Should you put comprehensive information on the Web site? Should you tease potential customers instead, hoping to force them into making a person-to-person contact? The right answer depends on your type of business, how your sales system works and what your market expects.

To use an example from the last letter, Sun Microsystems puts out white papers of hundreds of pages of gory Unix detail. Engineers want it. Purchasers need it. And the sales force simply cannot be competent enough to answer such detailed queries. To provide less on the site would have only frustrated potential customers.

On the other hand, while working at an online ad infrastructure company, I found that relatively complete information on the Web site mislead potential customers into thinking that our product was too technical to usefully apply to them.

Since the key decision makers were frequently marketing people, we found we needed to keep everything very much in the liberal arts sphere, focusing on customer benefits (save time) rather than features (exports to XML).

The most successful site strategy in this latter case was to tease the user to the point where we could get a human-to-human sales contact going. The trick remains not to frustrate visitors by failing to include information they want and expect.

Customers get aggravated when they can't do things online that they know they should be able to do. For instance, I very recently changed home and car insurers, and I avoided any companies that failed to give me an online quote. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was talk to an agent.

A good place to start is to interview the salespeople at your own company. This isn't to suggest that you should ask them how to design the site.

Instead, ask them who are the real buying decision makers at the customer companies. Try to find out how useful the salespeople really are to the process. From this you can determine whether or not you want to force that human contact and risk alienating customers looking for quick answers.

Do not expect one answer to fit all industries, or even companies within an industry.

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Dear Tig,

I recently reacquired a business from the man to whom I sold it two years ago. He had pretty much killed the brand name. I have run ads about new ownership, new crew, etc. What else can I do to get some of the old customers back?

-Back in the Saddle

Dear Saddled,

It sounds like you've done the obvious things. An additional element to consider: perhaps you could directly address the particular flaw that drove the customers away in the first place. For instance, if the previous manager failed to deliver services, you may consider extending (and advertising) more generous credit terms. Perhaps agree to getting paid only after a successful transaction.

Most times companies will do better not to directly advertise previous flaws. Especially in businesses with high customer turnovers, drawing attention to previous mistakes will only give a bad impression to those who haven't had to suffer through the previous bad experience. In a small town, though, or in a business category with fewer and longer-term relationships, sometimes you have to face up to the messaging music.

You can manage to do both at the same time. You can address the earlier problems in your messaging (“guaranteed in writing”), without going into mea culpa explanations about why this might be seen as necessary by some former clients.