“What are your organization’s goals?” For most B2B marketers the answer is increasing revenue. David says that leads and website visitors are the wrong things to focus on. I have to disagree. At ReachForce, we are all striving towards the same goals (proven by the fact that all of our bonuses are tied to revenue and bookings goals). But, each department sort of reverse engineers what they individually have to achieve in order to meet those goals. We measure everything, so I know exactly how many new leads need to be delivered to sales in order to for them to reach their bookings numbers. I cannot make a sale or generate revenue directly, so I have to focus on goals I can achieve.

I think a great question you have to ask is “what is the goal of my website.” I touched on this some in my last post, but it is even more relevant for this chapter. Is the goal of your website to:

• educate buyers about your products or services?
• get buyers to download a white paper, eBook, webcast, etc?
• get buyers to contact you?
• get buyers to request a demo?

Most executives will say that they want all of the above. In my opinion, you can’t have it all for every persona. Your website should lead buyers down a path. The better goal may be that you have a different goal for each persona. That way your website is reaching all of these goals but each persona is traveling down the best path for them. Now I would love to tell you to check out the ReachForce website as a great example, but I don’t think that it is. Check back in a few weeks though because we are making lots of changes in this direction.

David spends a lot of this chapter talking about personas. Our own Pam O’Neal has blogged about personas before. I find that the best way for me to think about my different buyer personas is defining the different members of the decision making unit. I already segment my database that way and have different offers for different roles, shouldn’t my website be the same?

Anyone had any success using personas to drive their web design?