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Selling Essentials for Online Business Entrepreneurs

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that about eleven percent of the labor force in America is involved in sales. In fact, retail sales are projected to be the fastest growing area of employment from 2004 to 2014.

In fact, salespersons who work in retail outlets are really customer service representatives. The people who persuade others that the products or services they offer are worth buying and actually clinch the sale fit the well-known stereotype of the salesman.

Sales methods have changed dramatically in the last decade. The negative used-car-salesman stereotype has been replaced with the evil telemarketer, even though that trend is all but dead, thanks to the national do-not-call register. Although the Home Shopping Network is alive and well, it suffers from its own stereotypes: bored housewives shopping for sapphire rings and watching perky little athletes in leotards demonstrating the benefits of the Ab-Flab Blaster.

While sales techniques and markets of yesterday are quickly fading away, the sales environment of this century is undoubtedly the growing and thriving online shopping environment where the impatient shopper can dodge the sales pitch, leave without embarrassment and pick up the goods right outside his front door. This type of consumer can be a tough customer indeed!

The Nature of Online Sales
Most sales training is built on some variation of these five steps:

• attract
• engage
• inform
• persuade
• reinforce.

The sales trainee is encouraged to picture herself in a nodding-and-smiling interview with the prospective client, surveying his needs and listening actively. A salesperson should also project warmth and empathy. The focus is on identifying the customer's problem and designing a solution on the spot.

This can be a problem for the online shopping environment because the internet gives you zero face-to-face time with your customer. All that nodding, smiling and persuasion is going to have to be done by your web site.

The attract-engage-inform-persuade-reinforce model still applies. In fact, it's as valid and important as ever. The good news is you don't have to sit patiently and listen to your customer's gall bladder operation details. The bad news is that, if you don't do the job well, your customer can be gone in a nanosecond.



Here's how you can do all of those good things online in your e-commerce storefront:

• You can assume your customer's already browsed his way into your store by following links from other sites, search engines, URLs from your advertising brochures, pay-per-click ads or e-mails from customers' friends recommending your site. So you've managed to attract customers.
• You have about half a second to engage the customer with your web site. Assuming that all visitors land on your home page is a big mistake. If you've optimized all or some portion of your product pages, your customers are just as likely to arrive on those pages as they are on your home page. So, when you think about engagement, think very broadly. Engaging your customer has everything to do with how well your pages are designed, so we'll discuss that separately.
• Informing the customer is actually quite easy to do online. You can offer a list of topics and include substantial copy on each product page. The content should be tightly written to optimize the page while it focuses on what customers actually want to know about the product. You can also offer extra information beyond the product description. In fact, online shopping can be more than a quest to buy: it may also serve as a method of comparing prices and gathering other information. Some customers want you to inform them about your product lines. They may choose to go to a store to see, touch and try out the product. However, they'll do the research online even though they don't intend to buy the product while they're on your web site.
• Customers can escape your online grasp long before you have a chance to persuade them to buy anything. You might think that offering them free shipping or a special first-time visitor discount is a great idea, but if you hide your offer on the checkout page, you're too late. You have to use whatever persuasion techniques you plan to use to keep your customer immediately. Attention-grabbing tactics that don't paint you as an aggressive, hard-selling operation are actually quite challenging to pull off.
• The hesitant shopper is going to back out of your store very quickly if you don't snag him with the urgency of that purchase. Often, shopping isn't a rational act (ask your friends why they buy gas-guzzling SUVs and see if you can get a rational answer). It's an emotional one. Because spending money stirs guilt feelings, you may have to work on, "Buy it now or you'll miss your chance." That's what the countdown to Christmas strategy is all about. "Oh my gosh! Only 35 days left to get all my holiday shopping done!!" Help your customer reinforce his resolve to buy, popp that product into the shopping cart immediately and check out quickly as soon as he's ready. Of course, you should also make it easy for your customer to continue shopping. Do this by taking advantage of your upselling and cross-selling techniques.

Web Page Designs That Engage Customers
Online stores typically enjoy a one percent conversion rate. What that means is that only one out of every hundred visitors to your e-commerce site is likely to buy your product or service.

Think of those paltry numbers in mall store terms. Imagine that your target of 100 sales a week can only be met if 10,000 actually wander into your store that week. You'd wonder what was driving them away.

Online stores might easily attract visitors, but the visitor volume is meaningless unless you can sell. Although one way to improve sales is to double your traffic, a better way to build your sales figures is to increase your conversion rate. In other words, if two percent of your visitors buy while they're on your site, you still get 200 people buying out of those 10,000 visitors, instead of the original 100.

You have to focus on two goals once potential customers arrives on your site:

• engage them so they're convinced they should stay
  
  
• avoid driving them away.
  
  

Much of the advice on selling online focuses on the second point. Features of web pages that alienate users from exploring your site include:

• annoying gimmicks like pop-ups, flashing banners or corny animations
• waiting for anything to download
• illogical navigation
• boring text
• in-your-face hard sells
• spelling errors and clumsy writing
• obvious sales pitches and slogans.

Not so long ago, the word "free" was one of the more popular keywords online. Almost overnight, the word was liberally salted across e-commerce sites. As a result, no one falls for that any more. If you want to sell products to a now-sophisticated online market, you have to show you understand that the customer's time isn't free, as well as the fact that you aren't wasting it with empty content and silly slogans.

Increasingly, users are losing patience with the obvious. Of course, they want a good night's sleep, a stain-free carpet and a bumper-to-bumper power train warranty. Yet, they no longer want to spend time hearing (or reading) much about it. They want to know why your product is the best solution to their insomnia, carpet stains or auto maintenance issues.

How do you know what problem they're trying to solve before they arrive at your product page? Here's where good market research is important. You can pay for reports or conduct your own focus groups where you listen intently to the opinions of your users. Once you've identified your niche, you have to communicate in few words to your potential customers that (a) you know the problem, and (b) you have the best solution.

Here are a few tips that are likely to emotionally engage your visitors and encourage them to stick around:

• features that build trust, such as security assurances, return policies, testimonials from satisfied customers and fair pricing
• attractive screens with carefully tiled quality photographs (bright yellows and oranges sell hot sauce, while soothing shades of green sell garden supplies)
• succinct text that's written for reading on screen This includes short (1-2 sentence) paragraphs, bulleted lists and sidebars for extra information.
• product displays that take advantage of the internet's capabilities, such as enlarged views or front, back and side views of products
• links that work quickly and easily
• navigation that's smooth and logical, with navigation aids that let users know exactly where they are
• opportunities for participation in forums or chat rooms where visitors can read reviews by other users of your products
• the ability to check shipping costs interactively, before checkout.

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