Conversion Rate Optimization: 4 Essential Ways to Be a Better Salesperson Online

Here’s what we’ve all allowed ourselves to believe: selling is tacky.

If you have brains and a great product or service, you really shouldn’t have to ask people to buy your stuff, should you? Great products sell themselves!

And, hell, you didn’t go to college just to end up hocking your wares like some sad-sack modern take on Willy Loman! Right??

Marketing and advertising are sexy. CRO is smart.

Your mom doesn’t scowl over those jobs.

But selling? Ugh.

As far as you’re concerned, the only way YOU’RE going to venture into the dirty, skeazy world of sales is if you do so from an academic perspective: you’ll subtly persuade your visitors by using their decision-making behaviors to your advantage. You’ll check out a few blogs that regurgitate other people’s studies and land on a sales strategy: you will use “loss aversion” and “reciprocity” when selling on your site. Sure, that should help you increase your conversion rate. Sure.

…….And then your startup fails.

Why? Because you let your mama’s voice and your mothereffing pride get in the way of moving units.

You thought selling was tacky. Turns out it’s the only way to make money.

Today – right now – this is your chance to get real about selling on your website so you actually stay in business, grow and feel awesome. Throw out all that BS about the psychology of button colors. Close your copy of Cialdini’s “Influence”. Fuck persuasion! (At least until you get the basics down.) Just sit there, shut the hell up and open your mind to selling some freakin’ products – like the salesperson you need to be.

In this post, I’ll show you how to be a better salesperson online using these 4 essential tactics:

1. Focus on getting the sale
2. Feed your prospects’ words back to them
3. Make it insanely easy to buy
4. Never apologize for selling

WARNING: Bad language ahead. This topic always gets me worked up.

1. Focus on Getting the Sale

Sales people like credit cards. They like POs. They like relationships only insofar as they can nurture them into a new sale or a repeat sale. But they won’t waste time on a dead lead. There are other sales to be made out there.

You only have so much time and energy.

If you spend all of your time and energy trying to doing anything but move units with your web copy, you’d better be damn sure that what you’re doing is going to have greater ROI than writing copy that sells would.

Copy that sells:

• Doesn’t piss away mental energy on trying to be cute or clever
• Doesn’t hem and haw about who the product is right for
• Doesn’t self-edit or try to squeeze its key messages into tiny spaces
• Speaks in the language of the prospect
• Only says things that truly matter to the prospect
• Doesn’t delay the purchase
• Doesn’t let a lead get away without at least capturing their contact info
• Connects all the dots, so every feature has clearly spelled out and meaningful benefits
• Knows when to shut the hell up

Get over the fear of losing people or turning people off by selling to them.

Your greatest fear as a business owner should be NOT making money.

Sales people are rich. There is no shame in selling. Rather, if you have a great product or service to sell but you’re too chicken-shit to sell it, you should be ashamed of yourself.

2. Feed Their Words Back to Them

Sales people have the advantage of speaking one-on-one, in person to a prospect. They take exactly what a person says and repeat it back to them, using the same words or variations on those words. Half the battle in real-time sales is won simply by listening.

On your site, the only time you have such an advantage is when you have chat enabled.

So, when it’s time to write your site’s copy, how do you “say their words back to them” even though they’re not sitting across from you, telling you what they think and feel?

Let me tell you…

…This, my friends, is the #1 secret you need to know about writing high-converting copy: it NEVER comes from you. It’s not living inside your head. High-converting copy comes from the stand-out things you hear or read:

• In customer surveys
• In pop-up surveys on your site (e.g., 4Q, Qualaroo)
• In other site surveys (e.g., Survey.io)
• In user reviews (e.g., UserTesting.com)
• In telephone or in-person interviews

You take the exact phrasing that your visitors, customers and users use… and feed it back to them in your headlines, body copy and click-triggers. You should check out my Unbounce post to see exactly how to do this

Okay, so, if this is all it takes – if it’s just a matter of feeding your prospect’s words back to her – then why aren’t more sites converting above 2%?

Honest t’goodness truth: people are too damn LAZY! It takes a lot of upfront work to get “voice of customer data” that you can work with. And if you haven’t done it before, then you may question whether it’s a necessary step.

We rarely question whether we have the right answer for our own business… so we end up writing the same egocentric bullshit on our sites. What you should do is stop believing you know what to say – because you don’t – and start swiping your customers’ language, just as salespeople have done for 100s of years.

3. Make It Easy to Buy

OMG, if I say “make it easy to buy” one more time, Lance is going to lose his mind and leave me.

I am like a broken record on this one. It’s my mantra (right after “get their credit cards”): make it easy to buy.

Here’s the minimum that you have to do to make it easy for your site visitors to buy:

• In buttons and calls to action, avoid “friction words”, like I show here
• In forms, only ask for as much info as you need
• In forms, auto-fill or pre-fill as much as you can (e.g., ask for their zip and use it to fill in the city and state fields)
• Offer multiple ways to pay*
• Break down large one-time payments into smaller subscriptions
• Don’t make them create an account – remember “a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush”
• Don’t interrupt them in the cart at all – not with upsells, cross-sells, bonuses or the like
• Surround payment forms and calls to action with assurances, like money-back guarantees, positive delivery messaging and support messaging

I’m sure there is some persuasion tactic floating around that holds that putting people through a bit of pain makes them appreciate a positive end result more… but I wouldn’t bet my startup on it.

Let your prospect keep their brain turned off as long as possible.

Making purchasing or subscribing easy – including requiring less work and finishing tasks faster – can help with that.

* We’ve seen at least double the number of purchases daily since adding the ability to accept VISA, Mastercard and AMEX on CopyHackers.com (versus just PayPal). Next, we’re thinking about Inpay.com for online bank transfers.

4. Never, Ever Apologize for Selling

I worked with a very sweet interaction designer a few years ago. She was super-nice and super-smart. …But I got the feeling she didn’t like selling very much. She, like so many of us, didn’t grow up dreaming of selling.

I recently worked with a startup that, to my great dismay, wrote this in a sales email:

If you want to turn your business into a success, you NEED to force yourself to get cool with selling.

You may not like how you feel when you first start putting some effort into selling and when you first start thinking of yourself as a salesperson. You’re going to feel uncomfortable. You’re going to second-guess yourself and this post and my cred and the 3 points above.

That’s okay. Feel uncomfortable. As my therapist says, sit with the bad feelings.

…Because you’re going to feel like a freakin’ KING once you start making more money.

And, suddenly, things will start clicking. You’ll move from an appreciation of the soft skill of marketing to the heroine-running-through-your-veins rush of actually selling.

I used to have people on my mailing list who would bitch and moan whenever I sent out an email with a sales pitch at the end. I manually unsubscribed them.

Because I am in business. I give away content, and sometimes it makes great sense to try to sell an advanced version of my free content at the end of a post or email. Guess what! That’s my job.

I’m in sales.

So are you.

Don’t apologize for selling!

Ask for the sale.

Offer paid upgrades before heading into the cart.

Once someone buys, go back and offer more to them later, with more attempts to close.

The only time you should be afraid of selling or – worse – ashamed of selling is if you have a crap product. And no copywriter on earth can help you if that’s the case. Or, at least, I don’t want to help you if that’s the case.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

One, stop acting like selling is dirty and salespeople are scuzzy. Get over that. The only prize for being the nice guy who steered clear of any risk of being pushy is a one-bedroom rental filled with eternal loneliness. 😉

Two, do at least one (1) thing to make it easier for your visitors to sign up or buy from you. I recommend you strategically place assurances – like your guarantees and support policies – on the first page of your checkout, in a sidebar.

~joanna

PS: Yes, persuasion is still good, and there are great tactics that go far beyond these. But you need to do the basics first. That’s the point.