Why Your Website Is Your Most Undervalued Sales Rep

If your team is struggling to meet revenue goals, one of the most valuable things you can do is examine your lost sales opportunities. If something is systematically going wrong, the pattern will jump straight at you.

One such common killer of business opportunities is simply being too slow to respond to incoming inquiries, yet it goes overlooked by many companies. For instance, according to Forbes, the average B2B company takes a whopping 47 hours to respond, while customers would prefer to be contacted instantly.

So much so in fact, that leads who were called within one minute of inquiry closed at a 391% improved conversion rate, according to Velocify research.

And yet sales organizations are still trying to push a dead end, increasing their rate of outbound sales with automation, while their websites are littered with forms that they don’t answer to when they get filled.

But what if your website could do more than just collect emails?

The Current State of Sales: The Broken Outbound Machine

The past decade was all about the predictable revenue playbook with massive sales teams scaling cold outreach operations. This worked fine until it didn’t, and the proliferation of automation and Gen AI tools have completely wrecked this playbook.

Like the “law of shitty clickthroughs”, once everyone started doing it, it stopped being effective. Customers have decided that their time and attention are more valuable than spending it by responding to unsolicited cold outreach.

This makes traditional sales motions wildly ineffective, as there’s so little return on every dollar spent that it doesn’t break even within a reasonable time frame - and if that’s the case for venture-funded SaaS companies, you can imagine how bleak the situation is for the rest of the economy.

Inbound sales are responsible for responding to incoming customer inquiries, yet this function always struggled because it’s highly reliant on the marketing team delivering great leads. And even if the leads are great, if the sales team takes too long to respond to customers, aka your lead response time sucks, those deals get fumbled, as I’ve mentioned above. 

Interestingly, the SaaS world came close to solving this problem: that was Product-Led Growth. Many companies made fortunes by drastically simplifying their sales process, giving the product right into the hands of the customers, but having seen how that works at SEON, there was still much to be desired.

The PLG Promise and Its Limits

From a business development point of view, PLG was a genius innovation. What if we could sell B2B SaaS the same way we sell consumer apps? Executed correctly, this solves the following problems typical to B2B:

1. It might not be cost-effective for us to manually service the SMB sector, yet we would be leaving money on the table if we closed our doors to them

2. The self-served onboarding saves us costs on demos and time on discovery and sales calls: the prospects qualify themselves, try the product, and proceed to pay accordingly

3. The buying process is virtually friction-free compared to the world of forms

It was a dream come true! Except if you want to execute it correctly, the money you save on sales would need to be heavily invested into designing the product. That’s tricky enough to do with simple, truly self-served software, but with complex products that serve enterprise customers, ie. high-value sales, PLG starts to fall short.

In fact, if we look at PLG companies like Notion, Asana, or ClickUp, we find that they do have sales teams precisely because they need that human touch to service their most high-value, enterprise clients.

Moreover, while I was at TestGorilla (a PLG company), while had thousands of free signups every day, the free-to-paid conversion rate was a tiny 2-3%. Trying to pump the number up, we decided to contact those signups as soon as possible, and we found something astonishing:

• People who we contacted after an hour often had trouble remembering who we were despite the fact that they had confirmed their email after signing up and trying the tool,

• But the people who we called within five minutes would convert to paid users at a much, much higher rate!

Naturally, there’s a lot of automated nurturing going on at PLG companies, and we were using automated alerts to conduct our follow-ups.

But the experience was eye-opening: those deals were not just simply a matter of speed, but the human connection at just the right time, while those buyers were the most engaged, with our tool still fresh in their memories.

That’s when the idea of real-time sales, delivered at just the right moment came to me. Which brings us to…

Your Website’s Secret Superpower as a Direct Sales Channel

Now, the industry-wide standard for selling directly through your website is a combination of the option to book a demo and some sort of bot-based chat assistance running on key pages.

While these approaches may be comfortable for the seller, from the point of view of the buyer, there are some caveats:

1. Booking demos and providing your contact details have relatively high friction and require a high perceived effort. Not to mention that the level of initial engagement drops rapidly, far out of the ideal conversion window as detailed above.

2. We’ve come to know and ignore chatbots, especially with high-value ticket items, we want to be understood and listened to - something that the bots can’t and won’t be able to do any time soon. The crucial moment of dealmaking will always be fundamentally about that human connection, whether the buyer is in the research phase or ready to commit.

So what if there was a better way to use your website? Taking a note from the PLG playbook, we can run real-time behavior analytics on our website visitors.

Every business has its high-value pages, like the comparison folders or its pricing page. Using a bit of javascript, we can not only find out where our visitors are but also what they’re looking at - giving us context to start a conversation.

Better yet, instead of making them go through hoops, what if we could call them directly through the browser when their engagement is the highest? Depending on your market, some people might prefer to be contacted via chat first - but that’s OK, as long as you make it loud and clear that there’s a human on the other end of the line.

This setup is faster than what we could achieve by trying to connect & automate different tools together for a quick follow-up. The only thing that’s missing is real-time alerts where it’s convenient, like in Slack - so our sales team knows when to jump on the call.

In the background we can run data enrichment on our website visitors, matching them to entries in our CRM for ICPs, or using visitor identification to try and guess who they are… or at least from which company in the EU, as individual level identification is only possible in the US.

This allows us to really “wow” our prospects because they receive the exact kind of assistance that they need, right in the window when they’re the most engaged, in real-time.

If we’re so inclined, we can even give them a product demo via screen-sharing right then and there, no further meetings or calendar invites required.

Forget Demo Bookings, Embrace Real-Time Sales

This is the power of real-time sales, and I strongly believe that it will change the way we buy and sell online for the better.

The ultimate goal would be to replace the entire process of demo bookings and qualification calls with a more immediate experience, where the buyer can contact the seller directly and vice versa in a frictionless, magical experience.

We have a long way to go until that’s the reality, but enterprising sellers are already embracing the real-time way. 

If you’re curious about trying it out for your organization, feel free to give us a call or try Captiwate yourself, and turn your website into a sales rep today.