A few years ago I had a boss whose favorite expression was “Just Take The Money”. He was a sales exec with many years experience and always tried to keep things simple from a leadership perspective.
So what exactly did he mean by this? Well….. have you ever gone into a merchant or even a car dealer and have said I’d like to buy item XYZ only to have the salesperson spend an hour trying to either up sell you to a different product or explain why an alternative product would be better? This is frustrating for the customer and often leads to overall reduced sales for the company or even no sales and a large customer dis-satisfaction quotient.
So why would a salesperson do this? Sometimes it’s because the salesperson is inexperienced and thinks their actually serving the customer by providing them with alternatives, usually something that they perceive as better for a myriad of reasons. Of course the other reasons are often found in manufacturer or company incentives whereby the company is trying to move certain products by incenting the salesperson. Regardless, you wind up with unhappy and frustrated customers. So, Just Take Their Money leaves everyone happy.
Translating this to the online line experience makes even more sense. In a world where customers have the ability to do extensive product research before ever visiting your site it makes sense to Just Take Their Money. Think of the case where someone comes to your website searching for product XYZ. Often the first thing they see on ones site is a product description of product XYZ. This is totally the wrong thing to do.
Why would you go out of your way to make it difficult to buy the product or service? The first thing they should see is an image of the product with a “Buy or Add to Cart” button on the right side. This is because they should be immediately arriving in your store. Make it easy for them to buy.
If the customer is not ready to buy, then can then scroll down or click through to a different page to read more about the product. If this is the case they weren’t ready to buy in the first place and just doing research anyway. They can return when they’re ready.
Let’s strive to make life easy for our customers.
Open Office