7 reasons why you should audit a prospective customer’s website

So you’ve done the ground work; you’ve found a target client, you’ve checked out their site, and most importantly, you know what’s wrong with it. You send that LinkedIn request and accompanying message and wait for them to come back to you. You move on to the next prospect, and the next, following the same process. You hear back from 20% (if you’re lucky), but only 5% book a call after your first message.

Sound like a waste of time? That’s because it probably is. We all know that having a hook makes a good sales message, but what if that hook was a report on your customer’s existing site that highlights just how much work needs to be done? We’ve listed 7 reasons why you should invest your time or money into auditing a prospective customer’s website (and 1 reason why you’ll want to do it again when you work with them).

Running a site audit allows you to better understand your prospects. Whilst you may have customer personas, a list of hot leads, or even a direct lead into your inbox, auditing your prospects site before you even speak to them means you can understand, quickly, if they’re a good fit for what you offer.

A site audit allows you to better understand your customer and, more importantly, they’re requirements. This is crucial when approaching a prospect client or even a new lead; if you have a full overview of your client’s site and online presence, you can build yourself a picture of where they’re going wrong before they tell you what theie problem is.

How many generic LinkedIn or email outreaches do you receive a day? And how many stand out? Any sales coach will tell you it’s important when prospecting to personalise your outreach. But what could be better personalised than an audit of their website?

Not only do these act as great hooks in your cold outreach emails or messages, they give you an a clear overview of the problems your team could solve which means moving your prospects through the sales funnel is faster than ever before.

Clients don’t want might be’s and could be’s. Taking the time to run an audit on your prospective’s client’s site or online presence means you can hit them with hard facts. In many cases, these may not even be facts that they’re aware of; such as how many broken links they have and why they may be a problem.

You don’t need us to tell you that often one big problem, such as a site ranking poorly on Google, is a result of several little problems. If you spare the time to audit your prospect’s site before having your initial call or even reach out, your sales pitch will be more impactful and memorable because you’ll have prior knowledge of the problems and the solutions you can offer them as a result.

When we say competitive insight, we mean both getting one up on your competitors and getting insight into your prospective’s competitors. The best audits have a good idea of where your prospect sits in their market and what is giving them a disadvantage in comparison.

If your prospect is a bit hesitant to pull the proverbial trigger on a contract with you, showing them who is winning business over them is a sure fire way to motivate a quick close.

So you’ve won the contract, completed the work, and now you’re ready to deliver the final project to the client. The only thing that’s missing? An updated audit to show them just how much better you’ve made their site and online presence.

Not only will this show off just how much of a good job you’ve done, but it could even open up points for next steps or further work.

Despite the importance of auditing your prospect’s site, you’d be forgiven if you threw your hands in the air at the thought of potentially wasting hours auditing a site for a prospect that might not be worth your time in the long run. Instead of putting pen to paper and scrawling through your prospect’s site yourself, it’s wise to cut down on desk research and invest in a tool like Insites which gives you a 360 degree view of any site in 60 seconds. For more experienced sales agents looking to look deeper, we recommend SEMrush , Ahrefs , and free tools like Google Lighthouse or Nibbler. These tools will give you a run down of your prospect’s sites and help you qualify your prospect clients and acquire the knowledge that will not just grab their attention, but help you sell your solutions.

Happy auditing!