Why Your Website May Fail as a Sales Tool

The Glass Bank + Responsive Website Design- Who Knew?

An Intriguing Discussion 

We recently met with one of our clients in order to discuss how their corporate website tied in with their new business + customer continuity objectives.

A few hours later, after researching about responsive design, the client sent me a very thought-provoking email.

Here’s an excerpt from the email:

“Yesterday, we discussed formatting each page for desktop, tablet and smartphone.
See the first link, below, re: Big Pictures on Small Screens…
As you can see, some sites get it wrong and some sites get it right. One would have thought some of the larger companies should have done it right, yet they did not.
Why would that be?”

Obligatory Disclaimer

I do my best to go into all situations with no predisposition or prejudice. The opinions I’m sharing with you are formulated over years and are based on the blend of experiences.

My feedback on this particular issue is based on my experience seeing the practical application of marketing strategies juxtaposed with the varying degrees of organizational misalignments I’ve witnessed across clients and prospects.

Speaking of that…

Website Design Is Not the Issue

The responsive design choices (and implementation) that my client was concerned about are just a symptom—one of many.

There is an underlying disease which is much larger than “Why do companies fail when it comes to responsive?”

The underlying disease is organizational misalignment.

After growing to a certain size, all companies suffer from this disease on one level or another, in one form or another.

Based on my experience, organizational misalignment causes a handful of issues that undermine customer acquisition + retention strategies as a whole, not just the company website.

This article is an overview of these issues.

These organizations are oftentimes so large that their sales organization acquires customers simply based on their exposure or brand recognition.

I have worked with such companies in the past and I’ve come to understand that, when their websites are lagging behind, it’s not because of lack of internal resources or insight. It’s because the company website is still viewed as a branding hub instead of a load-bearing customer acquisition + retention platform.

The “too big to fail” companies don’t (yet) need to ring the rag tightly on their marketing and website content. Their brand is so established and their sales organization is so established, that they haven’t felt the pain of spending marketing dollars in vain.

That said; more of these companies are adopting a customer-centric approach to drive the user experience strategies for their web properties. Still, some of the largest organizations are struggling to make this much-needed change. Why and how could this be?

Fragmented Marketing

Another issue that is causing misalignment within the organization is the fragmented marketing approach.

I have witnessed, especially with companies that have scaled quickly, that rapid growth begets marketing fragmentation.

Vendors Don’t Hit the Mark

I can remember many times when I have been presented with a piece of creative that I found myself saying:

“What in the world is this and how does it relate to my client’s business?”

In most cases the creative is supposed to be some kind of a metaphor. While original and well done, these pieces often leave way too much to the imagination when it comes to the intuitive connection to the goals of the campaign/strategy, etc.

It extends to implementation vendors and the strategies which orbit a company’s website. 

User Experience (UX), Creative, Branding, Website Design, Frontend/Backend Website Development—all of these (believe it or not) have evolved into separate career tracks.

This trend of specialization is problematic for both companies which are looking for true supplementation to their marketing strategy and vendors who strive to deliver a service but are under tremendous strain due to the costs associated with retaining specialized talent.