No. 32 Where is your sales representative? (February 8, 2006)
When a company decides to use a website for their business, the first thing it usually does is to directly or indirectly sell its products or services.
Sales (selling products or services online) and promotion (such as introducing products or providing campaign information) are both very important roles on a website. The sales and promotion functions have traditionally been performed by a sales representative. In other words, the work that was once done by a human sales representative is often shifted over and carried out instead by a machine, or a website.
However, many companies are simply putting their brochures on their websites, and leaving it at that. But will products sell via a brochure alone? In order to be understood by customers, most brochures are usually shown to the customer along with an explanation provided by a sales representative. This means that websites must not only be the brochure, they must also become the sales representative.
This is where we need to take a look at what the role of a sales representative usually entails. Unfortunately, when doing sales or promotion via a website, this is the perspective that many companies neglect to incorporate. We checked around to find out what company sales representatives, who have good track records, do and this is what we heard:
"Instead of explaining brochures or other documentation in detail, I first spend time talking candidly with my customer. While we are talking, I try to get a feel for their needs and interests. Then, when I go to explain the products in our brochures, having an idea of what they need and want and tailoring my talk to those needs helps me make the sale. Of course, I have also learned some techniques along the way to win customers over. Another important aspect is doing my homework in advance on which customers to target. All I need to do is find someone who wants to buy what I'm selling."
As you can see, in order to sell their product, sales representatives do their best to understand the customer. If so, then it is equally important when making a website that you get a very good understanding of the customers who will be visiting it. With websites or other self-service media in which everything depends on the user, it is even more important to fully understand your users in advance. If you don't have a good grasp on various information about your users ahead of time, such as users' needs, motivation, characteristics, background, and knowledge and therefore don't create your website content, i.e. your "sales talk", based on that information, it will be difficult to obtain the results you want.
Furthermore, although the website is a medium that can transcend time and physical restrictions, it is still nothing more than a machine. Since it is still difficult, technically-speaking, for a machine to be as flexible as a human being, it is vital that a website target customers even more accurately than a sales representative would.
By doing a good job of understanding and targeting your users, you should be able to design a website that will produce results equivalent to those of a sales representative armed with brochures.
Figure: Concept of promotion in self-service media
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