Are You Guilty of “Meat Grinder” Marketing? - Are We Ready to Convert?
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When it comes to evaluating your website’s ability to convert a prospect, it helps to look at your website like it’s a salesperson. We all know that no matter how good our marketing is, an ineffective salesperson or sales system will drop the sale in its tracks.
I have a friend who once equated their sales process to a football game. He said that as an order came into their firm, it was like the quarterback running the ball. If the quarterback made it past the marketers, the sales folks would be there to stop the sale, if they dodged past the sales folks in a blind bid to make the purchase, the customer service folks would lunge mercilessly at him. If he somehow made it past marketing, sales, and customer service, their antiquated primary business system would be guaranteed to stop the sale at the ten yard line, so no worries.
In short, defining the appropriate conversion will be dictated by many variables: the site’s ability to produce the desired conversion affordably, the actual ROI gained from the conversion, and the likelihood of the conversion taking place on the site.
For example, let’s say your site sells blue widgets, and your conversion objective is the sale of a widget. There are many factors that could throttle the site’s capability to reach that objective:
- Poorly designed site
- Poorly designed shopping cart
- Dropped orders/dropped tracking through site errors
- Uncompetitive product pricing
So while your marketing efforts were spot-on, the site failed to close the prospect, thus making your efforts to appear to be in vain. This is all being said to stress the point that we must first determine if the system is ready to make the conversion before we even begin to determine how to drive traffic to the site.
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