A £20k website horror story

Here’s my Halloween horror story. It has a new CMO, a £20k website rebuild and an industry of about 400 people in the UK.

Most deals for this enterprise SaaS company came through relationships. Rebuilding the website was the new CMO’s first move, and the shiny new site achieved nothing. Nobody grew the market beyond those 400 people because the navigation changed.

I can understand wanting a better site. I cannot understand spending that money before asking how this particular market buys. With about 400 people in the industry, I’d ask whether any of them was struggling to find what they needed on the existing site.

A rebuild gives a new CMO something visible to show in a board update, but it doesn’t enlarge the market or replace the relationships that bring in deals. If nobody can name the problem with the existing site, I wouldn’t approve £20k to replace it, even if the old one looked like it had been designed in a crypt.