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Regain Control of the Sales Process
September 3, 2008

Here’s how things used to be. In the dim and distant past, if a potential customer wanted information about what your company did, they called you on the phone and requested a brochure. (Yes, people used to do this once upon a time.) Or they filled out a reader service card in a magazine. Or they came by your retail location and engaged in a dialogue with a salesperson. Or they visited you at a conference or trade show and gave you a business card.

How has this changed today?

If a potential customer wants information about your company, they will visit your Web site.

Aside from the media involved, how do those scenarios differ? Well, in the first scenario, you had information about who was requesting information. A name, an address, maybe a phone number. These could be saved and used as sales leads; your sales staff could call them back or otherwise contact them with a follow up. Essentially, companies knew who was inquiring about them. This was known as “lead generation.”

Today, the ability for potential customers to anonymously prowl your Web site means that the customer has sole control over your sales process. While this is empowering to the customer, it is disempowering to the provider. Essentially, the anonymity of the Internet has changed the entire sales process. You now have no idea who is inquiring about you. The lead generation process has been largely short-circuited.

So how do we go about getting those leads back—and without doing a community theater production of Glengarry Glen Ross? There are a few strategies. Let’s look at some:

Make them sign up for something. As I have said often on this blog, marketing is largely about presenting yourself and your company as the experts in your field. As a way of fostering your experthood, producing a regular e-newsletter or some other regular, delivered publication can provide potential customers with useful information, as well as put your name and brand in front of them on a regular basis. But at the same time, the sign-up process captures information about who is inquiring about your products or services. Even if it’s just an e-mail address, at least it’s some type of information about potential customers.

Make them register and sign in to visit the site. This has proven to be somewhat unpopular, and is certainly not to be recommended for rank-and-file Web sites. But you can have a “premium content” area on your site that requires a log-in (and also stress that registration is free). This is a good way of filtering out site the more casual visitors. After all, you don’t want a database of useless, uninterested, and fruitless leads.

Engage visitors via instant messaging while they are on your site. Once, I was making hotel reservations and a customized instant messaging window popped up and offered me 10% off my stay if I IMed back. Unfortunately, the custom IM application didn’t support my browser and I was unable to respond, but it was an interesting idea. I have also heard of sales people who monitor Web site traffic and can initiate an IM session with site visitors. Granted, this can be intrusive, but may well be worth experimenting with. Perhaps a “live chat” link can be added that will let an anonymous visitor interact with a live human if s/he chooses.

Yes, I am aware that there are all sorts of ways to surreptitiously keep track of who is visiting a site, and you could probably quite easily get any piece of information about an “anonymous” site visitor you wished, the idea is not to be creepy and Orwellian about it. There is an irony today that at the same time people are concerned about their privacy online they are at the same time sharing intimate details of their lives on social networking sites. (It’s really the difference between someone volunteering information and having it “volunteered” for them.)

However you choose to wrest control of the selling process from your anonymous visitors, remember to make the process as quick, easy, and unobtrusive as possible. Some tips:

• If setting up a registration screen, don’t take that opportunity to do a 50-question user survey. Keep it short and sweet.
• Unless you are capturing financial or other sensitive information—and for a routine user ID registration screen, you shouldn’t be—don’t go nuts with security precautions, passwords that require a minimum of some number of letters, or a combination of numbers and letters, and password recovery questions. People have enough user IDs and passwords to keep track of these days.
• Make only a few fields required, and the rest optional. For example, require an e-mail address and a name, but make other information—a phone number, a snail mail address—optional. People who are really interested in your company will be likely to volunteer more information. If a ton of information is required, they may be turned off and click away.
• Don’t abuse the information you collect. Once, some years ago, I gave $25 to one charity and before long I was on so many mailing lists I felt like I was in Dickensian London. If you do make subsequent follow up, make it worth the customer’s while. While people tend not to unsubscribe from lists, they may reach a point where they simply delete messages from you sight unseen—which is worse.

The Internet is empowering in so many ways—but remember, in any relationship, when someone gains power, by definition someone else loses it.

Posted by Richard Romano on September 3, 2008 | Comments (0)