One of the biggest things your web site content can do for your company is to promote your expertise on demand. Don't make it hard for people to get to. Don't make them jump through hoops to get access to your brilliance. Put it out there and inform them about something they want to know about. This means it needs to be about them. About their problems and making their lives easier, better, more efficient, more profitable, etc. This is the driving force behind demand generation.
Make it easy to find. The sales cycle begins with education.
One of the most interesting things to me about the sales process, is how many people think that it's a numbers game. If they can only add X number of leads into the funnel every, day-week-month, then a certain percentage of them are likely to buy. Therefore, the more leads pushed into the funnel, the more sales come out the other end.
Bah! (Well, okay, unless you're selling a lower priced commodity that people are buying anyway because they have to have it and they ran out, or something.) But, I'm talking about bigger-ticket items like software and technology. Complex sales with a long sales cycle.
David Meerman Scott's article on the Marketing Profs site called, How Web Content Can Shorten a Complex Sale has a lot of good information on how you can achieve that. He talks about self-selected navigation and a stepping-stone type process to build relationships and lead the prospect to where they need to go, in order to actually buy your product. All with content.
Most importantly, he emphasizes building this relationship before you ask for the prospect's information. Basically, it's about building trust. How are you going about building trust in your company?
