Making things easy to buy

Grant Leboff: Phil, one of the things you talk about in your book is making it easy to buy when you’re selling to someone, so what are some of the tactics and techniques you can use to achieve that?

Phil M Jones: There are thousands but firstly, look at every step of your process that you’re going through and behave like a customer. You probably can’t do this, because you know your process so well, you haven’t got a hope of behaving like a customer, because you’re behaving like how you think your customer should behave. Stop for a second and go find somebody who knows nothing about your business to give you honest answers. The kind of person you’re probably looking for is between the ages of 11 and 15 or they’re over the age of 65 and ask them to go through your buying process and see how they get on. See where they bump into some snags and stalls. That will teach you a lot.

Then you need to look at some of the lazy things. What I’ve learned about sales people is they’re crazy lazy. If there’s an easy way to do something, they’re going to run down that path super quick. Classic example is asking a customer to fill in their own paperwork. I just think it’s sacrilege. It’s unprofessional, it’s just down right lazy, so if you cannot get the complete par of anything you need a customer to fulfil to finish the order all written out neatly for them with a highlighter pen that says sign here and sign here or read this and read that.

I mean, my accountant is brilliant. He’ll send me a boatload of forms through and he’ll put little tiny post it notes on all the things I need to read and a little tiny marker wherever I need to sign. Makes my life easy to do business with him. What some people do to stand in their own way is they think they have to explain everything to everybody, to give them all of the information. Particularly when you’re dealing with somebody from an expert point of view, if you’re got to the position of trust, often making it easier to buy is saying less.

Other things, while we’re on this making it easier to buy piece, is don’t give people too much choice. I used to work in the furniture industry, right? We are selling people three piece suites. We’d get somebody to a point that they decided it’s the threes seater, the two seater and the footstool that they’re buying. Salesperson would then hand them a color swatch of 52 colors and say, which one did you want to go for? Like 45 minutes later, the customer says, can I take these home and check them and see which one’s going to work best for me and they fail to close the sale because they couldn’t control that final part of the conversation.

If they said, which of these two versions of brown would you like, people could pick easier by putting some contrast between the two options. Give people less choice and the decision making becomes easier.

Grant Leboff: What about other techniques you see? We’ve almost taken for granted now because we see things like you know, trial, try it before you buy, money back guarantees and those kind of techniques. Do you think they’re effective? Which ones would you recommend people use? Are there ones they shouldn’t be using?

Phil M Jones: Without knowing the precise set of situations around the business, it’s difficult for me to give some advice. I think listen to your consumers and experiment. Test and measure and see which ones work best for you. Some form of removal of the barrier of risk at the start of a trial of your service, particularly if you can’t get to have a conversation first and you’re doing something online, huge. Again, some risk reversals can work fantastically well too, where you’re saying if it doesn’t work out then you can have your money back or if it doesn’t work out then these are the consequences from our point of view, where you put your best foot forward.

Those things can make life a lot easier but I think the process often stands in the way and how people can then go on to complete that transaction. I mean, we’re judged, right, even a small business is judged against Amazon and Google and the big guys. I’m shopping last night for a tiny little thing we need at home, so I go to Amazon, I scroll through my phone and I’m like, that’s the one I want, great, one click to buy. It’s been delivered this morning before I left the house. That is where consumers are being judged against for making it easy to buy.

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