How to make your website "salesperson of the year"

In the first part of this article, I discussed how my son’s 5^th grade class learned the importance of getting into the customer’s head and how this lesson could have saved a tycoon millions of dollars. In this article, I discuss how this task, traditionally performed by sales, is increasingly the responsibility of marketing and what innovative companies are doing about it.

Back in the 90s, it was the salesperson’s job to get into the customers head. Salespeople – at least the better ones – spent the majority of their time asking questions and understanding their customers’ needs. Only after they figured out those, they would talk about products, features and functions. Back then, most salespeople used the old rule of thumb: “You have two ears and one month” – in other words you should be listening twice as often as you speak to be successful in sales (As I learned later, this rule should be applied not just in sales, but in any conversation, particularly at home, but this is the subject of another article!)

But in enterprise 2.0, software is often sold on the web. Even when software is sold person to person, usually by telesales, conversations are brief and tend to happen at the tail end of the customer’s information gathering process – often too late to influence the customer’s decision. It is not uncommon that customers make an emotional decision early on in the process and then spend a lot of time justifying their early decision. The initial encounter of a customer with a company – usually through the website - is therefore critically important.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine – a VP of marketing at an enterprise software company. He was complaining that the company’s website is essentially a billboard. He later went on to state that the marketing department is the caboose – slowing the company down. Of course, in my view, there is a very strong and direct correlation between the two! A website should not be billboard or a marketing brochure. A website should be a salesperson - Not just a salesperson, it should be the “salesperson of the year”. A website should not only meet and greet most of your prospects, but it should engage them in a consultative sales cycle. Here are some techniques and technologies that innovative companies are using to adjust to this new reality:

1- A key piece of information to start a consultative website conversation is: what led the customer to the company’s website? If it was through a search engine, what keywords did the customer use? If it was affiliate marketing, what was the referring website? A customer will spend, on the average, 8 seconds on a website before returning to his previous link. Unless the landing page covers relevant topics that align strongly with the customer’s search for information, the opportunity to sell to this customer is likely to be missed.

2- There has been much talk about the use of personas in website design (personas are representations of typical users of a website). As experienced salespeople know, the best prospects are those who have a clear and well defined problem and the job of the salesperson is to help them buy. Similarly, marketing folks should interview prospects who have a clear and well defined problem to develop a primary persona for the website. Further, the buying process of those personas should be defined and documented. The website’s conversion processes are then designed to match the persona’s buying process. A common mistake I often see is trying to close the sale while the customer is in an information gathering process on the website.

3- A customer will often spend quite a bit of time on a website before he makes the dreaded call to the sales department (dreaded by the customer that is – a salesperson I worked with would often ask his customer: “what is so bad in your business that you are willing to talk to a salesman”). Rather than waste precious time asking customers situational questions, the salesperson should be armed with this information - gathered while the customer was on the website: what keywords did the customer use to find the website?   What pages did he visit?  What papers did he download?  And what emails did he click on? New technologies such as Eloqua and Salesgenius make this possible today.

4- Metrics, Metrics, Metrics. It is the old adage: “You can not manage what you can not measure”. This is perhaps the most important but least understood part. As a website incorporates a set of processes that engage and convert visitors, it is critical to continuously measure and improve those. Too often marketers assume that a new “cool” improvement to a website will result in an improvement in conversions. More often than not, they are surprised with the outcome. A change to a campaign may result in tactical improvements (e.g. more visitors) but a deterioration in medium and long term goals (e.g. trials and sales). It is important to instrument, measure, benchmark all processes of the marketing/sales funnel.

In Enterprise 2.0 the sales team may not have the opportunity to get into the customer’s head the old fashioned way. But through the use of new techniques and technologies, innovative companies are able to engage the customer in a consultative sales process that starts with the website. By doing so they are able to boost their sales and lower their cost of sales. Yet another reason to turn your website into “salesperson of the year”.

Comments

[Luhi]

Antony,

I must say I am very impressed.

It is very rare to come across a marketer that really understands the relationship between selling and marketing. That a magazine ad should be salesmanship in print, a TV or radio ad should be salesmanship over the airwaves, and that content on websites should be should be salesmanship on the internet.

VERY good article