Align your marketing program to the needs and desires of today’s online customers.
“Control the customer and you control the sale.” This advice served generations of successful salespeople who knew that they could make any sale once they could get face-to-face with a prospect.
When this sales process began to change, the change was so subtle that most salespeople overlooked its impact. Even the waves of consumer catalogs failed to alert the selling profession to the revolution that was taking place. It wasn’t catalogs as such that were so important. Whether it was Sears and Roebuck, L.L. Bean, PC Warehouse, or Victoria’s Secret, cataloging became a great success story because the cataloguers offered what the customer wanted more than anything else: Convenience.
But catalogs were just a rest stop along the world’s merchandising highway. Now, it’s the Internet. Although some express concern about “security issues,” millions of shoppers buy books at amazon.com and other popular sites using their credit cards every day. The experience builds consumer confidence and paves the way for increased spending via the Internet. As Andy Grove of Intel warns, “The world now runs on Internet time.”
The effects of Internet buying activity are being felt in virtually every industry nationwide. A Dodge dealer in Phoenix, like so many other merchandisers, is seeing it first-hand.
Describing the dealership’s expanding presence on the World Wide Web, he reports that “we are dealing with a totally different type of car buyer ... the cyber shopper. Many of them walk in (or e-mail) with invoice in hand and a retail book value on their trade. Since most are doing their shopping from home, it’s nearly impossible to sell value’ in the product. In fact, if they don’t get what they want in the form of Best Price,’ most of them never get their feet in the door. ... I’ve sold quite a few cars in my time and it’s much easier to isolate the objection and overcome it when I have an opportunity to sell’ the product, and myself, face to face.”
This auto dealer isn’t alone. Many companies have broken speed records to produce a website and take advantage of the Internet’s popularity, only to discover that they weren’t ready for the change in buying behavior that characterizes this sales venue.
As the Dodge dealer pointed out, today’s customers arrive by e-mail or in person after doing their research online. They no longer come to be educated and informed or to gather information. The Internet has taken this role away from the dealer. By the time customers contact the dealer, they know exactly what they want and what they’re willing to pay.
THE REALITY OF SELLING IN A NEW WORLD
Many salespeople have convinced themselves that, at heart, people feel there’s value in doing business with someone they know. But is this really the way customers feel?
Auto manufacturers make it clear that the vehicle’s warranty is good at any of their dealerships. Dell Computers has been highly successful selling computers by direct mail. The Internet only serves to enhance this type of buying experience. Dell and others provide the buyer with detailed information at their websites.
From the experience of Dell and others, we can see that customer reliance on a personal relationship is not what’s important to them. With their products supported by warranties, their only remaining concerns are price, quality, and value. In other words, their buying decision becomes product driven instead of sales driven.
Given this change in consumer attitude, successful businesses will be those that can adapt and provide an environment supportive of the new buying reality. An insistence that consumers continue to value the sales environment that you think should be important will only result in a loss of business.
Here are a few suggestions for bringing your business into line with today’s consumer attitudes:
1. Build a Web “store.” Cyber shoppers want something different, not just a website. They want a virtual store, not just one that leads to a “real” store. It’s quite possible that these customers associate physical locations (including sprawling auto dealerships) with high costs that are passed along to customers. Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, authors of Unleashing the Killer App, make the point: “Technology makes it possible to create, cheaply and consistently, a customer offering that is unique; not just one time, but every time.” In effect, the Internet shrinks selling costs, or at least it changes the perception of these expenses. The catalogs started the trend and cyber selling is taking it to the next step.
A virtual store gives customers the opportunity to custom-order what they want and the pricing reflects the reduced operating costs. This is what Toshiba has done for its independent dealers. Because the company sells only through dealers, the web-marketing goal is to get customers to the dealers who have had customers call and order specific products by model number after visiting the dealer’s website. In other words, the time might have arrived when the objective is no longer one of only using the Internet to attract customers to a physical location. The goal is now to get them to a virtual store.
2. Listen to the customer or lose the sale. There’s nothing new about saying that successful salespeople are good at listening to customers. Even though salespeople might know it, few actually put the idea into practice. Before even meeting a customer, many salespeople decide what they’re going to sell. They set the agenda and their job is to get the customer to agree with it. They decide what they want, rather than attempting to understand the needs of the customer and then find the right solutions. Of course, there are those who contend that customers don’t know what they want, and the salesperson’s role is to guide them in making the right choice, i.e., what the salesperson wants to sell.
This selling style is outdated and helps explain why many customers are put off by coercive, manipulative, and customer-ignoring sales techniques. This is also why effective banner advertising on the Internet asks questions. One dry cleaner, interested in attracting off-season clothing storage customers, used a banner that asked, “Need more closet space?” The goal was to identify customers with bulging closets. Another banner appealed to those looking for a tradesman. It read, “Need help with a home improvement project?”
3. Save the customer time — then money. Cyber shoppers are interested in saving time, not running around trying to find the right place to make a purchase. One survey shows that 60% of women and 40% of men who made catalog purchases do so for one reason: Convenience. Those searching for products and services on the web are known to value time above almost anything else. These are the “time-stackers,” people who perform several tasks at the same time. They know that it costs more to talk on a cell phone, but they can do that while they’re walking, meeting, or just about anything else.
A major issue in sales is adapting to the customer’s schedule. For the car dealer, this might mean seven-day-a-week service, “mall hours,” and free pick-up and delivery at the customer’s home or office. The concept is simple: In exchange for the customer’s money, you give the customer time.
4. The customer is in charge of the sale. Taking charge of the sale has been the traditional salesperson’s role: Fail to take or keep control and lose the sale. This is changing, quickly becoming a “one-to-one” marketplace.
Walk through just about any department store and the message becomes vividly clear. Departments are divided into “boutiques,” an attempt to offer a more personal approach within the context of a large store. A computer program “designs” Levi’s using an individual’s exact measurements, while several carmakers give customers the option of building a car to their personal specifications. Internet browsers allow users to customize their home pages.
The Internet is about the singular. It facilitates individual expression better than any other form of communication. It has to do with one customer and one customer alone. This gets rid of the traditional “what’s-on-the-shelf?” mentality. Traditional salesmanship was often a process of persuading the customer to want what we have available: One or two sizes fit all. This type of selling is predicated on controlling the customer and face-to-face encounters, circumstances that are negated by the Internet.
The Internet makes selling both more and less personal. It’s more personal in that it’s strictly one-on-one, but it’s less personal because customers can be totally anonymous, revealing only as much as they choose at any given moment. This makes it very difficult to apply traditional sales techniques and much more crucial to do everything possible to allow customers to be drawn into what can be called a “web-net” until they decide that “this is the place to do business.” Throughout it all, the task is to make it clear that the customer is in charge of the sale.
CONCLUSION
Although these techniques apply to the cyber customer, they also pertain to everyone who thinks like a cyber shopper, whether on the net, in an auto dealership, a shopping mall, or purchasing for a business.
The Internet has altered buyer expectations of what it means to be a professional salesperson and how customers want to be dealt with today. The Internet is not just changing where people buy, but, more importantly, how they buy.