One of the most difficult things to do on a website is to establish your credibility and build trust with your audience.

After all, many of your visitors will have never heard of you, won’t be impressed by testimonials (after all, these can be faked) and may only visit one or two pages of your site.

Thankfully, there are a number of things you can do to establish your company as one that can be trusted. Rather than reproduce the whole thing here, I found an excellent list of credibility building tips over at AffiliateKB.com.

While the article itself focuses on sales copy…the 17 tips provided apply equally well to those of us in the business to business sphere.  The points about ‘proving your claims’ are particularly salient for business to business marketing as you only have a short time to impress your visitors that you are the service provider they are really looking for.

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Sometimes, I’m annoyed by the simplest things. Like using the on-site search at a particular website and not finding a product I know they have. That irritates me beyond all reason.

So, typing ‘fruited tea cakes’ into Tesco.com’s own search engine and getting results for tea bags has inspired this blog post.

You see, I know Tesco sells tea cakes with bits of fruit in them. I buy them often. What I didn’t expect was that I would have to match the exact spelling Tesco themselves use (which turns out to be ‘fruit teacakes’) in order to find the product. Surely, they have a web team that looks at how people use their on-site search engine and adapt it accordingly? No? I guess not.

Poorly designed on-site search engines have been a bugbear of mine for years. It is up to the website themselves to understand the language real people might use to search for their products. That way, if I search for ‘fruited tea cakes’ and get no results, I’m not going to go to one of their competitors for my teacake related needs.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg over at GrokDotCom have long suggested that, if you can’t get your on-site search to function in accordance with the needs of your visitors, you would be better off scrapping it altogether. I can see their point, but done right, it is a useful tool for visitors.

However, website owners must be able to get access to a list of the queries users are typing in and must be able to adapt the results to shown to take into account the language their visitors actually use. Otherwise, frankly, what’s the point?

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It’s a fact of life that not all business leads are created equal. Most businesses buying leads would very much like all the enquiries they get to be looking to make a purchase there and then.

And, obviously, I can understand that mentality. Nevertheless, enquiries come in for all stages of the purchasing process. It is your job, as a businessman, to address the needs of all prospects so that when they reach the end of the buying cycle, it is your name that is foremost in their mind.

As someone who is involved in selling leads in the business to business sector, this is one of the most difficult things to get across to clients. After all, they are paying us for leads and some of the leads we provide are from companies who are six months away from making a purchasing decision.

Companies at the beginning of their buying cycle need to be nurtured and coaxed towards the ‘right’ decision. At the earliest stages, an introductory phone call and email or literature introducing your company should be sufficient. However, as someone looking for business, you need to offer hand-holding and make yourself available as the prospect moves through the decision making stages.

Maybe your prospect has a directors meeting scheduled to discuss how to move forward. You need to be aware of such stations on the road to a purchasing decision and offer impartial advice (yes, for free) that can assist in that process. Real, practical advice and problem solving is what companies who are early on in the buying cycle need - not hard sell.

If you can keep in casual but useful contact with your prospect over the time it takes their company to come to a decision, then you will be well placed to convert that client when the time comes.

In some cases, of course, it may be your own business process that is causing a problem.

For example, we offer leads for accountants as one of our services. Inevitably, we receive a fairly high number of enquiries from brand new companies who want an accountant. Some of these have only just started trading and, so, their end of financial year is up to 12 months away.

The problem from our client accountants point of view is that this can mean they receive no income from acquiring these new companies as clients until the following year. To my mind, however, this is a flaw in the accountants’ own business. Surely, there are enough value added accountancy services (bookkeeping, paye, payroll, etc.) that the accountant can monetise these newly formed businesses quickly.

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