Is your website a brochure or a sales tool?

Plenty of business websites were built the way a printed brochure gets built. Someone gathered the company history, the values, a product list and a few photos of the factory, and the designer laid them out nicely. It describes the business accurately, and the people who work there usually like it.

What it doesn't do is help anyone buy. That's the difference between a brochure and a sales tool, and it has less to do with the design than with whose questions the site is answering. The homepage is where it shows first, which is a piece of its own.

Who's actually reading it

A brochure is written for someone already interested in your company. A sales tool is written for the people deciding whether to buy, and in a B2B sale there's usually more than one.

Say a manufacturer is replacing its compressed air system. The maintenance manager found you and likes what you sell. But the operations manager is worried about downtime during the changeover, the financial controller wants to know what it costs to run as well as to buy, and there might be a safety officer in the mix too. You'll probably only ever speak to the maintenance manager. The others will look you up on their own, often after your quote has landed, each with their own question.

A brochure site gives all of them the same three paragraphs about quality and service. A sales tool has something for each of them.

What a sales tool has

It has the detail buyers check before they'd call: specifications, capacities, standards and certifications, the brands you carry, where you service and typical lead times. A buyer comparing suppliers can rule you out on these before ever getting in touch, and "contact us for details" makes you easy to rule out.

It answers the commercial questions as well as the technical ones. You don't have to publish prices if your work is quoted. You can still explain what affects the price, what's included, what a typical project involves and how long it takes. That's what the financial controller wants, and it's what brochure sites tend to leave out because it's awkward to write.

It deals with risk. The person signing off on a big purchase often worries as much about what happens if it goes wrong as about what it does. Warranty, support, who answers the phone when it breaks, what happens during install. If that's on the site, the person you'll never meet can tick it off without having to ask.

It offers more than one way in. Not everyone's ready to ask for a quote. Some want a spec sheet first, and some want to talk to someone today. A site with one contact form treats them all the same.

And it gets measured. A brochure is judged on whether it looks good. A sales tool is judged on how many useful enquiries it brings in and which pages people read before they got in touch.

A test for this afternoon

Pick something you sell and pretend you're the financial controller at a prospective customer. You've been handed your quote and told to sign it off. Go to your own website and try to find what you'd need: what it really costs, what's included, what the risks are and why this supplier over the cheaper one.

If you can't find it, neither can they. And they won't ring to ask, because they're not the person who enquired. They'll send the quote back with a question mark on it, or approve the one that was easier to understand.

Keep the brochure bits

You don't need to throw out the history and the values. Thirty years in business is a genuine reason to trust a supplier with a big order. It just shouldn't be the only thing on the site. Put the buyer's questions first and the reassurance after, and the same website starts doing a very different job.