Would you build a great shop, fill it with great products, promote it to drive traffic in and then not hire any sales people? Would you expect those customers to choose products and buy them on their own? If your website doesn’t deploy persuasive or proactive selling techniques then that’s exactly what’s happening!

Whether in the B2B or B2C all succesful online selling essentially follows the same system, a 5 step system just like with the marketing process AIDCA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction and Action) I mentioned in a previous post - sadly the sales 5 step process doesn’t have a nice and easy to remember acronym like AIDCA but involves the following steps:

The PROSPECT step is usually where your marketing comes into effect by bringing the right target audience to you website, these people are already partly QUALIFIED as they are people who are interested in what you have to offer. It is important therefore that you reinforce the relevance of your site to the PROSPECT as soon as they arrive which can be done by presenting your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) clearly and concisely. As well as confidently describing your unique relvance and value it should also look to build excitement within the PROSPECT to get them to stay, just like an old gold prospector would if he came across a bit of gold dust, a crude analogy but true and don’t worry I’m not going to try and expand on it!

So, you’ve now got the prospect at your site the next important step is to build a RAPPORT but you don’t have the luxury of being face to face where you usually have at least a few minutes to build rapport in this instance your website has to build a rapport for you in a matter of seconds and it can do this for you in a number of ways:

to name but a few but ultimately you must understand your target audience well enough to guage how they want to be sold to because they do want to be sold to they just don’t want to have something pushed on them.

The next step QUALIFYING is paramount to eventually closing the sale as why wouldn’t you click to buy if you were shown eactly what it was you wanted and you felt you had a RAPPORT with the people selling it. As it’s not easy to create a dialogue to specifically ask the questions related to the persons needs and wants you need to ensure your website is doing this for you through hyperlinks or carefully phrased questions which lead the person through a taxonomy to the product or service they desire and in as few steps as possible, afterall there is such a thing a ‘click fatigue’.

As you work through the process of QUALIFYING you must also ensure that you PRESENT or pitch your company, your products or your services in the best possible way introducing the CLOSE as early as possible. You must also however be aware that enough may not have been done and that objections may need to be handled and the closing process repeated in this way until the final CLOSE this is where information on your privacy policy, customer service, after sales support for example can play an important role. Think both in terms of the online micro-environment i.e. the speacific web page and also the online macro-environment which is the whole online experience associated with your website.

As you’re probably starting to realise sales steps and AIDCA actually work very closely throughout as it is the AIDCA process that should be used within your copy to PRESENT your offering. I think there should be an ‘S’ added to both the 5 sales steps and AIDCA which in both instances should stand for SATISFY as it is imperative to build customer loyalty and obtain repeat business if the essence of your business allows for it and the best way to do that on both counts is to satisfy the customer! Not to mention the free marketing associated with word of mouth recommendations.

If you do not follow these steps on your site and your site is not converting visitors into sales then I would recommend you stop spending money on your marketing as it’s simply a waste of money and focus on fixing the online sales process within your site first as a matter of urgency before continuing with anything else!

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