Turn Your B2B Website into a Conversion Machine: Expert Tips from Sam Dunning

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Mark Evans: One of the strange things about the b to b landscape is companies do great marketing to attract and engage prospects. They deliver value added content, optimize their SEO, leverage social media creatively, participate in communities, and drive brand awareness. But when people come to their websites, there's a disconnect. Homepage messaging is confusing and uninspiring. It's difficult to find information about the product, how it works, and whether it's a good fit. And it's not obvious what someone should do next such as book a demo or a meeting, download an ebook, or send a message. It's like asking someone to go on a date to a nice restaurant and you show up wearing a stained t shirt and jeans. Today, I'm talking with Sam Dunning, the co owner of Webchoice, which helps b to b companies with websites and SEO. We're gonna cover a lot of ground including ensuring that a website is a conversion machine, which is important as attracting leads becomes more challenging. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Sam.

Sam Dunning: Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me on, man. Looking forward to the chat.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start with a nice, juicy, softball question, get you to talk about the biggest mistakes made by companies with their websites. As I talked off the top, there are some really good companies with great products, but their websites are like they cut off their nose despite their face. And I always find that confusing and troubling at the same time.

Sam Dunning: There's an endless list. I could go on for for days, but I think one of the most important problems b to b companies especially make when it comes to their website is that they do not resonate. And when I say that, I mean, they do not resonate with their target client, the actual prospects that they want to engage. And, ultimately, most of us, especially in the b to b world, want our website to act as our best sales rep, as our best salesperson because we want it to fuel our sales team with a steady flow of qualified demos, consult requests, or leads. The mistake I see so often is that b to b companies are just guessing really when it comes to design, messaging, key pages. And quite a lot of the time, they're just building out these websites around their own ego, around what their marketing think team think looks good, around what the CEO thinks look good, or other execs on the team think is gonna work rather than actually understanding what their target clients care about seeing, learning, or doing before they're ready to take that next step, book a demo, speak to sales. So that's probably one of the most impactful mistakes where where teams are just guessing about what's gonna work on their website and hoping for the best.

Mark Evans: With that answer, you've opened up a can of worms because there's a lot of different places we could go there. But I think one area to explore is really taking a step back and looking at what a company should do when they're considering the relaunch of a website or they're building a website from scratch. What kind of planning should go into an a project a big project like building a website? And where do they start? What are some of the first steps they should take when it comes to launching a website that is going to engage prospects and customers and making sure that it does the job that you want it to do?

Sam Dunning: You probably wanna take a step back and think about the why. Like, why are we re redesigning? What are the problems that we're facing that have caused this trigger point that we now decide have decided that we wanna redesign and re rebuild a website? Because like you mentioned, it's not necessarily a quick thing. It can take quite a lot of time and resource from your own team or from an external agency. So is it because you're spending a lot on maybe ads, maybe you're investing a lot in SEO, maybe you've got an outbound sales team, maybe you're doing content marketing, maybe you're driving a ton of traffic to your website, but you can physically see that it's not converting those hard earned visitors into a steady flow of inbound demos or leads. So that's a big issue. Maybe you've had feedback. Maybe your sales team have had feedback on calls that your website just doesn't cut it. Like, they're landing on your site, they don't really understand what you do. Or maybe they've said, oh, it's actually quite difficult to get this job done on your site, I e, I can't see pricing easily, or I found it quite cumbersome to check out your case studies, Couldn't really see some proof of results, or it was quite tricky for me to actually make that demo, or it was a really long form. So you've literally had feedback from the horse's mouth, I. E. Your customers, your prospects, that there's certain issues that you need to address with your current site. Or it could be something else. It could just be that the website is super update like you built it ten years ago or five years ago, whatever, and now your complete business model has changed or your service offerings change and it just misses out vital gaps in the customer journey or or your offer. So the main thing to nail down first is why are we doing it? What do we wanna get out of this exercise? Like, what are our main goals? Because not every beat whilst majority of b two b companies want their website to drive inbound, some don't, some want to use it as a kind of trust builder, I. E, if most of their business comes from word-of-mouth referrals, they want people to quickly see, like, this is the problem we fix. This is how we help. This is some case studies. This is an idea of our pricing. They make it easy for those referred warm leads to get in touch. So think about what do we wanna get out of it. That's and why are we doing it? That's one of the first things. And then you wanna think about who is this site for? So which who are the target clients that we want to attract, engage, and convert with this site, kind of really nail down that persona. Quite a useful exercise on that side of things is if you've got a few existing clients, existing customers that fit what you call the ideal persona. Perhaps you enjoy working with them. You're there. They make good revenue for your company. They fit that that kind of client style that you enjoy working with. You can literally sit down with them. And if you've got an existing site, you can say, look. What's what works well about our current site? How do you think our site stacks up against our competitors? What do you feel is missing on our existing website is a really powerful question because that's when they can dive into. Oh, actually, you don't have this page, or I thought you could have a better case study here, or you actually didn't dive into this question that I had, etcetera. So it's a literal gold mine just by interviewing some ideal clients or prospects by understanding what doesn't work well because most b to b companies, if they're established, already can have a site. So that's a few starting points. Don't know if you wanna dig into that, Mark, before I jump into some more.

Mark Evans: You will. I one of the questions that I'm interested in, it's the classic chicken or egg question is where does a company start? Is it copy and content for the website or is it design?

Sam Dunning: So it should really be copy and messaging because otherwise, whilst you can design pages out, it just makes everyone's life harder. Because if you're building out, like, your homepage, for example, and you're just leaving, like, a few couple lines of your headline, And then as you as the user scrolls down, maybe you've got some images, you've got some examples, your product in play, you've got some social proof testimonies, etcetera. And you're just kind of guessing how much copies, how much space is that's gonna be. And then when you actually get to writing it out, it just turns out you gotta tweak the design a bit. So it can it can save time if you get the messaging right. It means you can design around the message, around the copy. It usually makes sense.

Mark Evans: One of the things that I struggle with with a lot of clients and things that I that really trouble me when I look at a lot of websites is messaging, particularly homepage messaging that is uninspiring and confusing. So rather than pull people into the website and start the journey, they actually turn people off. And that's why many of these websites see high bounce rates. And I'm wondering from your experience and the clients that you work with, do they think about messaging on the homepage? Is it an afterthought? Is it something that they should AB test? I'm just curious about the process and why many companies drop the ball when there's homepage messaging that clearly doesn't work.

Sam Dunning: I would say it's it's other pages as well, especially when you get into SaaS and b to b kind of detailed complex services that can have a ton of pages around their products, their offerings, their use cases. Those need to resonate, because you might be investing in in ads and SEO to send people to those. But going back to the homepage, yeah, I mean, it's something we advise clients on all the time because because of some of the issues I've talked about earlier, really. Like, sometimes companies are too deep in their own offer. They'll do things like they'll talk about they'll use technical jargon to describe their offer that their prospects might not resonate with is one issue. I. E. Someone lands on your homepage and they just see a headline like, we provide AI tech that improves system workflows and makes a all in one three sixty degree experience. And it's like, well, if I landed on that page, I think, what the fuck do you offer? I have no clue what you're doing. And I'll scroll down your page and still be confused and then probably bounce off to a competitor. So that's a major issue. And I often say, if you're not sure how your prospects describe your offer, then you can't go far wrong being super simple. I we do a to improve b or we help x improve y. Like, that's that's a fine starting point. And then once you understand the the actual words your prospects use to describe your offer, then you can go in a bit deeper. In fact, there's there's a couple kind of frameworks that I've over the years around homepage headlines. So one is just a simple, we do a to improve b. Another one is you can point out the enemy in your world. So if there's a monster, if there's a company, if there's something that you absolutely hate, I. E. In our world, SEO might be agencies kind of using sales tactics to try and sell you a massive SEO plan that you might not need. So we might say something like, no jargon, no hard sell, just organic growth for for your website or something like simple like that where you literally lay down everything you hate about your competitors and list out their flaws. But, yeah, I mean, the the simple the simplest way to say is with a homepage. If you confuse, you lose. So ultimately, you wanna be as clear as possible because if someone lands on that homepage, they wanna know what you do, how it's gonna help them, and then the easy way to take the next step whether it's learning more, checking pricing, or booking a demo. Those those are some of the fundamentals before you get into in-depth messaging strategies.

Mark Evans: One of the hypothesis that I have about bad or mediocre homepage messaging is that companies are trying to be all things to all people. They don't want to create messaging that excludes a particular segment of the audience that they think they're after. So as a result, they create messaging that is generic. It's very vanilla like as opposed to writing messaging that is clearly targeted at their ideal customer profile. This product is for you if you have these needs. Do you find that is a problem when a lot of companies are trying to create messaging that they want to appeal to everybody at the same time?

Sam Dunning: Oh, definitely. I think probably 90% of b two b companies do that. 90% of companies in general. I mean, just look at a bunch of b two b headlines. Like, so many of them just say award winning, best in class, we just got funding, g two top rated. It's like, you see that 99% of the time. It just goes over your head because it's so vanilla. But when you actually like you said, Mike, when you drill down into this is the segment we help, this is how we get them results, this is the specific pain point we fix around our offer. It helps resonate and also means if you're driving traffic, if you're doing like targeted LinkedIn ads, if you're doing target Google ads to to the specific niches and industries, when they land on something, it's more likely to resonate because you're directly speaking to the pain point that target market has or you're directly speaking to maybe the goal that they wanna achieve or the issues they're having around revenue, whatever. So the juicier you can be, the better. And also, do you wanna attract everyone and ever anyone, especially when a lot of b two b companies have high ticket offers? So if you're just attracting like a bunch of prospects that don't fit the right persona, I mean, what's to say they they're not gonna have cash cash to invest in your offer, they're not gonna be the right fit and all these kinds of problems that might cause?

Mark Evans: Yeah. I ran into that. I have a client that is struggling with attracting leads. The problem is they're getting a lot of tire kickers. Right. They're getting people who are not the ideal customer. They don't have the budget. They don't have the needs. But the marketing attracts them and they get to the website and they fill out the ask for a demo form and it turns out they're not really the type of customer they want. I think it has a lot to do with their homepage messaging. I watched a YouTube video in which you talked about the seven must have pages on a website. Can you quickly run through these pages? And then I'd like to drill down into best practice for a few of them, particularly home, about pricing, and contact, which I see as the key pages. But in many cases, there are some of them are afterthoughts, and some of them just aren't well designed and and structured. So why don't you talk about the seven must have pages, and then we can explore some of the the pages that I think play a key role.

Sam Dunning: Yeah. Yeah. So I I wrote an article and did a video, like you said, a little while back. And in my opinion, this was basically after because I run a podcast too called Business Growth Show. And just like yourself, Mark, I've interviewed a ton of kind of VPs, CMOs, b to b companies, and assessed, like, our own website to get an idea of what pages on our own sites, on client sites, on prospect sites, basically get most visited and people actually care about. Usually, when someone lands on your site, they essentially wanna get a quick idea of what you do, problem you fix, how you're gonna improve their life or improve their business or get them certain result that they care about. And based upon the fact you quickly do that with your homepage, they're probably gonna flick to case studies or results, Check out, you can do what you claim you can. Maybe look at some customer video testimonials, look at some reviews on g two, Capterra, whatever. Then check out they can actually afford what you do. So they're gonna check out your pricings within their budget. So if you're a SaaS offer, you've probably got three tiers. If you're a service offer, perhaps you say, look. This type of service starts at this rate. This type of service starts at this rate, and this one's at this rate. And then on the basis that you check all those boxes, as long as it's easy for them to speak to sales, like book a demo or book a consult, whatever that CTA is, then they're probably gonna get in touch if you fulfill all those boxes and have a website that does the basics. Right? I decent load page time design that's actually engaging and attracts them and and messaging is right. But I think you're asking for some of those specifics around the pages. Right?

Mark Evans: Yeah. Why don't we start with the homepage? Because obviously, it's the page that attracts the majority of website traffic. And we've talked a little bit about homepage messaging. Get a little deeper into the role of the homepage because I think in many cases, people are trying to get a sense of the whole story when when they visit the homepage. They may not click deeper. They may click into a couple other pages, but in many cases, the homepage is the page where they find out what the company does and whether it's relevant to them. Can you talk about what that page needs to have on it so that it gets people into the consideration funnel. It gets them thinking about maybe this is the option for me. Maybe I should click on that button so I can book a demo or or reach out to somebody.

Sam Dunning: Yeah. Just some high level best practices is that above the fold on your homepage, so as soon as someone lands on your homepage, above the fold means before someone scrolls. But if we go from top down, you want your your fixed menu nav, it's gonna have your key pages like home, about, services, drop down, resources, contact, and then usually top right, you've got a a fixed CTA, fixed call to action button. Maybe that's book a tailored demo, speak to a sales engineer, whatever's relevant. Usually under that, you've got what's called a hero area or top banner area, and that's usually got your homepage headline where you describe this is the problem we fix, this is how we improve your business, or this is how we're different. Then you maybe got a couple of call to actions like book demo or view pricing or see proof of results. I normally encourage companies to have two call to actions there. So for example, in ours, we've got, like, view our work, and then next to it is book a call, something like that. And then you've got people give people the option to see the results or if they're ready, speak to sales straight away. And then these days, you want social proof above the fold still. So that might be sliding testimonials. That might be we've helped this many brands succeed. That might be some recent logos you've worked with, etcetera. Loads of options you've got on social proof. And then you've got to remember that it's very, very rare that people scroll right to the bottom of your homepage, so you need to pack as much value in that above fold section as possible like I just mentioned. So really letting people understand your value prop and showing that you've done it for others. And then as they scroll down, you might dive deeper. So if you're a software tool, you might show screens of the key things that people care about around your software tool. You might say, look. This is how if we're sales enablement tool, like, this is how we can improve your sales process quick, like three times quicker than doing it manually, whatever, and then dive into a screen. So basically, as people go down a bit further along the fold, they're understanding your key value prop. Maybe you've got some more social proof. Maybe you've got some more video testimonials, etcetera, as people scroll down. But remembering the further and further you get down, the less likely people are to see it. So you've got to jam as much value in above that fold as possible. And also a lot of companies still forget to make their menu sticky. So what I mean by that is on mobile and desktop, as you scroll, your menu should still be fixed at the top of the page so people can easily access your menu nav to your pages and also click that main call to action if they wanna book a demo or live chat or whatever that is. So that's like home page, and I think you're asking like, in my in my top seven pages, it was home, results, case studies, or pricing was the next one, third one, and service pages, about page, contact page, thank you page is my top seven, but happy to dive into any of those a bit further.

Mark Evans: You mentioned that you wanna tease at the product on the homepage. You wanna give people a sense of what this thing looks like. When somebody does actually click into the solutions or the product or the platform page, they come with different names. What do you wanna show them? Obviously, you want to give them a sense of the experience. You wanna highlight the key features, but you don't wanna make it a laundry list of everything they can do with platform because, obviously, that's not gonna be terribly inspiring. And they can learn that if they ask for a demo. So what should be on the product page to get people excited about what's possible? And I I I love that term what's possible because you wanna tease people. You wanna make them curious. You wanna get them excited about how their jobs could change if they use this product. So what does that page look like?

Sam Dunning: It's like a great demo. Right? So the worst demos I've ever sat on personally is where sales rep just talk about how great their product is for an hour. They don't ask any questions about your current state, the problems you're facing today, where you are now, and where you wanna get to in six or twelve months. Those kind of sales calls are painful. Right? It's it's a lot better when it's a two way conversation and they're addressing your pain points and and your goals. Websites are much the same. So if you're gonna share your tool, bring up the things that people care about first, and that's where customer research comes in because then you understand, like, these are the top three pain points people wanna fix that straight away say, look, we understand this is your problem. These are the three main screens, for example, and these are the top three high level features that are gonna directly address these pain points. And then if you want, which a lot of SaaS tools do, they get into each individual use case. So, like, they might have a drop down for services or use case, and then you could say, like, if you serve manufacturers, IT companies, etcetera, you you're least listing each IT kit and each use case. So if people do wanna get into nitty gritty, they can do so. But on your high level overview, you're addressing directly those pain points in the top three or so features with screens. And some sites now are even doing live interactive demos on their site, like they're actually letting people see the video demos there. So if people don't wanna speak to sales right away, they can actually view a quick video demo.

Mark Evans: The other page that you mentioned that I'm always curious about is the pricing page. And Mhmm. When I hit a b to b SaaS pricing page and the prices aren't listed, first of all, my well, my first reaction is what are they hiding? What is it about their prices that they don't want to show people because maybe they're very high? Maybe they're afraid of displaying competitive information. So what are your thoughts on the pricing page? And what does a company show on that page other than prices and a few here's what you get. A a menu of here's what you get for this particular package.

Sam Dunning: To be fair, I think a lot of SaaS companies are actually better at this than technology more custom technology companies, service companies. A lot of those companies just scared stiff to share their pricing. Yet when you speak to their sales team, they'll tell you, yeah, we're speaking to tire kickers, like, all the time. We're just wasting our time on these leads that can't afford what we do. I've had arguments with, people that marketers at ZoomInfo, like, Cognism and famous companies because they're not doing it. I'm sure their sales team, if I spoke to them, they tell me, yeah, we get a bunch of tire kickers all the time. Now the reason that pricing pages are probably one of the most impactful pages when done right that a b to b company can do is because, yes, if you're a SaaS company, you've got three tiers. It's simple to show pricing a b c, and then maybe have a high level quick few points on the the most common features people actually care about. If you're a service based company, it gets a bit more difficult. That's when you probably wanna give a range. I we do a we do a we do a silver tier. It's between $5 to $10. We do a gold tier between 10 to $20, and we do a a diamond tier between 20 to 30 k as an example, and then you list again the core features. But the good thing about not only sharing pricing is gonna qualify prospects in terms of do they have cash to actually be able to work with us, but then you can back up your claims. So as people are scrolling through that page, you can use customer interview videos. This is a customer we had with a similar pain point. This is the problem they came to us. This is why they chose us. This is why they invested the the money. This is how their in light this is how their life and business has improved as result of working with us. You can also use testimonial sliders. You can use brands worked with, and you can answer common questions on that page around pricing. Literally, why are so expensive? Why are your competitors cheaper than cheaper than us? How long does integration take? Do I get a dedicated account manager? What are renewals like? Am I locked in on a contract? So all those questions that your sales team are literally getting on a day to day, address them directly. It's gonna make prospects less skeptical. It's gonna show transparency, and it's gonna feed your team better qualified leads, thus saving you time and your prospects time.

Mark Evans: The last page that I wanna dive into is the one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I recently wrote a series post on LinkedIn about it and that's the about page. And what triggered my LinkedIn post was visiting this about page for a very a very cool company. What I wanna know right away is what you do and whether you're relevant to me and instead I got this creative our company has cool people working for it. And frankly, I don't care about your cool people. I don't care whether you have a cool office. What I care about is me and whether what you do is gonna help me drive my business forward and is gonna make my life easier in terms of the jobs that I have to do every day. So what are your thoughts on the about page? What does it need to do? What are some of the key elements that need to appear on it?

Sam Dunning: I think the about page is a good one because if you look into an analytics, like, if you've got Google Analytics on your site, it'll probably surprise you how many people visit it. Up until a while, our own about page was the second most visited page after a home page. Now I think it's a homepage pricing and then about, which is still like a significant amount of traffic. And a lot of websites will have similar. And you if you've just got like you said there, your about page is like, oh, we're award winning. We've been in business thirty years. Like, here's our team. Here's our dog. And we're like a really creative company. It's like, who cares? I often advise companies to share maybe a brief snippet about the founder story, why the company was set up, and what are the gut motives behind it. Get to the point about the problems that you fix. I typically, we work at this type of business that's struggling with this or frustrated about this, and they wanna improve these results. So that should be kind of above the fold content. And then I usually advise businesses to direct to something relevant. Maybe we've got a call to action, like view some case studies. Here's some recent work we've done, or here's some clients we've helped that struggled with these problems. Here's our useful resource, I a recent article on this, or here's our podcast where you can learn more about kind of what we do and get some free tip, the niche that we serve. And then maybe later on if you and if you do wanna put some key team members, the accounts not the accounts team, yeah, I don't know, the customer service team, the tech team, whatever. That's fine. So those are the few of the points I normally advise. So really, like you said, making it about what's in it for the prospect rather than how great or awesome your own team is.

Mark Evans: The other area that I wanted to talk to you about, and this is sometimes the most contentious or the most controversial, is CTAs. Great website, great messaging, easy navigation, all the good things that you want on a website. And then people don't see the CTAs. They're not as obvious as they should be, or the CTAs are unidimensional, ask for a demo, or the CTAs are just are buried in the bottom of a page. And so you do all this great work, and then people don't convert because you're really not telling them what they should do next. What are your thoughts on on CTAs? And as important, what are some of the alternatives to the classic b to b SaaS CTA of ask for a demo?

Sam Dunning: Yeah. It's CTA is a funny one because like you say, probably 99% of SaaS companies have requested demo or book a demo. And I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. I mean, CTA best practices, like I said, is homepage above the fold. Most information pages, you want it above the fold, and then you want it stuck in your sticky menu nav on mobile and PC. You probably want it a standout color, and you probably want it fixed to the top right. So no matter where someone is on the page, they can easily access it. Now with that aside, descriptive call to actions are good. I if you describe the exact action that a prospect might take and what the outcome will be as a result of clicking that, but only if they're actually relevant to what your prospects describe your offer as or just what they describe they wanna do. I if the first stage of your process is booking an audit, maybe that makes more sense than booking a demo. Mhmm. I book your tailored audit. If you're more of a complex offer and it's not like we're gonna show you a screen share on day one because that's not relevant because we've got a really complex b to b product or service here and we need to we probably need to run an audit with you first. So what is it that prospects actually ask you for on sales calls? What is well, how do they refer to your service? Then maybe consider putting that in your CTA as the first step. That that's something I usually advise. And then you can test it. Like, if you've already got a decent amount of traffic coming to your site, perhaps you test the CTA on a certain amount of pages. And if you find that it drops a lot after you change it from demo to something else, you might wanna switch it back. Whereas if if there's an uplift in click through rate, then maybe you can tell it's working well. So there's nothing wrong with testing those things. Something that I see a lot in terms of an issue is kind of decent demo pages or contact pages. So a lot of the time, the actual pages businesses use to capture details are poor. I don't have your contact form or your demo form or your calendar form above the fold. Instead, you just got a load of info about your company, and then someone's got to scroll scroll right to the bottom of page. I mean, some simple best practices around the demo page or the contact page itself is you can remove menu navs, there's no distraction. You can straight away have book a call with our sales engineers or whatever that line is, maybe a calendar there or a simple form where people can put their details in. And then backing up with social proof because some people might be anxious around what happens next. So maybe you've got a customer review video or some testimonials. Maybe underneath it, you've got some FAQs around what happens after I book some time, like, explain the actual process after sales, after someone books a sales call. And then another often neglected page is the thank you page. So when someone actually takes the time to book time on your team's calendar, then actually saying, well, thanks very much. We'll if it's a calendar, we'll be in touch to to arrange a time or if they've already booked it. Here's some links to some useful resources, podcasts, video, articles, etcetera. Because sometimes you book a book a demo or contact consult request on a page, and the page just refreshes, and you're not actually sure if anything's happening.

Mark Evans: Right.

Sam Dunning: You're just bamboozled, like, will they get in touch? Will they not? Whereas if you have a clear thank you page, it just clears everything up and makes prospects excited to speak to your team if you give them some useful resources and kinda show that you're how quickly you're gonna be in touch.

Mark Evans: If you had to pick one widget when it comes to book a demo, would it be a calendar widget in which somebody picks a time and day to talk to you right away and you you get some details about what they're looking for? So you can use Calendly or or TidyCal. Or would it be the contact page where they fill out the form, they do all the work themselves, and then they expect you to get back to them with details about when a conversation could happen? Or is it both?

Sam Dunning: I think generally calendar time. I'm speaking now I'm speaking to established b to b companies that have a Salesforce because then you can use a tool like Calendly or Chili Piper, and then it it can instantly book the time that suits you and that gets routed to the relevant sales rep. So if you've got a team of sales reps, then that is a no brainer. Now if you're a smaller company, you're gonna respond to people quickly. You don't necessarily need that. You might just have a contact form and then you'll be as long as you're in you you contact them, like, within an hour or so of the contact form, you can get away with it. Yeah. If you if you're if you're an established company with a lot of sales rep, you need a calendar tool. It's like a no brainer.

Mark Evans: One final juicy question is we've talked a lot about best practices for website, website design, website content. What are the signals that a that a company gets that it needs to redesign its website? Something's not working. The website isn't doing the job that it's designed to do, and they have to take a step back and refresh or rebuild the website.

Sam Dunning: So a few things we talked about at the start really. If you're getting feedback on sales calls, prospects are saying things like your website, I couldn't find this info on there. I didn't understand really what you did. It's missing this page. Perhaps they're saying like competitors are doing a lot. Yeah. When when you're getting those kind of really signals that you do not wanna hear, I couldn't find this, didn't know what you did, couldn't see this, this was difficult to find. That's a telltale sign that something not necessarily redesign, but something needs work. So that that's definitely a red flag. Or probably the worst one is if you're investing cash or resource from your own team or external team into advertising or marketing, whether that's SEO, LinkedIn work, LinkedIn ads, paid ads, paid search, webinars, etcetera, you're sending all this traffic to your site, and you're pretty sure it's coming from the idle clients or the channels they hang out on, but it's just not converting effectively, then that's when you're gonna need to have a look at it, assess your website, dive under the hood of it, start interviewing prospects, start looking at your analytics, like is there a huge bounce rate on the homepage? Okay. Something doesn't hit right. Maybe we've got a poor load speed. Maybe our homepage messaging doesn't resonate. Maybe it's difficult for people to get in touch. Maybe people don't trust us quickly enough because they're not seeing social proofs. There's all these things you've got to assess and analyze and then make sensible decisions based on data.

Mark Evans: One final question is where can people learn about more about you and what you do?

Sam Dunning: If you're in the market for free b to b website and SEO tips, then connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Sam Dunning. I post stuff every day. Otherwise, I've got a podcast business growth show where I post a bunch of tips and interview b to b leaders. Or lastly, if you're perhaps a bit frustrated when idle clients are searching for what you do on Google, but your competitors are above you, stealing traffic and opportunities, or if you feel like your website isn't converting effectively those hard earned visitors into steady flow of inbound, then give us a shout. It's webchoiceuk.com.

Mark Evans: Awesome. Well, thanks, Sam, for all the the great insight. We've put the spotlight on the fact that websites are designed to do jobs. They drive conversions. They educate prospects and customers. And if they're not doing that, then you've got a major, major sales and marketing problem. So thank you for answering all these questions including some of the softball questions that I asked and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and positioning and messaging consultant, email mark@markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.