Frank Barnett

A good site that ranks well says you’re good at what you do. A bad site or one that ranks badly tells customers you’re not good at what you do.

If you’re thinking “the two aren’t related,” you’d be correct. This is absolutely a case where correlation is not causation. Your website and how it ranks likely have little connection with how good you are at what you do.

As the old saying goes, “Googling your symptoms only tells you which diseases have the best SEO.”

But your clients don’t see it that way.

Here’s an example: My wife is an exceptionally good realtor. She also happens to rank well for certain local realtor-related search terms. She gets calls all the time from new leads that report, “you came up first on Google, so you must be the best.”

Your clients are likely no different. Her anecdotal experience is backed up by data.

Year after year, the data has been pretty consistent:

the top organic search result gets roughly 40% of clicks.
The second organic search result gets 19% of clicks
the third result getting 10%.

The remaining ~30% are split between the ads and other search results.

With over 80% of all buying decisions starting online, if you don’t rank well, it’s likely you won’t even make your potential customers’ short list.

Next, of course, you have to give them something credible when they get to your site. There’s obviously a lot of factors that go into defining what “a good site” is, but here are some questions to ask as you look at your existing site:

Does it show and tell your brand story in a way that your salespeople AND support people would agree with?
Your potential customers are coming to your site with a problem (or three). Is it easy to find the solutions you provide to those specific problems?
Does your site show and tell why you’re the best option to solve those problems?
What keywords do your clients use to describe their problems? Use these when describing your answers – industry terminology may make sense to you, but does it to them?

You don’t need to be an expert in technical SEO, and answering the above questions doesn’t require hundreds of pages of content or a full-time in-house web team. But it also won’t ever be something you can check off and call it done, and getting outside perspectives and help are always useful in uncovering blind spots.

If you want credibility at scale, there’s not much better “bang for the buck” than investing in a well-designed, well-optimized website.

Silos are the enemy.

Early in my marketing career, the consensus was that “marketing owns the message, sales owns the customer relationship.”

There’s truth to that, but that distinction frequently leads to silos: marketing creates a message in a silo independent of sales. As a result, sales often comes up with a *different* message when dealing with a new contact/potential customer.

This is especially easy to run into when a campaign or product launch is delegated to an ad agency. Messaging, collateral, packaging – all might be exceptionally well done. Still, if sales hasn’t had a seat at the table from the beginning, you risk confusing the potential customer’s buying process. They converted on the marketing message, but then they’re sold using a different story.

Blurring the lines between sales and marketing greases the buying process for the customer. Silos are bad for marketers, salespeople, and potential customers.

This past week I cooked three briskets for a community event. I’m a systems guy, so since I had 40+ pounds of delicious-smelling brisket and multiple days of cooking to ponder this, I came up with three keys to success:

You need a process. Don’t wing it or make it up as you go. The more consistent you are with your process, the better your results will be.
Trust the process. You’re going to be there a while (think an hour or so per pound). I use a Meater meat thermometer and love it. But early in the cook, it will tell you something crazy like your 15 lb brisket will be done in 4 hours. Or you may get impatient because it feels like your brisket is taking forever to cook. You’ll be tempted to go fiddle with the vents and adjust the temp. Don’t do it. At about 160 or 170 degrees, a brisket will “stall,” and just sit there for hours. This is all how a tasty fall-apart brisket is made.
Consistency. Austin smoked meats guru Aaron Franklin points out that while the ingredients in your rub make a difference in the flavor, the biggest factor in taste and texture is the consistency of your cook. Simply put, if you’re constantly tweaking the temp, it will have a negative impact on the outcome – no matter how good your rub is.

These same three ingredients can also be applied to marketing. You need to have a process, trust the process, and be consistent.

You need a process. I love the recent move to combining sales and marketing into the term “Revenue Operations,” because it takes the emphasis off a crazy gifted salesperson who can sell water to a fish, or an uber-creative marketing person. These are great to have – but they’re expensive to hire and keep and it’s hard to replicate their methods to your other staff. If you have a PROCESS (preferably somewhat automated), you don’t have to rely on particularly gifted individuals to hit your monthly targets.

Trust the process. It’s often tempting to treat every prospect or lead as a unique scenario. There are times when a step doesn’t make sense (if they’re ready to buy, stop selling, no matter how many more sales steps there are!). But in my experience, SMB’s lose far more sales by getting creative than sticking with the process.

Finally, consistency is key. If you’re inconsistent with your marketing efforts, it will be difficult to see results. Don’t try to come up with a post that “goes viral.” Instead, design a consistent drip of social, email, videos, etc that keep you familiar and make sure you’re there when your client is ready to buy. As any good financial advisor will tell you, the compound interest of small but consistent investments will almost always outperform the one-off cash dumps.

If you can follow these three ingredients, you’ll be well on your way to a perfect brisket (and successful RevOps ).

What priorities are baked into your CRM?

Usually, this comes down to who “owns” it. With very few exceptions, a CRM is primarily a sales and marketing tool (even if everyone else in the organization accesses it).

For example, if IT owns your CRM, they’ll probably configure it according to IT priorities. You pay them to be really good at IT stuff, so this is no surprise. But it’s unfair to hand such a critical piece of your revenue operations off to IT to own, configure, and manage and then expect it to be optimized according to sales and marketing priorities.