying I love the product doesn't always. It has to say why they love the product, what problem to fix, what feature do they like the most? All the good stuff that helps me make a better buying decision. We'll go to the final deadly sin. What is the final deadly son?

Sam Dunning (30:14)

Yeah, so we'll round off with this. We've talked a bit about kind of messaging, we talked a bit about design, we talked about pages, SEO. And then we want the prospect. Ultimately, most of these, most websites want to drive sales leads, so we want to make it super easy for prospects to book a call with our sales team. So we want clear call to actions. Usually your CTA is fixed right in the top right of your menu bar, whether that's request a speak to a sales engineer or book a tailored demo or take your tour, whatever's relevant, and then that will link through to a page. So I recommend naturally installing a calendar software. So I think it's time to get rid of the contact inquiry forms with the endless back and forth on email where you request to speak to sales and SDR sends you 10 questions via email three days later and then you reply, then two days later they send you a link, then you go back and forth, back and forth. So just, just get a scheduling tool, be it calendly, be it Chili Piper, be it revenue hero, whatever, get that set up and when people are booking those calls, route them through to someone that can guide them and address their problems and actually answer their questions effectively. So rather than rooting them through to an sdr, root them through to a knowledgeable a or engineer or someone that can actually kind of give them the information that they want. Because after all, if you're sending them to someone that can't cover kind of half the questions they've got, it's just going to frustrate prospects, give them a bad taste in their mouth about your offer. So just a lot of what I talk about of websites is just making it trustworthy, making it a useful asset, making it your best salesperson and making your sales team's life easy by feeding them good quality leads, understand what you do and how you help and answer their questions up front. So then by the time they book that call, they're halfway there to doing business with you.

Daniel Murray (32:04)

Yeah, and I love that. I think that the whole goal of the website is making it easier for your buyers to buy, not easiest for your sellers to sell, but so just make. It needs to be frictionless, that process of how they book a demo, how they go through your website. It needs to be like with the site speed, everything you said, like makes it simple, frictionless, makes it easier to buy for the buyer. So it's the decision is their research is really done before they get to sales. Now they're just asking the little last questions of like you go to a sales associate, like what sizes do you have? Does it do this, does it do that? What's the leather like? Blah blah, blah. Like it's asking all those last questions to make sure they can answer those questions for you.

Sam Dunning (32:53)

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Daniel Murray (32:55)

And last question I have for you is what is a marking hill you would die on?

Sam Dunning (33:01)

Oh, marking hill I die on. That's good. Not even thought about that before the show actually. Let's go with experimentation. So I think experimentation, it's a mix of two, which is a bit cheeky. It's an experimentation slash practicing what you preach. So I see it time and time again, especially marketers, right? They want to, they want to get buy in from maybe their exec team or their founder, whoever runs the biz, but sometimes too scared to do it and they won't get budget authority authorized from higher up execs. So I'm always of the opinion of it's better to seek forgiveness afterwards than initially seek permission. Obviously I can get away with stuff. I'm a founder so I can just pretty much do what I want with an extent. But when you're Working in an organization, I think if you want to do something, just start making it happen yourself. So you're thinking about podcast. Great. Put a plan together, Start recording some episodes. Do you want to do it as an ABM play? Interviewing ideal clients and building relationships and eventually working with them. Great. Make a list of 10 on LinkedIn. Reach out to them, get it booked, do it off your own back. Record it on Zoom. Once you start getting some traction, you built out the episode show your exact team, they're going to think, holy shit, this person's actually doing stuff off their own back. I'm impressed with what they've put together and make it happen. And further up the ladder, that might be, I don't know, building out your own email list, building out your own show, building out your own, I don't know, hobbyist article site, building out your own YouTube channel, whatever, but experiment with things. One of the most fun things that I do as a marketer is kind of trying things out on my podcast, on my YouTube, doing experiments on LinkedIn, doing experiments with SEO to see if I can rank article pages above super authoritative sites, like when I've outranked Salesforce and various other huge companies with kind of really niche and specific pages. I mean, this stuff is fun, but it can also have really big impacts on your career. So I think, yeah, experimentation and kind of doing stuff off your own back will get you quite far.

Daniel Murray (35:01)

Yeah, that's a really good one. I think marketing is just a bunch of little experiments to find things. Nobody always has the answer. Nobody understands. If it was that easy, then there'll be a lot of great companies out there, but it's not that easy. So lastly, where could people find you and what you're doing?

Sam Dunning (35:22)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you've. If you're still awake through my website and SEO ramblings, then you can follow me on LinkedIn. Sam Dunning. I share daily tips on SEO and websites for B2B companies. I run a podcast a bit like this one. So we share actionable and no BS, solo episodes and guest interviews. That's called breaking B2B. Or if you're maybe a little bit frustrated that your website isn't driving a steady flow of qualified sales leads or competitors are constantly ahead of you on organic search on Google, then we can fix that with our unusual approach to SEO and web Design. It's breaking b2b.com awesome.

Daniel Murray (35:57)

Well, go follow Sam. He just gave you seven deadly sins, but I bet you he can give you 30 deadly sins of not to do on the website. Thank you so much for coming on the POD and sharing your knowledge and I really appreciate it.

Sam Dunning (36:11)

Thanks man. It was fun.

Daniel Murray (36:17)

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast us. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.