How to Use Your Web Site to do the Dirty Work
If you do things right, a web site can do all the dirty work for you and your business. So what’s left over for you to do at that point? Why, exactly what you want to be doing of course…
…building a relationship with your customer.
Because in most businesses that involve sales, there’s a dilemma that exists between the business owner and the customer. Many potential buyers approach a relationship with you, the seller, with their guard up. There’s a wall they’ve put up to protect themselves from being “sold”.
When you work with a potential customer you want them to come to you with their guard down. You want their cooperation and their full attention.
So how do we position ourselves to bypass the wall they’ve put up?
Web sites are great for explaining, telling, and selling. The whole point is that you don’t want to be explaining, telling, or selling anything that a web site, an article, or an email can sell, tell, and explain for you.
Major Important Point to Tattoo on the Inside of Your Eyelids: Once you start trying to sell someone on something, you become a salesman. What you want to be is their guide and mentor.
You want to have conversations with your prospect to be free of pitching and selling. Every time you talk you want them to be comfortable, open, and hanging on everything you say.
If your web site does all the selling and pitching and explaining for you, it gives you the freedom to be a real person and ask your prospect about their situation and what they’re looking for. You can keep it about them because they already have (or will have) access to information about your business and what you offer through your web site.
If you position yourself as a guide rather than a salesman, then you can recommend they follow a particular plan of action as a means to help them accomplish their desired outcome and they’ll take your advice seriously as a trusted resource and not suspiciously as a salesman.
Here’s how it works in practice
So much of what we do on a day to day basis is repetitious. We explain/do/say the same things over and over again while working with our leads.
So much of that can be automated.
Questions you don’t want to have to answer
If you find yourself explaining the same thing over and over again to your potential customers, write the answer down and put it on a web site.
If people ask you questions you’re not good at answering, write the answer down and put it on a web site.
So if they ask a question that for any reason you don’t want to answer right then, write the answer down and put it on a web site.
What do you say when someone asks a question you don’t want to answer? You can say “That’s a great question that a lot of people have, but it would take a while to answer and the answer to that is on my web site. Can I send you an email with a link to that answer? This way we can keep talking and the information on the site does a much better job explaining things than I can.
If it’s a one-sentence answer, go ahead and answer it, but in every business there are questions that take a long time to explain, are technical in nature, or need detail and knowledge that you (or someone selling for you) have a hard time conjuring up at the spur of the moment, or you’d rather not answer right then. Make a list of these questions and put the answers on a web site and offer to send them an email so they can get their answer without you having to give it to them right there.
This does a couple of things:
1) You don’t have to sit there and explain things to them. That can take a lot of time and, under a lot of circumstances, the more you explain things to someone the more you sound like a salesman.
2) It keeps the conversation moving in a positive direction so you don’t have to go on any tangents about topics you’d rather not focus on at that moment.
3) It makes you sound very open (like you’re not hiding anything from them) because the answer is already on your web site. This doesn’t mean that the information has to be available to anyone surfing your site. You can certainly hide it and make it available only to people who ask those particular questions (hence offering to email your prospect the information they’re looking for). But having it “already on your web site” sounds open and honest.
Use your judgment, of course
If you’re in a business, for example, where the sale is typically made the first time you talk with someone, then putting off questions and referring them to your web site might lose customers for you. There are many different situations and the best way to use a web site varies from business to business.
There are so many ways to approach setting up and using a web site to sell to and educate your potential client that I’ve started a daily conference call so I can teach business owners how to set theirs up directly. If you can describe the business you’re in, then I can guide you on the best ways to set up your web site so it acts as your salesman so you don’t have to.
In addition, I’d be happy to show you how I’ve done this in my own online businesses. I’ve set up a mentoring program through which you can see first-hand how I run my businesses and even work directly with me till you have the online marketing experience you need. Learn more about the Mentoring Program and Conference Call here.
The point is you don’t want to be spending your time answering common questions, especially questions that are long, technical, or deviate you from whatever presentation you’re making. A web site can take care of all that, and with a web site you control how and when your prospect accesses that information.
Make sense?
Putting together a web site that does the selling, telling, and explaining for you will allow you to do what you do best–forming relationships with people so that business transactions actually happen.