I’m amazed at how often we come across companies that are spending lots of money to grow their sales functions but don’t have the right marketing in place. They fundamentally haven’t got the right mix between sales and marketing investments. In particular, in the 21st Century, a company’s website is an absolutely key component of the marketing communications mix, especially since websites are now the primary vehicle for capturing and converting leads and turning them into sales prospects. Lots of companies that are trying to increase sales have outdated websites with stale messaging, poor positioning, outdated graphics, unexciting web copy and few offers or calls to action.

If your company falls into this category, how can you afford not to put your best foot forward when it comes to your corporate website? Lots of companies underestimate the importance that a website has for communicating your company value proposition to target customers.

Your website is your company’s most important first impression for most sales prospects. When a prospect is considering your company, the first thing they’ll often do is go to your website to try and get more information. If that website is outdated, isn’t fresh, or has ho-hum messaging, that’s the image that you’re going to be communicating to them.

The good news is that it’s very easy to engage a web design firm to refresh your company website or provide you with new updated messaging. If it’s been more than a year since you looked at your website homepage, you should consider taking a critical look and decide whether you should freshen the image and messaging of your company. Many companies do a poor job of communicating their core value propositions to their customers on their website homepage, and as a result, while they may attracted many visitors, people quickly leave because they don’t find anything of particular interest.

One of our clients, a major custom application software development company, recently came to us to try to hire top sales and marketing talent for their company. When we sent candidates to their website, we got a ho-hum response from several of them and a decline of interest in pursuing the opportunity. This is a perfect example of how a website can damage your efforts, not just with potential prospects and clients, but also with the top sales and marketing talent that you need in order to grow your company.