When sales are flagging or the competition is taking some of a company’s market share, the knee-jerk reaction is to demand a better product from development, hire new salespeople or roll out a new marketing campaign. The first place to start is to ask two important questions: Are you making it too difficult for prospects to buy from you? Even worse, are you negatively impacting future revenue growth?
Before you answer those questions, make sure you’re asking the right people — customers and prospects, says Christopher Ryan, president at Fusion Marketing Partners. Test your entire purchase process and see if these common revenue growth barriers exist.
Barrier 1: Invisibility
If you are not found, you are not selected. The reason the most visible company wins is not necessarily because it’s better but because it is discovered. Sometimes, it really is that simple. Do your content marketing and SEO homework to make sure you are highly visible in your chosen marketplace.
Barrier 2: Poor branding
Your brand must communicate exactly what you do and how it benefits the potential purchaser. And you only have a few seconds to accomplish this. Poor branding causes confusion, and confusion is a huge barrier to the buyer’s journey.
Barrier 3: Missing information
Your job as a barrier-removing marketer is to provide whatever the prospect needs to keep them moving along the purchase path. In the early stage of the buyer journey, you need to offer educational content, which, according to research, makes consumers 131 percent more likely to buy. At later stages, provide whatever information is required to validate the decision and complete the transaction (i.e., pricing, terms, warranty, product usage, etc.). All information should be presented in a consumable format without unnecessary burden, like forms to fill out.
Barrier 4: Too much information
One of the best pieces of sales advice is to not sell past the close. Keep the point of the promotion on driving toward a purchase decision and do not throw so much information at the prospect that he or she gets too distracted to purchase.
Barrier 5: Too many options
More options can lead to indecision both before the sale (which option should I choose?) and after the sale (did I make the right choice?). Experience on the B2B side has shown that when offering a cloud-based software solution, the ideal number of purchase options is three. Every additional choice will decrease sales. Incidentally, when we offer three choices, over half of purchasers choose the mid-priced option.
Barrier 6: Complexity
Do not over-engineer the process. A confused customer buys nothing. Annette Franz of CX-Journey encourages companies to find points of confusion in their sales process and redesign a simpler experience. Use journey mapping in conjunction with value stream mapping.
Simplicity is key
“The common theme running through all of the barriers is the need for simplicity,” says Ryan. “The simplicity mantra applies after the purchase as well as before. Whatever you’re selling, you want customers to not just buy, but happily use your products and urge their friends and colleagues to do the same.”
You do not want potential buyers using words such as painful, complicated, frustrating, slow or confusing to describe your sales process. Rather, to achieve solid revenue growth, you want them to describe the process with terms like clear, easy, fun, logical, cool and painless.
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