About Tesa

A few months ago I sat down with the marketing leader of a specialty chemical company to go through her website analytics. Traffic looked healthy: thousands of visitors a month, time on site that suggested people were actually reading. Then we looked at the contact form. Maybe thirty submissions in a good month, out of thousands of visitors. She pulled up the submissions themselves: a name, an email, a company, a product name that was sometimes the wrong one, and occasionally a note in the free-text field: "Interested in learning more."

That was the entire output of a website that cost six figures to build and receives more traffic than most trade show booths see in a year.

She couldn't name what was wrong precisely, but she described it in a way I've now heard from dozens of commercial leaders: "I know people are coming to our site with real questions. I just don't think our site is answering them."

Then she showed me where those questions were actually going. She opened ChatGPT and typed in a technical question about one of her company's flagship products. The answer referenced her company by name. Some of it was accurate. Some of it wasn't.

Either way, no lead was generated, no conversation was started, and her sales team would never know it happened. That was what unsettled her most: her website wasn't answering buyer questions, and other platforms were answering them instead, sometimes well, sometimes badly, always without her narrative being dominant.

Product information has become more accessible than it has ever been. The conversation around it has not. That gap is now the most expensive thing on a chemical industry website, and almost nobody is measuring it.

"Product information has become more accessible than it has ever been. The conversation around it has not. That gap is now the most expensive thing on a chemical industry website, and almost nobody is measuring it."

What hit

A few months ago I sat down with the marketing leader of a specialty chemical company to go through her website analytics. Traffic looked healthy: thousands of visitors a month, time on site that suggested people were actually reading. Then we looked at the contact form. Maybe thirty submissions in a good month, out of thousands of visitors. She pulled up the submissions themselves: a name, an email, a company, a product name that was sometimes the wrong one, and occasionally a note in the free-text field: "Interested in learning more."

That was the entire output of a website that cost six figures to build and receives more traffic than most trade show booths see in a year.

She couldn't name what was wrong precisely, but she described it in a way I've now heard from dozens of commercial leaders: "I know people are coming to our site with real questions. I just don't think our site is answering them."

Then she showed me where those questions were actually going. She opened ChatGPT and typed in a technical question about one of her company's flagship products. The answer referenced her company by name. Some of it was accurate. Some of it wasn't.

Either way, no lead was generated, no conversation was started, and her sales team would never know it happened. That was what unsettled her most: her website wasn't answering buyer questions, and other platforms were answering them instead, sometimes well, sometimes badly, always without her narrative being dominant.

Product information has become more accessible than it has ever been. The conversation around it has not. That gap is now the most expensive thing on a chemical industry website, and almost nobody is measuring it.

"Product information has become more accessible than it has ever been. The conversation around it has not. That gap is now the most expensive thing on a chemical industry website, and almost nobody is measuring it."