I remember a few years ago having a conversation/argument with one of my good friends about different selling styles. He was a psychology graduate and selling software at the time, I was working a lot on business development. I’ve always believed that selling something is about the relationship you have with the customer. With so many other options, they choose you because they like your ideas or product but ultimately you offer something more than anyone else. My friend is convinced that an analytical, scientific approach is best. For every question there is a response, essentially a network flow chart towards the inevitable outcome of a sale.
For me this kind of approach implies that a good salesman can sell someone anything. I don’t believe this one iota. You can’t sell someone something they don’t want to buy. Sales are made on the basis of relationships. There are so many determining factors in winning the confidence of a potential customer beyond set responses to triggers. Good relationships breed a longer term connection with the customer.
It’s blindingly obvious to say, but the same thing applies to selling online. The relationship is key. With the cost of acquisition of customers so high, this is an area where all brands need to spend time optimising what they do. Why spend so much time and effort to win a new customer for them only to purchase once?
There are many tricks and easy ways to build a relationship with customers online but some simple principals apply. These are five quick ideas (of many):
- Relevance of offers, communications and information is essential. Amazon are of course particularly good at data mining to derive suggestions for products customers may like; but you don’t need to have their database and detailed algorithms to achieve a simpler way of doing this.
- Improving landing pages from search engines so that content dynamically matches the search terms is a relatively easy way of immediately personalising the experience.
- Make it easy to log back in once the customer has gone to the effort of registering. Complicated or hidden login processes serve only to turn them off completely. Rather than requiring customers to remember loads of different usernames, just use their email address for login.
- Make the customer feel secure. eBay have a great feature where if you login to your account (to sell an item) from a computer you haven’t used before, they generate an automated call to check it’s really you. This helps breed a lot of confidence.
- Keep the customer informed. Simple things like confirming their order, sending an email when it’s despatched and letting them know of any delays help to keep them happier.
image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/embleton/70221054
