A site selection manager does not open your website to learn who you are. She opens it to find a reason to cut you. It helps to picture the moment honestly. A CRO has a feasibility out for a Phase II trial. Forty sites on the long list. Two days to bring it down to …
A site selection manager does not open your website to learn who you are. She opens it to find a reason to cut you.
It helps to picture the moment honestly. A CRO has a feasibility out for a Phase II trial. Forty sites on the long list. Two days to bring it down to eight. The site selector opens your homepage, and she is not reading. She works through the list one website at a time, and her job is to close most of the tabs.
This is the part that is uncomfortable to sit with. By the time a CRO emails you, your website has already finished its work. It kept you in the round, or it quietly removed you. And when it removes you, no one sends a note explaining why. The feasibility simply goes quiet.
What closes the tab
These are the things that end the scan in under a minute. None of them are about taste.
- No therapeutic area named. The homepage says “clinical research” and stops there.
- A team page with one bio and no PI credentials.
- No numbers anywhere. No past trials, no enrollment figures, no phases run.
- Stock photos standing in for the real site and the real team.
- A single “Contact Us” form labeled “General Inquiries,” with no path built for sponsors.
Any one of these is enough. The selector is not scoring your homepage against a rubric. She is looking for the first disqualifier, and she will take it.
What keeps the tab open
- Therapeutic areas above the fold. Named and specific, not implied.
- PI photos with real credentials, linked where you can.
- One enrollment number from a past trial. It does not have to be your strongest. It has to be real.
- A clear path labeled for sponsors and CROs, kept separate from patient recruitment.
- One line about your patient database or referral network.
None of this is decoration. Each item answers a question the selector would otherwise have to guess at, and the guess usually breaks against you.
The asymmetry most sites miss
Here is the uncomfortable math of it. A well-built website wins you very little on its own. No CRO chooses a site because the homepage was elegant. But a weak or invisible one removes you before the conversation starts, silently, against names you will never see.
So the cost of a poor website is not aesthetic. It is operational. It shows up as feasibilities that trail off, short lists you are not on, and a pipeline that feels thinner than your site’s actual capability.
This is also why “most of our trials come through relationships” is not the reassurance it sounds like. Relationships get you onto the long list. The website decides whether you survive the cut to the short one. clinicaltrials.gov gets your site found. The sixty seconds on your homepage decide whether it gets chosen.
Read your homepage like someone who already decided to cut you
If your last few feasibilities went quiet, the instinct is to look at enrollment, at your database, at your coordinators. Look at your homepage first. Open it the way a site selector would, with a list of forty and a deadline of two days, scanning for the reason to close the tab.
Most site owners have never looked at their own website that way. It is worth doing once.
At Trialsfocus, this scan is the thing we design for. Not the homepage that impresses the people who already work there. The sixty seconds that decide whether anyone on the sponsor side picks up the phone. If your site keeps getting passed over by CROs, we are happy to open your website with you and read it the way a selector would.
