What's the first thing you do when you sit down in your doctor's office -- especially if it's a new doctor? If you're like many people, you check out the diplomas, certifications and other framed accomplishments on their wall.
It's only natural; you want to know whether the person who's about to examine you went to Harvard Medical School or Docs-R-Us, right?
The same is true for visitors to your company's website. They will trust you more if they find an impressive "achievements wall" highlighting the folks they would be purchasing from or working with.
We've already discussed the importance of company Team or Leadership pages, and the value of showing your business's achievements and credentials -- through customer logos, media logos, industry association logos, BBB accreditation and other trust signals.
But it can be powerful to go even deeper -- by sharing not only your company's credentials but those of the individual members of your leadership team, or for smaller companies, your whole team. This is especially true for consulting companies and service-based businesses.
Take my own company, Idea Grove, for example.
We have a team page that shows all our team members and that describes how our team works together on behalf of our clients. As the website puts it:
Grovers share a chemistry that is unshakable precisely because it has been hard-won. We're far from perfect as individuals, but we've learned to achieve great things as a team. We have the scars, and the results, to show for it.
That helps our potential clients to understand our team better. But what about a buyer who wants to know more about a specific team member they would be working with?
Many companies don't share detailed information about individual team members, beyond perhaps a very brief bio or a link to that person's LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn profiles are a good source of information, but ultimately they have a different purpose from a Team page. They are designed to promote an individual's career rather than their role within and work for your company.
In the past, I've actually had people come to the Idea Grove website, visit our Team page, click on the link to one of our staff writer's LinkedIn pages, and then reach out to that individual directly to see if that person is interested in freelance work.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
Creating an Achievements Wall for Your Team Members
The better course is to give each of your employees (or leadership team members for larger companies) their own profile page on your website. This aligns their experience and credentials with your company and allows you to leverage those accomplishments to grow trust in your brand.
For example, if you are interested in becoming an Idea Grove HubSpot consulting client, it would be natural for you to look to our Team page for those employees with HubSpot expertise.
You might come across a picture of Kady White, our digital marketing strategist. When you click on Kady's picture, you'll find this:
Kady's page includes the following:
This "achievements wall" helps buyers to establish trust with Kady -- and with Idea Grove.
To encourage our employees to build out their pages and keep them fresh, we turn over the keys to them so they can update their bios and add accomplishments themselves. It's a win-win for our team and our agency overall.