The great thing about excuses is that they last forever.
Just find you a "good" one, and your work is done...or maybe your work will ask you to be done, as in, pack yo shizzle, you're done!
But success: that takes daily effort.
Since leaving the Air Force in 1997 to enter full-time, commissioned sales in everything from financial services to mobile homes to high tech, I’ve heard every variation of:
We need more leads!!"
We need better leads!!"
We need more traffic!!"
Since owning and operating The Sales Whisperer® since 2006, I’ve heard every variation of:
Whether you’re selling to Fortune 50 enterprise accounts or you're a local contractor simply wanting to be the go-to guy in your city, you don’t need more traffic until you master your attraction process.
People don't do business with you for one of two reasons:
According to Google Analytics, blogs can have bounce rates from 70-98%. A 98% bounce rate means only 2 of 100 visitors to your site click through to another page!
If only 30 stick around for more than one page, that still means you’re literally throwing away 70% of your marketing dollars chasing the “I gotta drive more traffic” hamster wheel.
Since you only get one chance to make a first impression, without an optimized attraction process, you’re literally paying to tell the world NOT to do business with you. (Sidebar: If you’re that stinking rich…may I give you my PayPal account? It’s for the kids. Really.)
I don’t know about you, but if I’m throwing 70-98% of my marketing dollars away, I would not be a happy camper…because I’d be out of business faster than green grass through a goose.
Which is why I say you don’t need more traffic—at least not yet. Instead, you need to turn window-shoppers and browsers into conversions.
Now when most people hear the word “conversions,” they think of closing the sale. In reality, there are many conversions that happen during the typical lifecycle of a sale.
To illustrate this cycle, I created the ABCDE™ Sales and Marketing system.
Notice that each step is a verb. It’s action-oriented. And each step flows naturally into the next. But your entire sales and marketing ecosystem begins with Attraction.
What are you doing to not only attract visitors to your website but to get them to identify themselves so you can then Bond with them?
You can’t close the sale until you establish some sort of bond and rapport, but you need the contact info of a human being—i.e., a qualified prospect—with whom you can begin bonding and who is more targeted, more segmented, more timely than a visitor whom you can not only see is browsing your site, but you can see what page they’re on, how long they’ve been there, what other pages they’ve browsed, and if this is the first or 10th or 30th time to your site?!!
While “if you build it, they will come” might, occasionally, sporadically, hopefully, be true every once in a while (but mostly in the movies), notice that the saying never promises “if you build it they will…buy.”
We’re all busy.
We’re all distracted.
We’re all over-communicated, over-stimulated, and over-technologized.
We want and need help in not only navigating the millions of results on the web but in finding the solution to our needs, the answers to our questions, and that’s where real-time visitor and chat comes in.
Paying for more traffic to your website and allowing those visitors to just “wander around until they find what they are looking for” is insanity. You and I don’t get paid to attract window shoppers and we’re all hesitant to enter our real email addresses to get your wonderful free report, lead magnet, white paper, and/or handy-dandy resource guide.
So strike when the iron is hot.
Cut through the noise.
Engage your visitors in realtime and show them how different you are from your competitors by providing a human touch to help your human visitors (Yes, there are actual humans on the other side of the interweb from you!) feel at ease and feel confident that they’ve come to the right place.
Michael was in a bit of a jam, and he turned into a paid Initial Process Assessment client within minutes of this chat starting.
We were able to immediately dive him, help him get some clarity on his situation, and he went on his merry way.
We both win in that I didn’t have to give days and weeks of free consulting to try to win him over, and he didn’t have to go days or weeks or even more months to know how to proceed to meet his goals.
This visitor became a prospect who opted in for additional free reports from me and is on my Longterm Nurture Sequence after I engaged with him immediately when he visited my website after listening to The Sales Podcast.
In both the Make Every Sale course and the Weekly Whisper newsletter, I drive home the importance of having a multi-media, multi-touch follow-up system, as well as understanding that there are 3-5-10 different little sales that must be made in every encounter with your marketplace.
First, this prospect had to find The Sales Podcast (#1), subscribe to it (#2), listen to it (just because he subscribed doesn’t mean he listened to it!) (#3), hear my Call To Action to get The Sales Agenda, then actually visit my site to download the report (#4), and now he’s engaging with me in real time via Pure Chat (#5).
After we chatted, he opted-in for my report, and now he’s another prospect who is on my Longterm Nurture sequence, Weekly Whisper email list and spreading the word about the great resources I offer.
Like The Sales Podcast fan from Connecticut, Matt came to my site from a podcast, but this time he heard me as the guest on the Agents of Change podcast hosted by my friend, Rich Brooks.
During that interview, we discussed CRMs, among other things, so Matt visited my site to see what I have to offer, then BAM!
I engage him via Pure Chat, and one thing turns into another, and suddenly I have a lead that I then connect with over the phone, and within 24 hours, he’s a customer.
It really is that “simple” to engage with your marketplace.
That’s why you went into business and created a website in the first place, isn’t it? To engage with your ideal prospects, address their needs, and help them make the right decisions, which in turn will get them singing your praises?
Your website is up, and you have visitors arriving every day, so the hard part done.
Now install Pure Chat and Make Every Sale…in real time!
Good Selling,
Wes