SELLING ONLINE IS HARD.
Although customers are just one click away on the Internet, merely reaching them is not enough. Potential customers are bombarded with more than 3,000 advertising messages every day.[1] The competition for their attention is fierce. They are also savvier than they were 20 or 30 years ago. If you want to increase sales, you must connect with your customers in new ways, capture their interest, give them control over their relationship with you, and gently guide them toward a conversion.
Every sales transaction is made up of a buying process and a selling process. In the buying process, the customer realizes his need or desire for a particular product or service, identifies and evaluates the different options available to him, and finally makes a purchase. The selling process is the flip side of this. In this process, the sales executive must establish a rapport with the buyer, qualify the buyer’s needs, demonstrate how her product meets those needs, deal with the buyer’s objections, and ultimately close the sale.
Although the Internet revolutionized how buyers and sellers communicate, the buying and selling processes have not changed much. The Internet gives buyers increased information and makes different products and retailers more accessible. Sellers, of course, have new ways to reach potential buyers.
The different stages of the selling process represent a funnel that many potential buyers or prospects enter on one side, and few actual buyers exit on the other. As potential buyers go through this sales funnel, many will exit at different stages for different reasons. The exit points represent holes in the sales funnel. Optimizing the sales funnel focuses on plugging these holes.
This process of sales optimization is complex. However, we can learn a lot about it from retail chains. No other retailer has perfected the art of maximizing revenue per visit as much as Wal-Mart has. Initially, they relied heavily on keeping prices lower than the competition and achieving profitability through higher sales volumes. Although this strategy remains at the heart of Wal-Mart’s marketing approach, its marketing mix has evolved tremendously over the past 20 years. The retail giant pays very close attention to every little detail of its sales process. Before a single visitor sets foot into a Wal-Mart store, plans are laid out and executed carefully to select the right location for the store, as well as its layout, merchandising displays, atmosphere, consistency in branding, and store traffic flow.