The Site Architecture
There are a couple of key principles in business-to-business online shopping, that you either understand or you don’t. When a customer says “Buy Now” the next thing you do is take his money. You don’t present him with half a dozen opportunities to change his mind. So when a viewer presses the Buy Now button, the next thing he should see is the checkout. My developers had customers taken to another web page, where they had to click another button, before being taken to a checkout page. These guys are supposed to be professional website developers – but they have probably never tried to close a high value industrial sale in a business context. When a customer gives buying signals – you close fast. Again, it’s possibly about world-view and experience, but it makes a big difference to commercial conversion rates.Lesson: Sales training and selling techniques, the art of good salesmanship, knowing how to recognise buying signals and how to proceed efficiently to close the sale - these are all well documented. People have been learning them and practising them all over the world for decades. But it seems that website developers may not have enjoyed an apprenticeship in the company's salesforce. The astute lesons of selling are just as vitally important in an online context, and yet developers are sometimes blissfully ignorant them, and, in consequence build websites that actually undermine the selling process, erode the value proposition and diminish the sales conversion rates of their websites. It is incumbent upon us, as business line owners, not to place our trust blindly in their superior wisdom in website design, but to imbue them with our own superior wisdom of how to sell effectively - and then watch them interpret that knowledge in an online context.
