Why is having an efficient sales system so
important?
You’re probably aware that it does not matter how attractive your
website is or how fantastic the product or service offer that you’re
making from that site is either. If no one ever visits your website, it is
totally impossible for you to generate any sales so without site visitors,
it is equally inevitable that your business is going to collapse around
your ears sometime very soon.
You may also understand that sending visitors to your website is not
enough because unless those visitors are targeted, your sales process is
far less than efficient. This is something we will look at in a little more
detail later.
However, for the moment, let’s consider how you attract visitors to your
site.
There are in essence three different ways of pulling visitors onto your
web pages.
Firstly, you can buy visitors by using paid advertising like Google
AdWords to generate traffic. Doing things this way can be very efficient
as long as you know what you’re doing with the possibility of driving
visitors to your site in a matter of hours.
On the downside, you have to pay for advertising and it is a fact that
when you are using AdWords in particular, it can work out extremely
expensive until you have mastered exactly how the system works.
This is because the pricing structure adopted by Google is flexible with
the cost of each click on your adverts varying according to whether your
adverts and the supporting website at which your ads are ‘pointed’ are
constructed in the way that Google want them to be.
There are of course dozens of alternatives to AdWords. Nevertheless,
the fact is that most online marketers use AdWords because nearly 70%
of the internet enabled population of the planet use the Google search
engine rather than any of the alternatives.
In short, if you want your advertising to be seen by the largest number
of potential prospects, then AdWords is the most sensible choice.
With AdWords, it is possible to reduce your costs by making sure that
your adverts and your site comply with Google requirements. This can
however take time.
The second option is to promote your business for free by publishing
keyword focused articles, video materials on sites like YouTube and
5
Google video, forum marketing and so on. All of these methods are
effective but they are usually far slower than using paid advertising and
there is considerable time involved in preparing the materials in the first
place.
For instance, unless you are an expert article author, it could take you
anything from 30 minutes to 1 hour to do your initial research and then
write your article. If you were to follow the advice of many experts who
suggest that you should always submit at least five or six articles that
are based on the same topic or subject matter together, it becomes
fairly obvious that even something as simple as creating articles can be
pretty time-consuming.
The third option is to ‘borrow’ traffic by getting involved in suitable
joint-venture operations with other marketers in your market sector or
niche. This is a fantastic way of marketing, because you are leveraging
the popularity and market presence of the person you’re working with
to generate business. Consequently, joint ventures are often the most
successful form of marketing.
However, there is yet again a proviso because joint ventures do not
happen overnight. You have to build or develop your relationship with
the marketer with whom you’re planning to work and you have to put
together a top quality package of marketing materials to make their job
as easy as possible. It is likely that you will probably have to spend
some time and not a small amount of effort convincing them that you
know what you are doing and that everything is ready to go to the
market.
If you think about these three different methods of driving traffic to
your site, you will probably begin to note that there is a common theme
running through everything you have read so far.
Every one of these individual traffic generation strategies has
advantages over the others, but at the same time, each of them also
has disadvantages. And in every case, the major disadvantage is
remarkably similar.
No matter how you set up your systems to drive traffic to your site,
there is a cost involved, whether that cost is measured in terms of
money (paid advertising) or time (which in business often amounts to
pretty much the same thing anyway).
To a certain extent, the way that you promote your business will be
decided by your own value judgment of which is more important to you,
keeping money in your pocket or saving your time.
In my experience, when you are a complete beginner, it is money that
is the most valuable, primarily because you don’t have any. However,
6
as your business becomes more successful and starts to generate
income, the importance of time tends to come to the fore as money is
always replaceable, but time never is.
And here is another critical thing to understand about the cost of the
traffic that you generate to your site.
Each and every one of those visitors is expensive in some way or
another. Indeed, getting them to come to your site for the very first
time is the most expensive visit you will ever generate. To get to this
point, you have had to spend time, money or both to go out onto the
internet and ‘grab’ that visitor.
Until you did so, they were not aware of your site or business. Hence, it
naturally follows that if you had not gone out there with promotional
materials that attracted their attention, you would never have been in a
position to present them with your offer.
Thus, it is an inarguable fact that getting new traffic to your site for the
very first time is expensive and that any subsequent visit to your site by
someone who has already visited costs almost next nothing in
comparison.
In some cases, the visitor will return to your site of their own accord, in
which case there is really no cost to you at all. Alternatively, they might
come back because you have a system in place that encourages them
to return.
This system might take some time and effort to set up, but you only
have to do the job once, after which your system continually pulls
visitors back to your site. The cost per individual return visit is therefore
negligible.
Knowing that each first-time visitor is the most expensive that you will
ever attract means that it has to make sense to ensure that you do
everything possible to turn that visitor into an asset of your business.
This is essentially what having a sales system in place is all about.
An efficient sales system is one that is designed to squeeze every
possible cent out of every visitor who ever comes to your site. To go
one stage further, it is about maximizing the profits of your business
because profits always equal incoming revenue minus costs. As we have
already established, the cost of each visitor is the highest it will ever be
when they visit for the first time.
So far, I have continually used the phrase sales system. However, it is
relatively common in all forms of business, both online and off, to
present this sales process as a funnel, hence the title of this book. In
the next chapter, I will illustrate why this is and how the concept works.