Transcript of How to Build a Website That Actually Converts With Sam Dunning

There's a mistake that a lot of folks make with their website. And one of the biggest killers of website performance is ego. As much as we want our websites to look great, have great features, have pages that share information about us, and so on. The website, in most businesses' case, is not for us. We are not the buyer. We are not the person that's going to be landing on the site and potentially request to do business, book a demo or book a sales call, whatever the action is. Usually, folks want to quickly get an idea of exactly what it is you do, how you're going to help them, and how they can take that next step.

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What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're making it right, right now. It's always discussion about how you do better marketing, how you do better B2B marketing. We just had to go to the expert, Sam Dunning. He's the founder of Breaking B2B. Welcome to the show, Sam. Hey, Ryan.

I appreciate you having me on, man. Really looking forward to the conversation and excited to get stuck in.

Just like my accent gives away that I'm a Southern guy from the States, it's clear you're across the pond a little bit. Where's home, Sam?

Yeah, so I'm Southern as well, but Southern in England. So I'm right in the Southwest. For any folks that are familiar with England, I'm near a city called Bristol, probably about two and a half hours from London in a little town called Yovle in Somerset.

Let's just set the table for everyone, Sam. Let's give everyone your background and a little bit of your career story and trajectory.

I started off in business And business-wise, my first job was in the retail world, which is funny because probably about a year and a half in, I realized that I absolutely hated working in retail. So I worked in a shop called Jessup. For anyone not familiar with that, selling camera equipment. It relates to what I do now, just like yourself, I run a podcast. That's where my keenness for it came in. So selling video cameras, SLRs, tripods, anything associated with cameras. But I soon realized that although I love media, I did not like dealing with the general public. I don't know what folks are like in the US, but when you go up to someone and say, Can I help you there? Or how are you doing there? People in the UK just grunt at you and almost moan at you. They'll swear at you. And probably about a year into that role, I was like, I'm really hating this, man. I was probably 18 years old. And then my cousin said he was actually recruiting at this web agency. At the time, a company called Webchoice, he said, There's a project management stroke sales roll going.

I said, Sounds good, man. I'm tired of this. So took an interview the next day and thought, yeah, jacked in that retail job, started working at a web agency. Essentially was like a Jack of all trades. Started off project managing websites, doing a few sales calls, learning how to design sites, learning what was involved in digital marketing to start growing businesses. But a quick funny story. One of the first leads, one of the first sales inquiries they ever gave me, I called them up and this lead came in, I called the guy and he wanted a web. This is probably about 12 years ago, Ryan, and he wanted a website, no joke, that was pretty much the same spec as LinkedIn. So quite a small website.

I'm joking, probably the biggest platform you could go. Yeah, exactly.

Probably the biggest scope of work for a web project you could even imagine. And I think I quit him.

Did you actually do it?

This is the even funnier part, or probably not that funny, was I think I quit him because I had no clues at the time sales. And I was 18, 19, roughly. Now I'm 33. I just said yes to every request on the sales call. I just said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes £500, which is probably equivalent of, I don't know, seven, £800. And luckily- To do a LinkedIn website. Yeah, man, it's insane, right? Yeah. Even however many years ago, that was like 14 or so years ago. It's still insane. Luckily, we started doing a few designs, and then this guy let us transition it off, like cross over into other work because he realized that the spec was too crazy. But luckily, this guy was quite friendly and understood that I was new. But yeah, as the years went on, I've had other jobs in between working at web agencies like nearly joined the army, worked in a call center, worked for a marketing agency was going to be a paratrooper, none of which worked out. Then I've always been drawn back into the web and SEO world. I think what resonated with me was the fact that you could use a website as almost like a salesperson in itself as it's live 24/7, working around the clock.

I love the fact that websites can really fuel a business with inquiries, with sales leads, and all that good stuff. It really can be the heart and soil of the business. That teamed up with SEO. I talked about quite a lot on episodes and podcasts like this where you can rank on Google and drive organic traffic. The fact that you can build this site to fuel your sales team really intrigued me. And that's why a lot of what I talk about is geared up around this stuff. And then eventually became a director in my last web business, which I exited, and then We recently, start of this year, fired up Breaking B2B, which is a B2B SEO and web agency. And we also run podcast, which is themed around B2B marketing, where we interview practitioners and a B2B marketers and founders called Breaking B2B as well.

Similar journey to a lot of people here.

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Finding your passions, finding your skill sets, and ultimately, finding fascination and interest in something, and then honing in your skills around that. If I'm summarizing well, Sam, at least that's what I'm hearing.

Making a lot of mistakes as well. Let's not forget that. Doing a lot of stupid stuff. The LinkedIn is just the tip of the iceberg. I've made so many stupid mistakes over the years, man. So many silly things.

I'm trying to think how you sped out after the fact. Because on its surface, if you go, even now, if you go on the surface, it doesn't look that complicated, like the UI, but it's all the functionality and databases and all the stuff that's behind that you can't see. Exactly. That starts to break down, probably. Even for, I'm sure, LinkedIn used some gigantic digital agency wherever and spit millions of dollars on it. But at the same time, even in a small agency, if you're speccing that out, that's probably 200 or 300 grand. Oh, easy. Easy.

It's like when I've had sales inquiries years ago where folks would say, I just need a website like Google, just a simple one-pager like Google. I can pay you 300 bucks and we can get it done. I'm just falling off my chair in laughter.

Yeah, exactly. You don't know what you don't know. Exactly, man. Turning to the B2B side, it is fascinating that you have this both quandry and opportunity with websites that you You want it, you want it to look great, you want to be proud of it, you want this esthetic that has been the historical perspective of your brand and all those things. In reality, you have this great opportunity, like you said, to deliver a sales funnel and leads if you can get out of your own way. Yeah. And I think even today, working with particularly medium to larger companies, and maybe even small companies, it depends on who's in charge and what their esthetics are. But I think there's, even today, the battle that happens with what it looks like versus what it does. How do you approach that? And is that still a common refrain that you hear?

What it looks like versus what it does, if I may, there's a mistake that a lot of folks make with their website. And one of the biggest killers of website performance is ego. So to dive into that a bit deeper, what I mean by, and that could be if you're running a small business that you're the founder and you're doing all the work on your website yourself, or maybe you're getting a contractor, maybe you're a larger organization and you've got a marketing team that are going to be delivering it, you've got a team of execs that are going to be delivering it. But what you've got to realize is as much as we want our websites to look great, have great features, have pages that share information about us and so on. The website, in most businesses' case, is not for us. We are not the buyer. We are not the person that's going to be landing on the site and potentially request to do business, book a demo or book a sales call, whatever the action is. We've probably got a warehouse full of our goods, our services, or for a technology business, we've got almost unlimited supply within reason of what we can deliver.

So one of the biggest issues is that folks spend all this time designing, building the copy, the content, the messaging, building out the pages, but they do it all for what they think looks good as either the marketing or the founder of the business. The issue with that is unless you fit your ideal client persona 100%, which is pretty rare, your focused clients, aka the people that you want to inquire on your website or to buy your stuff, probably not going to resonate with it as well as you think they are. We're often quite biased, and I've done this. I've made this mistake on my own websites in the past. You become too attached to it. You start using copy and text on your website headlines, like award-winning, best in class. We've been in business 100 years, and all this stuff, which we think in theory is going to work. But most of the time, if folks are landing on your website, especially your homepage, which we can dive into the fundamentals in a sec, usually folks want to quickly get an idea of exactly what it is you do, how you're going to help them, and how they can take that next step, because especially in the times we're in now with AI fast improving, people are time short, so they don't have tons of time to scroll through your website and work out exactly what problems you fix, the value you bring to their life, and how to be able to contact you.

So that's a taster into it.

I love the thought when you said ego. We all think we know what's best, and we have what's in our mind. And a lot of times that's serving, like you said, ourselves instead of our audience, instead of our target. Because it reminds me a lot of discussions I've had the years with marketing executives and clients and having to tell them the bragging stuff, the speed, the feeds, the stuff that you're so proud of about your product, about your service, about what you do. You're so proud of it, but it doesn't translate to necessarily solving an issue or a problem for your client. And that sounds very much the discussion we're talking about now when framing up, especially the key positioning on the homepage.

Yeah, you're exactly right. And these issues, like you mentioned there, Ryan, They're not just appropriate for your website, they're appropriate for marketing in general. These are fundamentals, right? When you're building marketing assets, be that website content, website messaging headlines, be that ad headlines, whether it's for Google Ads, whether it's for LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, etc, whether it's other marketing collateral, you've got to put yourself in the shoes of your focused clients, the people that you want to stop in their tracks, attract, grab their attention, and then point them to take an action, whether that's to learn more, book a demo, check out your case studies, whatever. So one of the biggest things that you want do at the very start of a website exercise is actually spend some time, whether that's yourself as a founder or with your team, and really get down to basics. What exactly do we want to get out of this website? Because I think that's just an exercise that people don't do. They get into the design, they get into the exciting stuff, but they skip out the fundamentals. In B2B, at most B2B companies, most folks I've interviewed maybe 350 or so marketing execs on breaking B2B.

From my experience, typically, what they want to see on a B2B website is a quick idea of what you do or the problem you fix and how you help. They want to see some proof of results. That could be case studies, testimonials, review videos, creditations, walkthroughs, etc. They want to see some proof of your offer in action. If you're like a technology or software business, maybe it's a demo before trial. They usually want to see how much it costs. So some indicative area of pricing, whether that's ballpark figures, starting ranges or packages. They want to get their questions answered. So maybe you've got FAQ sections on relevant pages, address those key questions that come up in sales schools, and And then they want an easy route to speak to sales. So maybe that's weaving in a calendly or similar. So someone can book time directly on a sales rep's calendar or using a tool like Revenue Hero, which is similar to calendly, or a simple to fill out form or book a call, whatever that is. So that's usually the fundamentals of what people want out of a B2B site. But one tip that you can do is if you really want your website to resonate with these target clients that you actually want to buy your stuff and generate leads for on your website, this is something that's skipped by a lot of websites.

And it's understandable because it takes a bit of time. It's customer research. So what I'm saying here is basically interviewing anywhere between, if you can, 5-10 recently signed or recently onboarded clients, or if you don't have access to that as a new business, maybe folks that fit your target persona, the people that you want to go after. You may have to offer them something like a free consult or something perhaps that's a free low-ticket item you can provide. But from these people, you can get golden nuggets, which is really going to make sure your messaging, your headlines, your content resonate, because these are the people you want to attract and convert. This is where you can ask them things like, if it's a recently onboarded customer, what was the frustrating problem that tipped you over the edge, was becoming so annoying, that stopped you in your tracks, that made you decide that it's time to fix it and reach out to a company like ours? And that's going to be really impactful for your headline. Something like that is useful to know. What do you care about seeing on vendors in our sector, in our industry's website?

What are the main things you quickly want to learn, see, and take action upon? Again, these are golden nuggets because it's actually going to give you the spill the tea on what people actually care about seeing on your site. How do we stack up, in your opinion, to other agencies or other companies or other similar businesses in our sector? If you have got an existing website, you can ask questions around what do you feel is missing on our current website? Because that can give you some real insights. They might say, We don't have a pricing page, or, Your case studies are quite thin, or, I couldn't really understand exactly what it is you do or it's quite difficult to contact you. So my point here is you're doing these 5-10 interviews using a transcript tool, maybe like Otter or similar, so you can dissect the notes after each call on Zoom. And then from there, you want to look for patterns. Once you do 5-10 interviews, you'll see patterns in people's responses. You'll see common things that come up. It might be this is the juicy problem we fix. This is the main outcome people want as a result of working with us.

For clients that we've already worked with, this was the main outcome we actually brought to them. Okay, excellent. We can use this problem in this solution and maybe our website headline, ie, we do X, it fixes Y, was our headline. You get all this juicy intel that's going to basically mean that you're not designing and building your website on guesswork. You're building your pages, your content, your messaging, and more based on what real potential clients or existing clients care about learning, seeing, and doing. So that's one of the vital steps. Takes a little bit of research work, but if you're in a growing organization, it's something that's going to be worth its weight in gold. So it just means your website is going to convert better in short.

And that is very good practical advice. It makes a lot of sense when you're listening. Sam, as we close out here, any final tips, tricks, or things that you counsel people on?

Yeah. I mean, to summarize what we've discussed, your website can quite literally be your very best or be your very worst salesperson, depending on how you research, design, build, update, and market it. In most companies' case, they want it to be their best. Don't neglect it. Even if 90 % of your business is word of mouth for referrals, these folks are probably still checking your website and you don't know what you don't know. So you're not going to know about a lead that you missed. You're just going to miss it. If that website isn't hitting the mark, it's taking ages to load, it's not presenting the information they care about seeing, it's not building confidence with results, it's not sharing the key piece of information they need, you're losing leads, losing potential business that you didn't even know coming through the door and your competitors are getting a free lunch. So that's what I'd urge you to consider.

I love it. Good advice. You don't know what you're missing out on. That's the scary thing. You don't know how many people are dropping off if they're not getting to the bottom of at least the form fill or something like that. Nothing worse than that. Sam, where can everybody learn more about what you got going on and everything you're doing with Breaking B2B?

Appreciate it, man. So by all means, connect on me on LinkedIn. My name is Sam Dunning. I share the daily tips around website SEO and more. I run the podcast, which is called Breaking B2B, where we interview marketing practitioners, or I also run solo episodes each week with stories, ideas, case studies, B2B marketing. Or lastly, if you're perhaps a little frustrated every time target clients search for what you do on Google, your competitors are above you stealing traffic and inbounds, or maybe you've got a decent site already, but it's just not converting a steady flow of sales leads for your team, then happy to discuss and see if we can help you. It's breakingb2b. Com.

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, Sam, and I look forward to further partnership and discussions. Got a lot to share.

Appreciate it, man.

Hey, guys, you're to find us, rianisright. Com. Find all the highlight clips and the full episodes and the show notes where you can get the details to Sam's info and all things breaking B2B. You know where I'm at, at rianalford on all the social media platforms. See you next time on Right About Now.

This has been Right About Now with Ryan Allford, a RADCAST Network production. Visit rianisright. Com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.