The moment on the call
Your salesperson has a good conversation. The prospect says they will have a look at the website and come back. Your salesperson winces, because the site still lists services you stopped offering, shows a team photo with three people who left, and describes the business as it was years ago.
Some of your team now say "ignore the website, it is out of date" before a call. That sentence costs more than it seems. It asks a stranger to trust you while admitting the most public thing you own is wrong.
Why it got this way
Websites do not age in one go. The business changes a little every month: a new service, a new sector, a price change, a new certification. Each change is too small to justify touching the website, particularly if touching it means calling a developer.
So the site freezes at launch while the company keeps moving. Eventually the gap is so wide that updating it feels like a project, so nobody starts. The root cause is usually that the site is hard to edit, not that nobody cares.
What it costs in a sale
| What the prospect sees | What they conclude |
|---|---|
| Services you no longer offer | The business is unclear about what it does |
| Old logos, stock photos, dated design | The business is smaller or less active than it claims |
| No mention of the thing they asked about | Maybe the salesperson overstated it |
| Broken links, old blog posts, stale news | Nobody is minding the shop |
| Hard to read on a phone | The business is behind the times |
None of this shows up as a lost-deal reason in the CRM. Prospects rarely say "your website put me off". They just go quiet, or choose the competitor whose site looked like it knew what it was doing.
How we fix it without a year-long project
- Find out which pages prospects look at. Analytics usually shows a short list: home, services, about, a few case-type pages and contact. That list sets the priority.
- Sit down with sales for an hour. We ask what prospects question, what they compare you against and what the site should prove. That becomes the brief for the copy.
- Rewrite those pages around what you do now, for whom, and how working with you goes, with real photos where you have them.
- Rebuild the design and templates so they look current, work properly on phones and load quickly.
- Put it on a content system your team can edit, usually WordPress with locked, simple page layouts, so the next change does not need a developer.
- Redirect old URLs so any search rankings and links you do have are kept.
Where the whole site needs replacing, we still launch the pages prospects check first, rather than holding everything back for a big reveal.
What your team gets
Salespeople stop apologising and start sending links. A page that answers a prospect's likely question becomes something to share after the call, not something to hide. When the business changes again, someone in-house updates the page that week.
It also changes who the site is written for. Old sites tend to describe the company in its own vocabulary. Rebuilt around what prospects ask on calls, the pages start answering the questions your salespeople currently answer by hand, such as who you work with, how a project starts and what it involves on the buyer's side. That shortens the explaining in the next conversation, because the prospect has already read it.
Signs your site is working against sales
- Staff warn prospects not to judge you by the website
- The services listed do not match what you sell today
- The team or client logos shown are years out of date
- Nobody has edited the site since it launched
- Prospects ask questions the website should have answered
- You send PDFs because the website does not explain things properly