How Prospective Clients Think About Your Website: Learn From My Mistakes

I learned a valuable lesson about putting too much information about your consultancy services on your website.

Welcome to my consultancy newsletter. Please subscribe to my newsletter and browse my favourite posts.

How I Caused The Number Of Leads To Plummet

…by giving prospects exactly what they asked for!

In 2014 (I think), I decided to upgrade our consultancy page on our website.

It had always been a little vague about what our consultancy efforts included and most of the questions we got from prospective clients were about whether our consultancy matched what they specifically needed.

So I updated the page and included a lot more detail. I broke down our methodology and process. I highlighted what the specific deliverables were like. I shared as much information as I could to pre-emptively answer their questions.

Can you guess what happened?

The number of prospective clients dropped significantly.

For a while, I couldn’t work out why.

So I asked a couple of past clients we had had good relationships with what they thought of the new page and how they would have responded to it.

Their answers varied but generally congregated around the same theme.

“It’s great that you’re being precise in what you do, but that wouldn’t have exactly matched what we were looking for at the time so we wouldn’t have contacted you.”

They all thought adding more information was a good idea but several of them wouldn’t have hired us as a result.

That’s when I was struck by a lightning bolt about how clients think.

Prospective Clients Are Looking For Reasons To Disqualify You

More information increases the risks of disqualification, not qualification.

This is the thing to remember. In most situations, prospective clients have multiple choices about who to hire and they’re typically looking for reasons to disqualify options and reduce the number of choices.

If the more precise offering doesn’t closely match what they need, they will disqualify you from the list of options.

In the more detailed offering, I highlighted that our strategy process begins with research of the target audience and the internal environment. I highlighted we undertook interviews, surveys, and reviews to identify exactly what the audience needed.

One of our clients, after looking at this, said;

“We had already done that part of the work ourselves. So if that was a fixed part of your process, I wouldn’t have hired you”

Sure, a simple phone call would have revealed that part of the process wouldn’t have been necessary on that project - but we wouldn’t have gotten to the phone call.

The client would have moved on to a consultancy which was more vague about what the service included.

Don’t Be Too Specific About Your Service

Give enough information to know what it is and the outcome, but don’t outline all the inputs

This is one of those rare situations where thoughts diverge from actions. What prospective clients say should be on your website and is different from what will lead them to hire you.

If you’re too specific in your services, you increase the odds that one aspect of what you do doesn’t precisely align with what a client needs. And for that very reason, they might decide not to contact you.

However, if a prospective client is impressed by everything else on your website, but has questions about your services that match their needs, then they will be more likely to contact you to ask.

…And these are precisely the discussions you want to be having!

You don’t want to try and reduce the number of questions about your services. These questions are the beginning of the sales process. This is a process where you can gradually learn more about a client and adapt your services to their needs - and a process where they can gradually learn more about you and adapt their needs to your services.

Don’t Be Too Vague Either

For A Long Time Our Audience Didn’t Know What We Did

The flip side of this is it’s easy to be too vague about your services too.

I remember doing a survey around 2012/2013 of our mailing list. I slipped in a question asking people if they had considered hiring us. If not, why not?

One of the most common answers was:

I didn’t realise you offered consulting services, I thought you were just a blogger”

Most people had found my content on a blog and subscribed without spending much time on the website.

To be fair, considering the consultancy was launched from a blog and still hosted on a blog, it’s easy to see how that could happen.

Our website in July 2012. One of my biggest mistakes was not investing soon enough in upgrading our website.

Highlight Your Unique Services, But Avoid The Process

My suggestion then is to highlight the unique services you offer, but don’t share the process behind creating them.

Saying your name and you’re a ‘strategic consultant’ is probably too vague. You either need to add a specific target audience or type of service.

For example:

• Team Training Package 

• CRM Platform Migrations

• Implementing A New CRM From Scratch

Your services are essentially your products and you need to be clear about what products you sell.

However, don’t go too deep beyond that because you’re probably doing more harm than good.