Kathy Sierra challenges the difference between pre-sale and post-sale activities / effort / communications / seduction techniques. It strikes to the heart of her premise that 'creating passionate users' is a marketing technique, and should be budgeted as such. I'd like to add another piece to the puzzle - the 'during-sale' phase.

What Kathy called 'before' is really best represented by the intense amounts of time, money, and energy on spent on attracting, contacting, interrupting, or even conversing with people. But the comparison of resources allocated to those lead generation activities vs those invested in the actual buying/selling process is where the trouble starts. The horrible stuff that happens after the sale is just the icing on the cake!

Think about the money spent to buy highly targeted paid search terms which send you to generic home pages where it's your job to dig through the navigation to find what you want. They take the time and spend the money to be exactly where you want them in terms of the search, then drop the ball immediately as you engage to try and buy.

Now consider the rich media ad that takes you to a website where you can't find answers to dozens of your actual questions so you wind up back at Google trying to find reviews, tech specs, or other stuff that really should have been right there waiting for you. The disproportion in spending between demand generation and website architecture and content is insane. As the Eisenbergs have said, why spend so much time trying to fill a bucket full of holes?

The tricky part is trying to figure out why marketers do this. They may not yet realize that customers are their best evangelists, but surely they realize that prospects aren't yet customers. Why abandon them so early?

I believe the Eisenbergs (again) have the answer. Marketers sell, customers buy, and rarely the twain do meet. Sellers think the glossy features and benefits brochure is a winner. Buyers look at it and instantly generate 5-50 more questions. Sellers are proud of their snazzy new web page, yet lots of buyers don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from it (ie, they leave) because it lacks testimonials or awards. Others leave because it's too cold and impersonal. In these cases and many others, failure to consider the buying process and address the needs – step by step – of those to whom you’re selling results in the abysmal conversion rates everyone is used to.

We’re in the middle of a Persuasion Architecture process for a product which helps ease some of the side effects of chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. Today a lot of time was spent digging into the differences between how doctors and nurses (and the different personality types of each) interact with the website and product information. Every time we do one of these it’s just amazing to see the massive number of absolutely critical pieces of information that it forces you to include on the site that would have otherwise NEVER even been considered.

Yes, this requires allocating time, people, and dollars. In our experience it generally comes to between one and three months of the paid-search spend of those we work with. So instead of working with a leaky bucket, they take a month or two off (metaphorically) to create something that’s nearly water-tight, and then go back at it. While the rest of the world saves that money and just tries to put more water in faster hoping somehow they can out-run those holes. (Note this wasn’t meant to turn into a Persuasion Architecture commercial - but you can call us if your bucket is leaky).

Kathy’s post covers people who are seduced fast and hard enough to make it from the dangling of the shiny thing to the purchase on the steam of the shine alone. She’s 1000% right that the post sale experience counts too – as is always pointed out when someone asks a crowd how many people saved their iPod boxes (vs their boxes for almost anything else.)

But before you go improve your user manuals and packaging, stop and look at your website and all the places people trying to buy from you are getting stopped. Work on disappointing them less while they’re trying to buy and THEN get around to disappointing them less after they’ve bought.