How to Find Exactly What You Need from a Corporate Web Site in Seconds

It’s standard advice for sales people. Before you make that cold call (warm call or referral follow-up call – or even go to that initial meeting) surf the company’s web site for the information you need. You know you should, but who really has the time?

The problem is in the word “surf.” “You should surf the company’s web site before you make your sales call.” Yeah, and I should brush each tooth 24 times up-and-down, too.

What if you could take just seconds to research your target company – and get the kind of targeted information you really need?

Let’s face it, most corporate sites are boring and bloated. Beyond that, more and more of them are becoming impossibly complex. And, finally, many of them don’t offer a quick way to search within their site.

Here’s a much faster and more effective way to get what you need in seconds. We’ll use Google, but you could do these same example searches at Yahoo or Live.com.

You will be making an initial sales call to Atlantic Trust Private Wealth Management, one of the premier financial advisory firms in the world. You happen to know the web site for the company – but if you didn’t you could quickly locate it at any of the major search engine sites by typing in “Atlantic Trust Private Wealth Management.”

Go to www.atlantictrust.com and start looking around for what you need. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Most of the time, you simply don’t have the time to “look around” for the information you need. So, too often, we just don’t do it.

For the benefit of this exercise, however, turn on your stopwatch now and go to the site. We’d like you to time how long it takes you to find someone at Human Resources – because you want to call whoever is in charge of Human Resources. Ready? Go.

If you did that exercise, you may have found the information in a few minutes, perhaps even longer, or you may not have found Human Resources at all. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Here’s the secret. DON’T wander around the web site – instead, search the web site. Atlantic Trust does not have a search tool on their site – but Google (and Yahoo and Live.com) do – for every web site in the world.

For this exercise, go to Google and type in the following:

“human resources” site:www.atlantictrust.com

The first result (and only) result in Google is “Alison “Ali” Dohrman is Director of Human Resources for Atlantic Trust and is responsible for the oversight of all human resources, payroll and office.” If you click on the “Cache” link you will even have your search term, “human resources” highlighted in yellow, making it easy to find your search term as you scroll down the page. Another time savings.

I think you’ll agree that this is the only way to search for the information you need on a company’s web site. You completed your search in seconds – and found exactly what you needed.

Try this approach with a company you’ll be calling on today. Type in what you are looking for and the web site address for the company, like these examples:

“mission statement” site:www.xerox.com
“contact us” site:www.molsoncoors.com
“chief information officer” site:www.qwest.com

It works so well and saves so much time – you might just do it! And so might your sales people.