How Can We Make Our Prospects Believe Us?

If only they would believe everything we say. How easy selling would be.

After years of being conditioned to believe that marketers are liars (and sales people are worse), we as consumers have evolved into a very skeptical breed.  Sadly, our skepticism is often validated and reinforced by real-word experience in the marketplace.

So what do we do about it?  How do we differentiate ourselves and our message as simply being believable?  If we can figure this out, we’ll sell more (online and offline).  We’ll increase our conversion rates.  And we will be more profitable.

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Are You Ask Too Much of Your Marketing Materials?

Twice in two days, I’ve had the same conversation with marketers suffering from the same confusion. Both are organizations that rely on lead generation as the first step in their sales processes. That is to say, they expose prospects to their marketing message in an effort to move them to contact the company, learn more, and finalize a sale.

The problem both companies had (and I see this all the time) is they were falling into the trap of over-communicating in their marketing materials… telling their whole stories… every detail… forgetting that the goal of their marketing is not to close the sale on the spot. Rather, the goal is to motivate a prospect to call and engage in the sales process.

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A Simple Exercise in Empathy to Boost Online Sales

I was working on the early planning of a new web site recently, and I was struck by a realization that I think may prove helpful to many of you who follow this blog.

As I have said countless times, effective online selling hinges on your ability to climb into your prospect’s head (empathize) and speak to her in the way she needs to be spoken to in order to move her to action. You have to anticipate her questions and make answers available in the right places – coinciding with her own buying process.

I have done this dozens of times now, but as I worked through the process today, something useful occurred to me.

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Dissecting Your Site’s Conversion Problem

Surround yourself with smart people, and you can’t help but get a little smarter yourself.  I participated in a conference call between a couple of Web marketing experts – Shell Harris and Alyssa Duvall (President and VP of Strategy for Virginia SEO firm, Big Oak) and Howard Kaplan, one of the big wigs at Future Now (the thought leaders in online conversion).

It was a simple revelation, but one well worth sharing here. The problem that most of refer to simply as Web conversion, “I want to increase my site’s conversion rate,” is actually a symptom of two separate and distinct issues. What are those issues you ask???

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