There’s only one idea in Chapter Six of ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ but it’s a whopper: While you are busy ‘Selling’ your customers are busy ‘buying’. By taking the time to recognize the differences between these processes you can dramatically enhance your ability to provide these people with solutions – which will cause them to choose to stay longer and ultimately purchase more.

I’ve often said that websites need to serve three masters – customers, search engines, and the marketing dept that pays for them. It should be designed to serve them in that order, but that very rarely happens. Marketers generally dictate site content and design by applying their ideas of a web-based sales process or information system. But as the book points out:

Your sales process is about you and your goals. Customers will engage with your sales process only as long as it provides relevant answers to the questions they ask, and helps them accomplish their goals.

By default, your sales process probably does neither of these things. Like most PowerPoints it assumes you have someone strapped in a chair and they’re going to be forced to listen to your logical progression through the highlights and priorities as you see them. This is really just the other side of the ‘visitors arrive by choice and leave anytime they want to’ point made in Chapter 5. If they won’t stay just because you’re selling, the only option is to stop selling, or more specifically adjust your selling, so that it aides and aligns with their buying.

Forget the PowerPoint. Walk into the room and ask “what can I tell you?” Answer any question they have, in the order they ask them, in as much or as little detail as they require.

It isn’t obvious how to do this on a website. (Although interestingly that is almost exactly what the Google interface does, in theory anyway.) So instead you have to figure out what they want, and before that who they are, and then how different ones of them vary, and thousands of other things. It won’t be easy, but if you can do it you can ironically ‘sell’ a whole lot more stuff.

Turns out selling is just like Global Thermal Nuclear War – the only way to win is not to play.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are welcome.