There are two big used car dealerships in town.
The first one is just 5-minutes down the road. A nice facility, and they have a few cars you’re interested in.
The second one is a little further away, but every car goes through a 125-point inspection, comes with a 10-day money-back guarantee, and their salespeople don’t work on commission.
Which one are you going to?
You don’t have to be a car expert that understands all the inspection details, read the fine print in the guarantee, or understand their employee compensation package to immediately feel safer going with the second one.
That second dealership is CarMax, which Marcus Sheridan wrote about in this book They Ask, You Answer. It’s a great reminder about just how powerful “process content” can be…
…And how bad most of us are at using it.
You might hear “talk about your processes” and think it means publishing your SOPs. No one wants to read that (not even you 🤣). But there is tremendous comfort in knowing those processes exist.
Rather than trying to skirt around the fears clients have about handing over large sums of money, CarMax addresses them head-on and uses their processes to convince you why you don’t have anything to worry about when shopping with them.
“I don’t want to buy a lemon” → Our cars are put through a 125-point inspection process and only the cars that survive make it on our lot.
“I don’t want to be pressured” → Our sales people don’t work on commission, so they have no incentive to put you into a car that’s not a great fit.
“I don’t want to have buyer’s remorse” → If over the next 10 days you change your mind, no problem. Bring us the car and we’ll give you your money back.
Good process content takes the invisible parts of how you work and turns them into reasons to trust you.
We’re all sitting on a goldmine of this stuff…
We’ve got dozens of checklists, code standards, QA processes, onboarding systems, accessibility reviews, launch plans, performance tests, backup procedures, security protocols, discovery frameworks, revision processes, and post-launch support…. But how much of that is totally invisible to the client?
Buying a website is a lot like buying a car. It’s expensive, confusing, and most people don’t know what to look for. If you’ve ever wondered why most of your leads come through referrals, this is it.
Most agencies — like most car dealerships — look more or less the same (especially to the untrained eye). We’re giving people very few reasons to trust us, so their only option is “well, my friend used them and didn’t die, so…. 🤷”.
As Marcus puts it “If you don’t show it, it doesn’t exist”.
If clients don’t know you’re testing the forms daily, verifying everything works across all screen sizes and browsers, and keep two sets of daily backups in case anything goes wrong, then those things hold zero value in your client’s eye.
There are a dozen reasons someone should buy a website from you… but are you making that choice obvious?
