I don’t think I’ve worked at a company whose website satisfied me. It never gives me a clear explanation of what our product does.
After a few years working closely with Marketing, I finally understand why.
As a developer, my goal is to provide useful capabilities to people through the software I work on. To succeed, I need the software to be running… and people have to be using it. Which means they need access, which means people have to buy it. If it’s software they use at work, then the company has to buy it for them.
Does “the company” really buy the software? Someone in the company buys the software. Or several people in the company, working together. Someone has to decide they really want this, and someone higher up has to agree it’s worth money out of their budget.
This is where marketing & sales come in. We give buyers the motivation, information, and business justification to buy our software. Buyers, not users.
The company web site exists to appeal to buyers, while not completely turning off users.
If the buyers and users are the same people, then you’re selling consumer software. The person getting the value is the person paying for it. It sounds so simple. (I’m sure it is hard in different ways that I don’t know about yet.)
When you’re B2B (a business selling to a business), you have to create value for users and belief of value for buyers. They probably don’t care about the exact same things.
At Honeycomb.io, our users are engineers of all types, plus sometimes product managers and customer success reps. By the numbers, most are software developers. The person who decides that our product is the best is generally a Platform Engineer, or a DevOps person, or an SRE, or a Developer Experience Engineer (many names for the people who set development teams up to succeed). That person is not a budget owner, so they have to go up the chain to find purchasing power.
A buyer has more than purchasing power. They have the influence to move at least part of the company toward consistent use of the new platform. This is the hard part of buying software. A buyer of Honeycomb.io might be CTO, VP of Engineering, or Director of Developer Platform.
Even then, a budget owner has influence, not dominion, over their allocated funds. Every major purchase has a business plan, an expected return on investment, a quantified justification for why spending this money is good for the company. It’s our job to prove that for them.
Decision-makers don’t have the same experience of value that a developer does. I care about how an observability tool integrates with my software, how the UI works, how I can build queries in it and share and automate. My VP cares about quicker incident resolution, accurate measures of customer experience, and no surprise overage bills. If I’m lucky, my VP also cares about developers’ cognitive load and performance improvements.
The company web site talks about business problems solved by the product, not how the product works. It lists current customers for credibility. It has use cases, testimonial quotes, and high-level buzzword language that CTOs can use on airplane rides with Finance people… I don’t know, I’m not there.
As an engineer, even as a user of our product, I am not the audience. The audience is the people who need to buy it, plus the CEOs and VPs of Finance who are checking on this company the CTO just signed a big contract with. The first job of a company’s website is establishing legitimacy with this group.
I am not the target audience of any B2B website. That’s why I hate them all.