The Path to Personal Selling

“What good selling paths do for web-based marketing is to combine web marketing psychology with traditional selling methodology. A series of these screens is crafted to work together to win trust, build selling propositions and ultimately result in a purchase decision and transaction.”

Calling your re-purposed PowerPoint presentation a web sales “tool” is as ridiculous as calling red Twizzlers licorice. There’s no licorice in red Twizzlers, and a good PowerPoint preso does not make a good web path. Let’s look at selling on the web—as a practical reality.

Most websites don’t really sell anything. I mean plenty of sites conduct sales transactions and some up-sell/cross sell. But the standard operating procedure is to present a product and hope someone buys it. There’s no real selling involved. It seems rather ironic for a medium that’s founded on the idea of one-to-one interactive communication that the preferred relationship between buyer and seller is anonymous and to large measure, irrelevant.

A selling path is a series of screens where, unlike a random-access website, the prospect’s choices are limited, controlled and purposeful. A series of these screens is crafted to work together to win trust, build selling propositions and ultimately result in a purchase decision and transaction. A path sits on top of a traditional website. We are in no way advocating the demise of the random-access web property for an Internet full of selling paths.

There is a tremendous opportunity beyond the dutifully repurposed catalog and shopping cart metaphors brought online by everyone from Amazon to The Gap. The opportunity is mass personal selling and it can’t be accomplished through the confines of the traditional web site experience. And before you challenge the validity of what seems to be an oxymoron in “mass personal selling,” imagine a thousand or a hundred-thousand simultaneous prospects getting involved in sales paths on your website—that’s mass personal selling—and that smells of one-to-one interactive communication as well. Nifty.

But most websites are random access. You present the choices, your participants choose to click on something and that’s where they go. Your only control over where they click comes in your presentation of the choices. But ultimately, you have no control over their course through the sale.

Traditional, offline selling presentations are linear. You take a prospect step by step through a series of points that build up to a purchase decision. The order of those points is important and controlled as is the pace of their presentation. These basic truths hold fast in personal selling of everything from lunch to a house. So real selling takes place when a prospect gets moved from point to point, buying in at each step and getting more and more involved along the way. For a sale to take place he or she must get moved to the purchase decision a little at a time, so at the end, he’s sold and there’s really no decision to be made.

The web hasn’t changed the psychology of selling. It’s changed the psychology of marketing. The web psychology of marketing says that you need buy in early on and that you have to befriend and ask permission to get that buy in. A big part of that is the perception of choice and control on the part of the prospect.

What good selling paths do for web-based marketing is to combine web marketing psychology with traditional selling methodology. There are several valid premises on which a path can be presented as a valuable alternative to your random access site: Speed “Click here for the fastest way to find the tire that’s right for you.” Simplicity “Click here for the easiest way to decide which tire fits your car.” Personalization “Click here and we’ll match our tires to your lifestyle.” Offer “Click here to enter to win a set of Roadhugger Supremes.” Whichever premise you jump from make sure you pay it off—right away—in the first screen. Don’t forget why you asked them to click on the path in the first place.

Nine rules for making a sales path that sells:

A web sales path should not be truly linear

Think of it as limiting the number of choices and outcomes—but not limiting the number of choices to none. That won’t work as it flies in the face of the web psychology of marketing. There should be one, main, incredibly obvious and clear “NEXT” type of choice, but there should also be pop-ups or free-form fields, or “click here to choose A”, “click here to choose B” scenarios as well. It must appear as though the input the prospect is giving is affecting the results of their efforts. If your selling path is simply click-click-click, you’ll get no prospect involvement, no early buy-in and you’ll be no closer to selling them at the end of the path than you were at the beginning of the path.

Exude speed and efficiency

Make your first screen short and punchy. (Really you need to make all of your screens short and punchy, but make the first one extra short and extra punchy.) Your path needs to load fast, look clean & simple and scream “I promise I won’t waste your time with any meaningless garbage like our president’s bio!”.

Get smarter at every click

So if your prospect needs to make choices, have him make choices that give you more information so you can narrow the selling message. Let him choose features he’s looking for, things that interest him, colors he likes, etc. Make it all about him and make the questions smart enough that you learn something valuable.

Be clear and don’t ask unless you need to

Each choice the prospect makes should impact their next set of choices or certainly the outcome of the sale. In other words don’t ask them anything that’s irrelevant—they don’t have time for it and they’ll only end up questioning your motives.

Stay focused

Don’t distract them. In other words, don’t tell them anything they don’t need to know to make the next choice or the purchase decision. Resist the temptation to go into the details of how the process works when data travels in and out of the database that functions as the central repository of information related to the migratory flight of cow egrets on which your company based the research and development of the bird seed you’re selling. The bottom line is to give them the big picture, big selling propositions and make them click for the details as they want them. (That type of “purchase decision support” is excellent anyway as it makes your prospect feel involved and like they’ve done their homework by looking at more information. And you kill two birds with one stone—the prospect gets to choose something and gets more involved in the process.)

Don’t ramble or waste their time

Limit the number of screens in your path and make your point succinctly on each screen. For simple products, make your case in three steps. For complex products, wide product lines or high-ticket products, go to no more than seven steps. If you really have a complex sale that requires the web equivalent of the Appalachian Trail, build in pauses that pay off the previous screens with some conclusion before moving on and asking for more. Regardless of the number of screens, limit the copy on each screen to two, or at most three, short paragraphs.

Be honest and up front

Let them know where they are in the path. Clearly display how many steps there are in total and the prospect’s current place in the path. This is a key ingredient to building trust and letting them know that they haven’t committed to giving you the next 30 minutes of their life just to pick-out kitty litter.

Barter for information

When you ask for your prospect to give you information, give them something in exchange. You’ll be much more likely to get what you’re looking for this way, and you’ll build trust and equality into the relationship. This is especially true in paths built around contests or offers.

Sincerity wins the day

Avoid the ad. If your path is nothing but a series of ads linked together, you’ll lose your prospect early on — probably screen 1 or 2. Really try to visualize the medium as an extension of a real, flesh & blood relationship—a good one—where the byproduct is the sale of your wares. Remember that trust, mutual respect and mutual freedom need to come across on every screen—after all, you’re befriending. Also remember that advertising and selling used cars are competing neck and neck for the low position on America’s respectometer.

Testing, one, two, three

And now the sweetest piece of the path puzzle—you can test the hell out of every nuance and tweak everything to maximize your yield. You can’t do that with salespeople—we’re too damn moody and inconsistent (not even scripted telemarketers can be tweaked like this).

You should know what works and what doesn’t by where prospects bail out of the path. Identify problem areas, make adjustments, watch your results and adjust some more. Then look at targeting specific segments with specific paths—drive traffic to the promised land, watch the results and tweak some more.

Then once you have your paths selling strong, tweak them to increase the purchase value or push a particular model. You have total control of your sales force—yippee! And the whole time you’re selling you’re also learning about your customers, providing excellent sales support and customer service and building solid relationships. Not a bad path to success is it?