Three reasons why your website is not generating leads

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Intro

Are you frustrated that your website doesn't generate the number of leads you want?

Maybe you've hired a conversion rate optimization expert or a UI UX designer to come in and redesign your website. 

They've changed the shape, the color of your call to action button. They've moved it to the upper right hand corner of your website.

They've changed the wording from submit to something a bit more engaging, like contact us or request a consultation. 

And they've done other things and design changes based upon best practices and their experience. But still your website is not generating the number of leads you want.

In this episode, I'm going to explain why this is happening and what you need to do to fix it.

At the heart of the problem, there is a disconnect.

There's a disconnect between what you want your website to do and what your visitors are looking for when they get to your website.

You and I put myself in the same category. You want your website to generate leads. You've been told your website is going to be this fantastic 24 by seven salesperson who's going to convert visitors into customers.

You've invested a lot of time, money, resources, and energy into your website.

So naturally you want a return on that investment. And the way we typically measure the return on investment for a website is a number of leads.

Yeah. You want your website to be a lead generating machine. 

But I can assure you that the people visiting your website have very little interest in:

• Signing up for your newsletter, 
• Being put into your nurturing email campaign or 
• Filling in your contact form so they can 
• Become another entry in your CRM system and be 
• Put into your sales funnel.

They don't want any of that. 

That's because when they visit your website, they're looking to solve their problem.

They don't care about you, what you do, your capabilities, your product, your history, your team, or anything about you.

They care about themselves and their problems.

They want to educate themselves on what the problem is and how to solve it.

And they will only press on that contact us button on the add to cart button, sign up for your newsletter, call your sales team, fill in a form, or initiate that chat after you have demonstrated three things.

1. One is that you understand their problem. 
2. Two, you have the experience and expertise to solve their problem. 
3. And three. You're easy to work with. 

So it's time for us to stop thinking of our website as this lead generating machine and really start to understand how our website fits into how people make purchasing decisions in today's digital age.

And it's all psychological.

It all comes down to human behavior. And this is how we make purchasing decisions today. 

The first thing we have to understand is that:

People are afraid of making mistakes.

We're trained to do this. I actually think is built into our DNA. We don't like seeing that red check Mark on our tests. When we were back in grade school, we want the a hundred percent, not the 95%.

We don't like making mistakes 

And you can see this today in our daily lives. 

So. I'm sure this has happened to you. 

You're driving down the street and maybe there's three or four lanes. I live in California. We've got really big highways here.

And then there's this car in the 10 o'clock position off to your left hand side. 

And all of a sudden this car swerves over three lanes because he has to make that right hand turn. 

Yeah, you've seen that, right? 

But he can't say, gee, I'm going to miss that right hand turn. 

Maybe I should go do a U turn or take the next off ramp on the freeway.

No, no, no. 

He doesn't want to make that mistake. 

And so he cuts over those lanes, being a jerk, cutting people off, regardless of what kind of traffic hazard he's causing.

And then when he, or she, succeeds in making that last minute right hand turn, they feel victorious. 

Because they didn't make a mistake. 

This psychology of avoiding mistakes also applies to how we make purchasing decisions.

Simply put, we don't want to choose the wrong product or the wrong company.

I know I don't want to do that. Do you?  And how do we avoid making a mistake?

This leads me to my second point to avoid making that mistake.

We research before we buy.

And I'm not talking about that impulse buy when you're standing in the checkout line at a grocery center and, uh, you're get that pack of gum while you're standing in line to just grab it.

No, no. I'm talking about buying something of material value. Can you remember the last time you bought something where you didn't research the snot out of it? 

Thank you, Amazon.

We all look at reviews. In fact, they have filters on the left hand side that shows us the reviews for the product that we're looking at.

You only select those products that have four stars or above because you don't want to make a mistake.

You don't want to buy a bad product. And so you research before you buy. 

And this is especially true for big things, like a new car. 

Can you imagine walking onto a dealer's lot today in 2024 without having researched the car you're interested in? 

By the time you walk onto the dealer's lot, you already know the make, model, trim, option package, floor mats, number of cup holders.

You know all of this. And if you've really done your research, you know the nearest competitors. So if you're searching for a Toyota Camry, I used to work at Toyota motor sales. So a lot of the stuff I talk about involves cars, but if you're looking for a Toyota Camry, you know, the nearest competitor is a Honda Accord.

And the last thing that you want to see when you're walking onto a dealer's lot is to see this army of salespeople coming over to you and asking questions like,

hey, do you have any questions about the car? Or, hey, can I help you find the right one? 

No, you can't. 

In fact, the only question you want to ask that salesperson is, Can I drive that car and take it out for a test drive? And literally you're pointing at the car you want because you've probably looked at the dealer's website and found the car is in their inventory.

This behavior of researching before we buy just doesn't apply when we're buying consumer goods, like cars or shopping on Amazon, this also applies to the B2B world where potential customers are looking to solve a problem. 

And if they find you, they're trying to understand if you, your company, can solve that problem. I can't imagine buying a product or a service from a company without researching them first. Can you? 

And this really brings me to my third point. So, remember, we're afraid of making mistakes and we research before we buy.

So, where do we research? 

I'm old. I'm, you see my gray hair. 

I'm a Gen Xer. And so, you know, when I was growing up, when I need to do research, 

I went to the library and at the library, I went to this thing called a card catalog, and I found what I wanted, and I wrote down that Dewey Decimal Number. 

And with that number in hand, I wandered up and down these aisles of books. So eventually I got to the correct row that the book was sitting in and then I found what I wanted.

And you know, that's how we used to research in the old days. 

Maybe some of you miss the Dewey Decimal System. 

I certainly don't. 

Today,

people research online

and it goes something like this. They go to their favorite search engine, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Your choice. 

Interestingly enough, I think the traditional search engine way of finding things is going to go through some very rapid and fundamental changes with chat GPT and generative AI search results and kind of already see it happening.

And no one really knows what it's going to morph into. That's a discussion for a different day..

Right now in 2024, we go to our favorite search engine and we put in our question.

And the second thing that happens is we get the search page results. We scan through the results, find the one that answers our question and click on it. And this usually takes us to a website.

I mean, yeah, there are other places you can go a video, a podcast, a PDF, a social media post, but I think we can all agree.

You remember that movie, uh, finding Nima where all drains lead to the ocean.

It's the same thing. 

All these customer discovery channels. They all eventually lead to your website because that is where we do our final research for big ticket items.

And when they come to your website, they're looking to answer their questions. 

Don't take my word for it. Forrester recently did a study where they found out that

• 68 percent of B2B buyers prefer to research by themselves online.
• And 62 percent of those B2B buyers, they develop a shortlist based solely on digital content.

So these B2B buyers Almost two thirds of them don't want to talk to your sales team. Don't want to pick up the phone. Don't want to initiate a chat and don't want to click on the contact us button.

They're going to develop their shortlist based upon what you have on your website. 

So, you need to put in the time and effort to answer these three questions. Do you remember what they were? 

1. Do you understand their problems?
2. Do you have the experience and expertise to solve their problems?
3. And are you easy to work with? 

They're looking for answers and you have to answer it on your website. 

But it's a one way communication. 

There is no opportunity for you to go back and forth and ask clarifying questions and really drill down on what their problem is. 

You're going to have to do the hard work to truly understand your buyer persona and target audience.

And I'm not just talking about demographics like age, education, gender, job title. You need to go deeper. 

• You need to understand what are their problems? 
• What are they worried about? What happens to them if they fail? 
• What are their objections? 
• And yeah, What are their feelings? 

Because people buy on emotion and justify on logic.

You have to demonstrate that you understand and answer all of that stuff. Online. If your website is not addressing the concerns, their hopes, desires, it really doesn't matter what color your CTA button is.

It doesn't really matter how your website looks, the colors, the fonts, how big your logo is. All of that is secondary because if they don't believe you understand their problems, can solve their problems, and are easy to work with, You're not going to make their short list.

Outro

And that's the reason why your website is not generating the number of leads you want. 

Look, I'm not saying that conversion rate optimization, UI, UX design, doesn't matter. It absolutely does. 

But before all of that, you have to understand the psychology of how we make purchasing decisions today. 

So before you go out and hire that conversion rate expert or web designer, take a look at the content of your website.

Are you talking about yourself

OR

Are you answering those questions? 

Thanks for listening and spending time with me.