B2B Goes Web-Centric

Not so long ago, business-to-business Web site “design” was dominated by brochure ware—basically, just using the site as a brochure listing the company’s products and capabilities. For a great many B2B sites, brochure ware is still the standard.

But more and more B2Bs are using their sites not as static presences but as active players in the selling process. For many, the Web has become the hub of their sales and marketing efforts, as traditional outreach—trade shows, ads in trade magazines, direct mail—all point potential buyers to the site. The culmination of the process is still the face-to-face meeting.

These days, it’s the Web site that’s making the most successful introductions and generating the most productive leads for B2Bs.

Information Central

“What a great B2B site can do is shorten the buying process,” says Chris Schermer, president of Minneapolis B2B marketing and interactive agency Schermer Kuehl. “It can bring a buying team closer together in terms of their criteria and understanding whether the company fits their criteria. And it can also, in our experience, cut down on the amount of unqualified leads coming to a sales pipeline.”

Potential customers can, in short, self-qualify themselves, determining earlier on whether the company’s products fit what they’re looking for. Once they decide that, okay, these products could work, they can sign up for more information. Later, that can provide a foot in the door for a sales visit.

“The business-to-business ‘buyer’ typically is not an individual buyer, but part of an organization,” Schermer notes. Such buyers run from a “push” sell like the plague. Engineers, for instance, “are going on line, and looking around to see who might offer the solution or the product to fit their needs,” Schermer says. “They’re also talking to peers at that time, and they are looking at cures. They do not want to be engaged in a sales process at that point. They’re not only reluctant to do it, they are avoiding it, until they qualify you.”

To help them qualify a vendor, potential buyers are looking for information. But not information that just lies there—brochure ware does that well enough. They want white papers, industry analysis. With the technology for putting video and other media on line becoming cheaper and easier for non-techies to use, Web site marketing options are becoming broader. Potential customers are looking for product demos and videos. They want engaging ways to understand and absorb the information.