How well do you stack up against the three revenue success factors?

• Tweet Widget
• Google Plus One
• 
• Share on Facebook

Most CEOs assume they have firm control of their company's success. They make decisions all day long, and believe that what they are deciding is driving their revenue. But they're missing something. In my experience, their control is more in the 50% range - because they not focusing on the three revenue success factors.

What are the success factors? And, as a CEO, how can you get them under your control?

Success Factor #1: Your website actually makes it easy for customers to buy.

Yes, you have a website, and you are involved - though how much you are involved depends on the size of your company. The bigger the company, the more distant you are from your website. That's a real shame, because these days, your website IS your company, as far as the customer is concerned.

I'm sure your website has all the usual stuff - product and solution sections, "about us," "contact us," "directions," and so on.

The problem is, every day customers are coming to your site looking for answers - so they can buy from you. They aren't finding what they want. So, they leave - and buy from someone else. Your website failed them, because it wasn't functioning the way they needed it to. Function, or failure. That's the choice.

What that really means is, your customers' needs determine the success of your website. Not you, and not all the people you have hired to create and maintain it. Your customers' experience with your website will determine if you are successful - or not.

If your company's sites function properly, people come there with expectations, and their expectations are satisfied. They get what they came to get, quickly and easily. If not, the sale is lost.

So now the big question: How involved have customers been in your website design? Asking the question another way: Did you use formal, get-to-the-heart-of-the-matter research to determine what they actually wanted to do on your site, and how they wanted to do it? Did you find out why they were looking for the answers they sought? What was behind their perceptions and needs?

Since most companies answer "no" to this question, I bet that's your answer also. Which means that you have designed your site to meet the needs of everyone except customers - the people whose needs must be met in order for you to succeed. There are straightforward and cost-effective ways to figure out what your customers need to do, and to turn that into navigation that makes it easy for them. We describe some of these methods in a recent white paper.

Once you know exactly how your customers want to buy, and what your customers want to do on your site, you can correct the shortcomings of your website - and start bringing in more revenue. Your website will support, rather than frustrate the customer's quest to buy your products. You will be pleasing and satisfying customers, instead of disappointing them. 

Success Factor #2: Your salespeople are following a successful buying process roadmap.

Salespeople make calls all day. The sales process is slow, painful, and consists mostly of rejection. After many unsuccessful calls, a potential customer finally says yes to the next step. The salesperson sends something or sets up an appointment or schedules the client for a webinar. Most of his day is spent hearing "no," or leaving voicemails, or "checking in."

This is an incredible waste of money. You're paying someone to do something wrong, day in and day out. You're hoping that they'll "get lucky." Luck is not a strategy.

Once again, you're trying to do something with a customer without matching your process to their process.  What do they really want to buy from you? How do THEY describe it? Words matter - website A/B testing has proven, over and over, that a tiny change in the way information is presented can make as much as a 40% change in sales. The same applies to selling methods. All day long, salespeople are saying something to someone. Either that prospect agrees with - and accepts - what they're saying, or not. And when they don't buy the salesperson's line, they won't reveal it. They just start looking for a way to hang up gracefully.

Successful sales result from a series of small steps, with each step being one that is comfortable for the customer. Salespeople, on the other hand, follow methods that require the customer to take a giant leap of faith (in a salesperson!). Customers balk. They want to take small steps. They don't want to risk their careers on a giant leap of faith.

What are those small steps? What would make it easy for a customer to say yes, one small step at a time? Have you mapped out the customer's buying process? Have you interviewed them to find out what it is? Are you guessing?

As a buyer, how many times have you been irritated by people pressing you to buy, without understanding what you really want? Are you allowing your company to do this to your customers? No one wants to be sold to. They want to know about solutions to their problems. They want it to be easy to understand what their options are - and then buy the best solution for them. They want you to sell to them in exactly the same way they want to buy from you.

Success Factor #3: Your employees, partners, and customers are finding what they need, and doing what they need to do, using your intranets and extranets (private portals built for their needs).

Intranets and extranets - sites for employees and partners/customers - are more popular than ever before. Unfortunately, most of them don't actually work as they are expected to. They don't "function" for their users.

We bank at a regional bank. We live on a small island; the people who work in the local bank branch are our friends and neighbors. The service is fantastic. So we are very loyal to our bank.

The bank's headquarters recently updated the "bill paying" function in their online banking portal. I'm sure they paid a lot of money to get it done; it has all the earmarks of the newest website design technologies and graphic trimmings - everything looks very 3D. Unfortunately some of the simplest tasks have become impossible.

For example, there's a screen where you can assign your vendors to categories (I was disappointed that my previous category assignments didn't carry over to the new system, but I was willing to forgive them for that, since I like my bank). When I went to the screen to assign categories to the various vendors I write checks for, they had this "really slick" drag-and-drop function - where you created a bunch of categories, then dragged the vendor's name into the category.

Too bad it absolutely, positively didn't work. The vendors' names were in a list at the top of the page, and the categories were in big, fat, fancy 3D boxes continuing down the page - most fallling below the fold. When you grabbed a vendor to drag him down into a category, if the category box was below the fold on the screen, there was nothing you could do to get that vendor into the box. If you tried to take your cursor beyond the fold during the dragging process, the page didn't scroll. It just sat there. If you tried to page down or use the down arrow key, even while holding on to the vendor's name with your mouse, the vendor's name was released from your mouse. No Windows or browser convention worked.

Some programmer must have tested the blasted thing - with only four categories, all appearing above the fold. This is a prime example of why user testing - with REAL users - is so important. Asking users to perform the task, and then watching while they tried, would have revealed this serious problem.

Since there was no other way offered to categorize vendors, I gave up. I decided I would live without the categorization in the bank's system, which doesn't help me much anyway.

Another broken function: My bank's new bill pay system is a third-party system embedded in the bank's system. So when I write a check to a vendor, it appears on the list of transactions in the bill pay system, but does not show up in my account balance detail - until they do a batch posting of all checks, which apparently happens once a day. Before, with the previous system, everything was integrated, and any check I wrote appeared immediately on my account balance detail.

My bank went to a lot of trouble and expense to create this new system, and, as far as this very loyal customer is concerned, took several steps backwards in terms of actual functionality.

Function? Or failure?

If you're really going to provide customers and your other users with websites that function for them, you can't leave your websites to be run by several, often conflicting departments - IT, webmasters, content providers, marketing and/or agencies.

Each group has their own set of desires, preferences, and drivers. Each group is measured on metrics that have nothing to do with true website functionality. No one finds out what the customer is thinking. No one speaks for the customer. The customer is seldom, if ever, involved in the decisions made. And yet, it is the customer who determines whether a website is functioning or failing.

See your company as your customers do: as your sites. The places where they come hoping to do business with you. Find out what your customers want, then adapt your sites to their preferred ways of using them. Your future depends on it.