Now,
imagine pulling these circles apart, so Sales gets farther
and farther away from Marketing. How much buying do you
have left? (Hint: Less and less until you have none. Zero.
Nada.) Now imagine pushing these circles together, so
Sales and Marketing increasingly overlap, and you can
literally watch buying increase!
Before
they get to your website, your potential customers take in
lots of external influences and compare those messages to
their internal desires and values. This is where Marketing
plays an important role in creating the "propensity
to buy." But as soon as a visitor begins to interact
with your "store," all
the marketing in the world isn't going to save you if your
site doesn’t know how to sell.
Think
of it this way. You see an advertisement on TV where a car
manufacturer tells you it makes the safest car out there,
and the ad prominently displays lots of images of an
adorable, safe baby and happy parents enjoying their
worry-free car ride. Suppose you've got a baby. You want
her riding in the safest car. You think maybe you should
look into buying this car. So off you and your baby head
to the dealership. You walk in with the "propensity
to buy," but you still need to be sold. You
want lots of questions answered about options, service,
which model would best suit your needs. You want to test
drive the car. You want to be treated like you matter. You
want to feel good about the decision to buy. Without a
salesperson holding your hand through the sales process,
treating you the way you want to be treated and selling
you the way you want to be sold, you probably aren't going
to buy a thing from this dealership, even if they do sell
the safest car in the world.
Or
think of a smaller-ticket purchase. I wanted a
photo-quality printer, because I'm playing around with
digital cameras these days. I came across an advertisement
that promised the product would give me "superior
quality at the incredible price of $175". I
enthusiastically trotted off to that store and in the
blink of one of my eyes, found myself standing in a huge
aisle filled with printers. All of a sudden, I got to
wondering if maybe there wasn't an even better printer for
my needs. I pushed a few of the test buttons and got some
test printouts. Holding them in my hand, I looked for a
salesperson. No one around. I read some of the fact
sheets, but still had questions. Still no salesperson in
sight. I've still got the printouts right here on my desk,
but I didn’t buy a printer.
Marketing
got me to the store, but it didn't create the sale. Marketing
can’t; Sales can, and does. Had someone bothered to
help me, I might have bought that $175 printer. Who knows,
they might even have been able to talk me into the next
model up. Or they might have helped me figure out I really
would be better off with a different make. It just as
easily could have gone another way: even without benefit
of sales help, I might have bought that $175 printer,
carted it home, installed it and been dissatisfied with my
purchase. And if I'd bought it and it worked okay? Well,
I'd still be wondering if I'd got the best deal for my
needs, which still leaves me somewhere short of being
completely delighted. So, the end result in this case is
that no amount of money that business spends on marketing
is ever going to induce me to return, 'cause they haven't
shown me they acknowledge and value the role of Sales,
which is another way of saying they haven’t shown me
they acknowledge and value me!
Getting
the idea? It's a proven fact: shoppers want to find
something they will be happy to buy; they do want to be
sold. So, in order to sell more, you need to sell
more. By all means, drive traffic to your site. But make
sure when they get there, you have a website that attends
to the business of Sales. Marketing alone must
fail. It is that simple!
