3 Ways You're Sabotaging the Sale...and what to do about it

When it comes to closing the deal, you could be your own worst enemy.

Not happy with your sales numbers? Is your web site not converting at the rate you need? Don’t blame the leads. Instead, the answer could be looking you in the eye every time you visit your company’s website.

Un-optimized websites and difficult conversion processes are kryptonite to a high conversion rate and could be the very thing that is sabotaging your sales. Here are three of the most common areas of #salessabotage reported by SME Digital:

Your Website Isn’t Optimized

By now everyone reading this blog should understand the importance of a mobile optimized site. But having a responsive/mobile friendly site is just one area of your website that needs optimization. Take a good look at your site, what’s the first thing you see. If it’s not a call-to-action to begin the sales cycle (or get placed into a nurturing campaign), then you could be losing potential conversions.

You have to optimize the site for conversion

Make sure there is at least one call-to-action on every page of the site. You also want to make sure that you are split-testing these conversion points to continually improve your numbers. As silly as it seems, tweaking the color of a button or the wording of the call-to-action could add serious points to your conversion rate. Besides optimizing for mobile and conversions, you want to be sure your site loads at an acceptable pace. Your customers are not patient people. They are just like you. If they think a site or shopping cart is taking longer to load than what it should, they’ll bounce! They are going to lose interest and go to a competitor’s site. A competitor who has a better functioning site.

Your Messaging Is Confusing

The mechanics of your website might be working, but what about your messaging. Anyone who comes to your site should be able to get a near-immediate understanding of what your company is about. If it’s not crystal clear what service or product your company provides, you’re going to lose the sale. Think about it yourself. How many times have you gone to a site, read the “About Us” page and thought, “Okay…, so what do they do?” If you ask that question, you can be sure that your customers ask this question. Make sure they aren’t asking that question about your site. Every page on your site should speak, to some degree, about how your company is going to help solve your customer’s problem. This can be done through copy, product images (especially if you’re an Ecommerce shop), video, and infographics, anything short of a dancing bear in the corner of the screen.

Regardless of the medium you choose, make sure the communication isn’t too long, confusing or full of jargon/empty words. The better the understanding a potential customer has of your services or products, the more likely they are to convert.

Your Conversion Process Sucks

If your sales or conversion process is too complicated, it could be costing you conversions (sabotage). Complicated sales process include those with multiple, unnecessary steps, buttons that are hard to find, poorly worded field labels and anything else that makes a customer say, “Huh?” when they are trying to check out. Equally detrimental to closing the deal are buggy conversion processes. If a customer’s shopping cart keeps emptying automatically, or a form field isn’t working, that customer is going to become discourage. Discouraged customers do not buy.

So how do you know if your sales process is costing you sales?

Well first, get some honest feedback from past customers on their check out or conversion experience. Even better, go ahead and set up conversion funnels and goals inside your analytics platform. This will visualize and measure each step of the conversion process so you can see where customers are abandoning the conversion process. High abandonment at a particular step is often an indicator of a problem with your sales process.

Closing the deal is hard enough as it is, do yourself a favor and fix the issues!

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