Organizations (actually, the people inside the organizations) often complain about their website hindering sales. They don’t like the look of it or there isn’t enough information available for customers. Usually, there is a simple explanation - they’ve just heard someone complain about their website and now they are parroting back what they’ve heard. In actuality, these complaints are hiding an underlying problem. There is no understanding of the buying process.

{Note: In a few cases, there are companies who’s online presence is novice. If this is you, fix it.}

The buying process describes the steps that a person goes through before they actually make a decision in your product. There is a human process (mostly brain/decision-making theory) and a company process. The company process also contains variations for the industry, product, and market. The buying process is not something we consciously do, but we all go through it nonetheless. Unfortunately, problems in the buying process will pop up as random complaints about random things.

So when someone complains about the look of the site, they really mean: “Our website is very important in the initial discovery stages, and we aren’t creating a good enough first impression.”

And, alternatively, when someone complains about the lack of information, they really mean: “Our website is being used later in the process for qualification and we aren’t providing enough information to keep us under consideration.”

Once you understand the buying process, you’ll fix many of those complaints.

Great point about declining marketing budgets:

New Study Says Marketers Expected to Cut Budgets: Are You?

Here’s an article about Mike Elgan, a blogger at Computerworld, trying to get an iPhone and getting denied.

Here’s the article:

AT&T won’t sell me an iPhone at any price

There are some interesting lessons here:

1) Huge corporations make mistakes

2) A customer who wants to buy continues the buying process online

3) Mr. Elgan quickly discovered that he was in the right

4) No one from AT&T proactively contacted him

I’m not going to side with either party. It sounds like things are getting worked out.

My point - If you are a small business, are you monitoring the online activity of your products? Would you have been able to identify this situation and rectify it?

I get excited about business.

It really doesn’t matter what it is, when someone starts talking about business, they get my full attention. I’ve learned over the years that this isn’t the best behavior at cocktail parties, so I include other topics when I’m in public. However, discussing business really gets my blood flowing. As a consequence, I find myself in a lot of business conversations.

There is a shocking theme that underlies most of the conversations - the lack of marketing. Most people launch off into a spiel about their product problem or the future potential of their business. And the ones with business ideas (or schemes) are so excited to get started that they just ‘go,’ without any real idea of where they are heading. In all of these situations, these are smart people who know and appreciate the role of marketing, but they ignore the marketing step entirely.

Here are 3 examples:

- A very close friend and I are talking about a new business that he is starting. The product will be sold over the web and payments will be accepted online. Because of contractual reasons, he wasn’t able to
tell me the product. But he did say that he had researched domain names on GoDaddy, he could build a website, and that he knew a little about PayPay, and “that’s 90% of the work.”

There was no talk about fulfillment, upselling, demand, messaging, demographics, pipelines, conversion, seo, sem, backend, positioning, usp, and so on. It was the perfect example of build it and they will come. Also, since this is their first online venture, there was a lack of meta-knowledge. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

He’s a pretty smart guy, so he’ll quickly figure it out he needs some marketing help. But, there was no talk of it upfront.

- The second scenario involves a local owner who has multiple ventures, but only one of them is going well. As I asked about marketing, he didn’t have a website, the products were high-end products, but his marketing was decidedly low-end - small classified ads and flyers. Clearly there was a mismatch between the message and the demographic. He is trying a mass approach of interrupting people. Interrupt enough people and someone will buy. There was no discussion of the buying process or demographics. They didn’t know the customer at all.

- And then there is the owner of a retirement care facility. She called in desperation because she was finishing her building and she had no tenets. She had been convinced by the local TV station to buy some ads, but ‘the only people calling from the ads were people looking for jobs.’ Shocking. In her case, there was no lead capture, psycho-graphics, competitive analysis, pipeline, or USP. She, like the others, just hoped to interrupt enough people with her ads that she had someone show up. ( Also, she thought she was marketing to the retirees, when in fact she should have been marketing to their families. )

These folks all had one thing in common - they were product-focused, not market-focused. No one did the upfront work to determine how to be successful. They didn’t know the market, how to sell the product, or even if there was demand for what they are selling. They just put the product out there and hoped for the best. The good news is that they will soon (if they haven’t already) recognize the importance of marketing.

On a positive note, a local real estate company approached me with the right mindset. They saw the potential for business growth and identified the opportunity. They approached me with several questions -

- “Is there a market here?”

- “How do we make the most amount of money on this endeavor?”

- “How do we reach the right customers?”

Brilliant. There is at least one firm one step closer to being successful.

Article on long content:

The Difference a “Big Post” Makes

Once companies start to blog, they’ll quickly become focused on SEO.

Here’s a great article for Wordpress blogs:
WordPress SEO

Analysis: Mainstream Media vs. Blogosphere

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching

Social Networking Will Go Mainstream

From IDC:

IDC Finds More of the World’s Population Connecting to the Internet in New Ways and Embracing Web 2.0 Activities

Worldwide Spending on Internet Advertising Will Soar Past $106 Billion in 2011

How does this increase sales?

That is the question put forth by Scoble in a recent post. Jeremiah started the questioning in his post, but from a broader perspective. Read the comments for Scoble’s post. They are worth the time. I’m also certain this topic was discussed last week at Enterprise 2.0 .

Let’s tackle the question from a slightly different perspective. There are two sides of the balance sheet. Let’s look at the left side and focus on where I can save money. If we reduce costs our margins improve, cēterīs paribus. The cost side discussion is often more more equitable to medium and large businesses for several reasons. One, the rhetoric of trying something ‘new’ often translates to great risk in the corporate world. And, unfortunately, risk is not a popular concept.

The second reason is the officers are often working from a budget. It is often impossible to ask for new budget dollars, but very easy to re-allocate and shift dollars from the current budget.

Spoiler alert: If your customers aren’t online, this won’t work.

Reduction in trade journals spending traditional ad dollars in traditional channels

Move a portion of the money you are spending in trade journals. You don’t need to retire your entire spend, but buy smaller size ads or reduce the frequency. 25.9% of total B2b 2006 ad spending went to business publications.* There is a fair amount money in the trade pubs.

Reduction in pre-sales travel

Before a sale closes, a salesperson will often travel to the customer’s site to facilitate the closing. This is especially true in companies with long sales cycles and complex products. Reduce the amount of pre-sales travel and use social media to pre-qualify potential buyers and resolve their major issues. With gas prices predicted to reach $5.00 a gallon, spending less money on upfront travel could help subsidize your effort in designing and building a social media campaign.

Reduction in traditional media buys

Similar to the trade journals, re-allocate some of your dollars in T.V., cable, newspaper, radio, and outdoor. Shift some of that money over to a social media campaign.

Reduction in customer support or customer retention

Use RSS, Twitter search, and blog searches to monitor for issues and address them before spiral out of control. This upfront monitoring will reduce your ‘emergency’ funding for customer support. (To be fair, some companies budget customer support separately from other initiatives. If this is you, technically, you can’t re-allocate from the support budget. However, you can gain another champion in the Support leadership by saving her some money.)

Reduction in lead generation campaigns

You could pull some money out of partner programs, trade shows, and other lead gen campaigns in order to help subsidize your social media plans.

(Ultimately, you want to be thinking in terms of returns, not necessarily revenues or costs. For every dollar you invest, you should get more than one dollar in return. )

*Data from eMarketer report