Revenue Journal®

I am your customer. I have a Problem. I am looking for the Best Solution to my Problem. You sell the Best Solution, but I don't know that yet.

I go to Google. I type in a phrase describing my Problem, or perhaps a phrase describing my imagined Best Solution. I may remember hearing something specific about the Best Solution - such as a company name, a product name, or even a model number. I know that the more specific I am, the faster I will find my Best Solution, and the faster I can buy the thing, and then go on to do all the other things I have do to today.

The search results appear. I scan the listings quickly. If it looks like my Best Solution is right near the top of the left-hand search results, I don't bother to look at the paid ads on the right. If my Best Solution isn't obviously on top, I scroll down the page a ways. Not too far, but far enough to see if anything obvious jumps out at me.

[Does your website appear in these results? The ones that appear when the customer types HIS FIRST search phrase into Google?]

I've been a Verizon customer for years. I stayed "loyal" for a long time, partly because switching carriers is such a pain. But I also stuck around because their service was reliable and their customer service people were helpful.

But, I'm not loyal anymore. I'm leaving.

Why? For the stupidest reason: They won't let me pay them. Yep, that's right.

Imagine you are in a physical store. You've just put an item into your cart. As you do so, a store clerk comes along and grips your head with his hands and turns your head so that you are forced to stare at your cart.

"Look in your cart. See what you've bought? So far, you've bought one container of sour cream."

You murmur in agreement, amazed that this is happening.

He releases his hands from your face, takes your cart from you, wheels it to the front entrance of the store, and walks away. You are offended, but you still need to keep shopping, so you take your cart from the front of the store and go to the produce department. You put another item in your shopping cart.

Almost like magic, there's that clerk again.

This article was halfway finished, with the title you see above, when I got an email with this subject line: "If you want to sell better, just shut up!"

Whoa, I thought. Readers often send me emails with the article title as the subject line. But this article hadn't yet left my computer! What was going on?

Here I am again, a buyer. Money in hand. Ready. Eager. Wanting to get what I need, fast, and go back to work. What do I want to buy? International wireless broadband, using a data SIM card that I can plug into a variety of cellular devices and work, on land and at sea. I want to get the right solution, but I also have deadlines - so I don't want to spend a lot of time on this.

People who run companies tend to obsess about getting leads in the door. They are petrified that they won't be able to keep the pipeline full of leads. Before the web, their efforts were focused on PR, advertising, and sales tools. Now they focus their efforts and their resources on search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and so on.

They also assume they have to convince their prospects to buy their product. So all their marketing copy - online and off - is designed to convince someone to buy.

The problem is, the way people are buying now, they are mostly convinced by the time they get to your website. A large percentage of today's buyers have already decided what they want, and all they want you to do is answer a few remaining questions that aren't answered on the web, to make sure that your product will perform well in their specific situation.

I ran across this recently when placing an online recruiting ad for a client. His company is in the Bay Area (San Francisco area) and I was placing the listing on BAJobs.com.

My husband was watching an "instructional" video, online, showing a sales guy for a marine rope company. The sales guy was supposedly showing how to make a particular splice in one of the ropes that his company sells.

A splice, for those not familiar, is the joining of two pieces of rope by interweaving the strands from one rope with the strands of another, so the two ropes are joined. For example, you can create a loop at the end of a rope by splicing the end of the rope back into itself. Splices are important. If they fail, you can lose your boat. The splice has to be right. No BS allowed.

As I watched the salesman in the video, I could see that the BS quotient was really high. Not only did he not really know how to clearly explain what he was doing, but he was doing a poor job on the demo. He was showing "how easy it is to splice this rope," but not how to actually do it. For example, he would be pointing to the strands, explaining how they were oriented. As he pointed, his fingers came between the strands and the camera, so you couldn't see the strands.

In my first book, Rivers of Revenue, I talk about the fact that money is always flowing somewhere. Where do these "rivers of revenue" come from? Needs and desires. People, everywhere, have needs and desires, and they're looking for solutions. If lots of people have the same need or desire, you have a BIG river. Going after opportunities is a matter of identifying the needs and desires you can satisfy, and figuring out how you can satisfy them.

All of this sounds pretty straightforward and logical when you're enjoying a steady flow of revenue. But, if your river starts to dry up, life changes - fast.

Careers and businesses used to last a lifetime. Not anymore. You'll be lucky if what you are doing lasts for five to ten years.

When your river dries up, everything that you did, everything that made sense, everything that "worked" for years suddenly just doesn't work any more. You are stumped. You will have no idea what to do next.

Back when most people lived on farms, there were "snake oil salesmen," who came around to tell residents, one by one, about a cure-all elixir. The salesperson had to be very convincing, and sell as many people as possible in a short time, because the stuff didn't actually work. He had to be in the next town before the people in the previous town discovered the truth.

Fast forward to when people moved to the cities. Buyers saw ads, and then used any means they could to determine if a product was right for them. They would visit a store, call a salesperson, get a brochure, read an article in a "consumer reports" magazine, and so on. The salesperson, and the company's ability to get covered by the press, played a large role in the completion of the sale.

Fast forward to today, when most buyers have access to Google.

People buy when they're comfortable that they're making the right decision. If they're uncomfortable, they don't buy. This is especially true when money is tight or people are fearful. Their comfort zone - and how well you stay within it - will determine if you make a sale, or not.

Let's look at what will kick you out of their comfort zone - and how you can stay inside.

Some time ago, I wrote an article about how software buyers were mired in the "skepticism swamp." It's even worse now.

If you're selling software, you have to be able to overcome the massive amount of disbelief that has built up in buyers' minds, thanks to all the promises that have been made to them - and broken. Everyone promised higher productivity, increased efficiency, and plug-and-play. HA.

What everyone delivered was installation headaches, integration nightmares, missing-in-action service, and navigation that required that you know the program intimately before you could do anything useful with it.

Today, software buyers and users consider each purchase an investment - of time and grief, as well as the money.

There comes a time in the course of inevitable economic ups and downs, when "everyone" starts to feel like "things are going to hell in a hand basket." The media is filled with stories of business and industry failures, people start hoarding and cutting back on their expenses, sales that used to be easy become difficult, and company budgets are cut.

There is a sense of impending doom, and financial statistics are reported that reinforce that sense. We are in one of those periods now.

It doesn't really matter how we got here, or how much of it is real and how much is mass hysteria. Having been through a number of these periods, I've come to pay less and less attention to the "why."

I am currently working with a couple of clients whose sales are being affected by current economic events. One client is in the luxury travel business and another is in the recreational boating business. In the former situation, high gas prices, higher food prices, and the fall of the dollar against the Euro are causing their customers to pull back on their buying decisions. In the latter situation, high gas prices and a concern about the economy are causing their customers to put off their next recreational boat purchase.

Of course, they're not the only ones feeling the pinch right now. If you are too, here's a recessionary rallying cry for you:

If you want more sales, get serious.

Serious about what?

Salespeople (or, I should say, order takers) who are used to taking calls all day are still having a hard time adjusting to the email-driven business world we live in now. The same is true of many small business owners.

The phone is no longer the "instrument of choice" for today's busy buyers. Their preferred way of contacting companies when they are interested in a product or service is via email. And yet, too many salespeople and entrepreneurs are still treating email as an intrusion into their busy day. Because they get so much email and spam, and because they don't want to spend all day typing notes to people, they just aren't giving incoming email buyers the attention that they deserve.

If your salespeople are struggling with, or ignoring, this issue, it helps for them to see the email scenario from the buyer's point of view. It will help them understand how just a few minutes spent responding can make the difference between closing a sale or losing a customer for life. Let's look at this from the perspective of a customer we'll call Jane.

Personas do have their place. When you're designing a product, you have to make decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. Personas can help with that process.

But once the product is designed, and it's time to create your web page, write selling copy, and train your salespeople, personas can get you into real trouble. They can make you think you're addressing the buyer properly, when in fact you are probably ignoring who the buyer is, what the buyer really wants, and, in many cases, insulting the buyer.

You see, if I'm the buyer, I already know who I am. So I'm not the least impressed if you think you know who I am. Besides, it makes me feel a little creeped out anyway, that you're so determined to know everything about me you can describe me to your buddies around the conference table.

Do you really have to know all those things about me to sell something to me? I mean, c'mon. What does it matter how old I am or how much money I make? I just want to buy something to fix a problem. I don't want my personal space invaded.

Not only that: Is it going to be a fun to buy your product, or are you going to make it a hassle?

There's a joke - you've probably heard one of the many versions of it - that I think of as the "demo" joke. My favorite version is the one starring Bill Gates:

Bill Gates died and found himself standing in front of St. Peter, who was sizing him up.

"Okay, what the Hell," said Bill. "Let's try down below first."

I am continuously amused at the lengths company executives will go to, to avoid talking directly to their customers. They'd rather do their taxes than phone or go face-to-face with a real, live customer.

As a result of this fear, company executives and owners will bet the company on any other data they can get their hands on. They pore over their website metrics. They run web-based surveys. They ask their salespeople (sometimes) and customer service people (hardly ever) what customers are saying. Every so often, they may lurk on an online discussion group.

They demand more and more data from their marketing folks. Every piece of data makes them want more data, because the data they get only raises more questions. Deep down inside, they wonder if it's all BS.

If they found some backbone and focused instead on actually having a few conversations a month with their customers - and listening to the calls that come in from customers - they'd understand what their customers want them to sell, and how they want to buy.

The rise of "personas"

Over the last few years, the idea of customer "personas" has been finding its way into website design. The basic idea, obviously, is to design your website for the types of people buying your product, so it satisfies each type of person's preferences and buying process.