In my view there is a golden rule of sales and marketing and that is, "you can only sell one thing at a time". Almost everyone I help and work with does not realise the importance of this rule and as a result they sell less of their products and make less money. This sounds a bit weird, so let me explain.
Imagine you sell a product or service to another businesses. Let's say you get an introduction from another customer that allows you to telephone a brand new prospect to see if they are interested in your products and services.
So, what happens next?
Typically most business people will make the call and tell the guy all about their product and services, providing many of the benefits and then asking for a meeting. Whilst this sometimes works it often fails.
The clever businessman stops and thinks before picking up the phone and asks himself, "what is my objective here?". Unless your product or service is normally bought over the phone then no matter how much of a compelling argument you put the prospect is not going to buy your product or service during the call. You need to advance down the sales cycle, so you need to get a meeting, therefore the whole point of the call is to arrange a meeting, and not to sell your product. With this in mind during the conversation you need to dangle enough carrot about the benefits of your product or service to get interest, but once you do you should ask for a meeting and say no more.
Depending on your sales cycle, at the meeting you can go 'all guns blazing' to sell your product and service.
Your phone call sells the meeting, then your meeting sells your product - one thing at a time.
Now consider this same principle to every aspect of your marketing and ask yourself, "what is the objective of this marketing".
Most companies simply fill their websites with product information then hope that the visitor takes the effort to contact then. Unless you sell online the objective of your website is to attract interest then compel the visitor to contact you. So make it easy for them to contact you, give them plenty of reasons to contact you and just use the key benefits of your product to attract their interest.
Very often you don't need as much information to have a more effective website.
So remember the golden rule, and always ask, "what is the objective of this piece of marketing?"