How would you feel if you knew half of everything you worked on was a failure? No question that for even those of us with plenty of self-esteem, such a realization would slow us down for at least a minute or two when we got dressed in the morning. But that realization is just now starting to dawn on people who thought a “presence” on the Internet would be good enough.

Please allow me to quote John McLaughlin from the PBS roundtable WRONG!

An electronic brochure, which is what we used to call it, isn’t good enough any more. Today’s story, a report on how B2B, and more specifically industrial buyers, deal with websites that don’t provide required product or pricing information is clear and unambiguous. If they can’t find it, these buyers go elsewhere. No phone calls. No e-mails asking “where”? Just flat-out gone.

And why won’t these buyers give a supplier a break? Because they’re rewarded for sourcing online as it is. Nearly 40% said they saved their companies thousands of dollars by finding lower-priced items online and 85% said they go online as their primary channel for finding suppliers.

So, what should a company do about all this?

The answer is simple, but not inexpensive. Just like with any kind of sales experience or marketing assignment, you have to get to know and understand the needs of the customer. That requires two things many B2B marketers don’t have in great supply … patience and money. You don’t have to spend a fortune, but you do have to spend something. Investing the time and the money required to develop a clearer understanding of your customer will help you make smarter marketing decisions down the road and that will help you save money in the long run.

But taking a look requires introspection as well as external discussions. Take a look at your current website statistics and find out where your visitors drop out. If you combine this historical perspective with forward looking, client research, you should be able to find simple ways to improve your online experience and keep visitors longer. The end result, increased online sales.

What if you’re a company who doesn’t traditionally sell through online channels? Maybe you have distributors or produce goods that require heavy customer involvement? Why spend the time and money on research and improving your website? If you read further into today’s article, you’ll see why.

Even more than the cost savings associated with finding cheaper suppliers, businesses are realizing significant productivity gains by sourcing and working with suppliers over the Internet. Time savings to the tune of thousands of hours a month. That means improving employee productivity and, in turn, profitability significantly on an annual basis.

If a business is able to save 500 hours a month, as over 20% of the survey respondents claimed, they’ve essentially added the capacity of three full-time workers at no additional charge. At an average annual wage of $33,000, the company has been able to create an opportunity to drive over $100,000 to the bottom line through cost savings (if they chose not to hire people) or, more importantly, by leveraging that increased capacity into top-line sales of over $1,000,000 (assuming a 10:1 billings to salary ratio).

So how much of your bottom line ROI should you put into remodeling your website? Certainly not all of the customer advantage relates to business for your company. But think of it this way … if half of your competitors are automatically missing out on sales because their websites don’t provide the kind of information buyers really need – where is all that business going? Chances are, if you haven’t seen a measurable impact on your top line sales or bottom line profitability that you can attribute to your online presence, you need to consider re-inventing your website.

When it comes to a question of how much, you need to buckle down and make some decisions. It’s a level of commitment that many businesses are not comfortable making in the real world, let alone the virtual one. But it’s a commitment that has to be made. Just realize that setting the objectives is your job and making sure they get achieved is your agency’s.

Later.

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