Does making things easier for you make them easier for prospective clients?
Very often, the answer is no.
And when that isn’t the case, it can be a problem. I remember my dad telling me about an example a few years ago that happened when he was working in I think the 80/90s (he might correct me here).
They worked with a particular supplier, doing a lot of business between them, but everything was always on an invoice by invoice basis (as the amount changed each month). The supplier wanted to move to DD to help with their cashflow, so mandated that all their clients move to DD. That didn’t work for a lot of their clients, including the business my dad was working for, and because they made it mandatory they lost a lot of clients.
A few months later, after finding a new supplier (that turned out to be better service and slightly cheaper), the supplier came back to my dad’s company and said “you can do invoicing now, sorry about the inconvenience”, basically ‘please come back to us’. They didn’t, and a couple of years later the company was no more.
Now, that is an extreme example, but a business focusing on making it easier for them at the expense of their clients, finished them as a business.
And you could be doing more to make your sales process easier.
We saw with a client last year a 15%+ increase in conversion rate from just adding an auto-address lookup option to their sales process. You will have used them before, but the button when you enter your postcode and it lets you chose the address. Making something a tiny bit easier increased their online sales massively.
Parts of your process will be difficult for some people. Make it easy for them!
Have a chat bot on the site where people can ask questions easily, and respond to them ASAP. Make it easy for you by having that chat bot on your phone to respond rapidly.
I’ve said this before a lot of times; increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2% DOUBLES YOUR REVENUE. That improvement can be a tiny change to make things easier for your customer.
And this comes down to lead acquisition too.
If you are running ads to cold audiences, people who have never heard of you, on social media in between posts from their friends and families, make it simple and quick to give you their details.
If you are trying to speak to people, and you are immediately asking for dozens of answers to questions that will make your life easier further down the line, then you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You can ask all those questions with automation or by folding them into your sales calls, but if you are putting people off getting in touch because you want to know everything when they have only seen your business for 7 seconds, they simply won’t.
Chat bots, automation and simplifying your sales process are all easy things to implement to increase the ease for your customers. It should be a priority…