Start from the questions people arrive with, not from how your company is arranged.
Most B2B websites are organized the way the company is organized. Navigation named after divisions. Products grouped by the line they’re manufactured in. A resources section that mirrors which department produced each file. It makes complete sense from the inside, because from the inside it is the structure.
The visitor doesn’t have your org chart. They arrived with a question, and the question doesn’t respect your departments — “can this cut the material I actually use?” touches three product lines, two support articles and a spec sheet nobody has updated. The org chart is showing.
A practical sequence
- Write down the ten questions people actually ask before they buy. Get them from your sales team, not from a workshop.
- Check which ones the site answers, and how many clicks it takes. Anything past two is a structural problem, not a copy problem.
- Add the door people actually walk through. In industrial markets that’s usually the application view — material, thickness, tolerance, volume, the thing they’re trying to produce. You don’t have to throw out the product structure. You have to add the entrance people use.
- Give each seat what it needs. The same purchase gets researched by an engineer, an operator, an owner and purchasing, and each needs something different in order to say yes. There is no average visitor — the average of an engineer and a CFO is a person who doesn’t exist.
The test that tells you it’s wrong: you have to explain your own website to people. If your sales team routinely says “it’s under Resources, then Technical, then scroll down,” that’s not a training issue. That’s the site telling you it was built from the inside.