Challenge:

Transferring all your printed data into searchable form is tough enough. Making it user-friendly is harder. Most B2B companies today have some sort of database search tool on their web sites that help customers find the products they're looking for. Some of them are too complicated for a site visitor to use, others require registration. Both of these issues, among others, are barriers to making your company's products attractive to a potential customer. But the worst problem is the lack of a compelling reason to choose your product over a competitor's, assuming the visitor gets all the way through the selection process. The last thing you want to do is commoditize your offerings by reducing the product selection criteria to a customer-driven choice among many apparently comparable brands.

Solution:

When thinking about building (or re-building) your product search tool, consider what's most important to your prospective customer. The first thing to remember is to not make the search tool development an engineering project. It will inevitably become too complicated. Think like a sales person – easy, simple, non-complicated. Engineering or customizing a specific product comes later. Then, if all products are generally “equal,” how big a role do customer service, custom engineering, warranty, reputation, delivery or application support play? If these are typically among the “big brand” promises your company stands for, then make sure you include content and links within the product section that make it easy for a customer to see why he'd want to do business with you. If you have a pre-sale support team available by phone or e-mail, publish this alongside the results pages and encourage your audience to take advantage of these no-charge services. If some of your products are available for quick shipment, make that feature obvious to the reader.

Getting it done:
  1. First, talk to your customers and find out how they go about searching and selecting products like yours. Identify the high level criteria that a user needs in order to narrow his search. Find out what support features and benefits are important to them. In short, determine why they buy from you.
  2. Build the database. Test it. Test it again. Have your customers test it for you. Re-tool it based on your findings. Don't go “live” until it's right.
  3. Create content and links illustrating all the other reasons people should buy from you. Incorporate these into your search tool at strategic locations and encourage visitors to contact you directly.
  4. After your selection tool has been running a couple months, check your site stats to see how many visitors are using it, and how much average time they spend on it. This will give you a pretty good idea of its value and effectiveness.

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