I’ve had many different experiences in Music shops. I’ve encountered shopkeepers and sales people who treat you with indifference or even disdain, like you’re a shoplifter. I’ve also had the hard sell. So it was with a little apprehension that I stepped into the Acoustic Centre in Park Street, South Melbourne.

I went upstairs and entered a shop that was wall to wall with acoustic guitars. I was thinking to myself, “Where do I start?”

The first thing that the guy behind the counter (Michael) did was ask me a few questions. What style to you like to play? What are you looking for? What do you like?

Now these guys are a cut above most shops already because they started by showing personal interest. Those few simple questions established that this was about me, the customer. I said that I like to play finger-style, and I mentioned that my friend has a nice Maton. What followed next sealed the deal for me.

Michael started to arrange a series of guitar stands around the central couch in the Maton room. He disappeared for a few seconds at a time and resurfaced with an acoustic guitar each time to place on the stands in front of me.

He spoke a bit about the styles, differences and benefits of each guitar and then said to me, “Have a play with each of these, see what you like.”

I took good time and played to my wife Donna in the store. We both decided that the guitar for me was the Maton EBG808C Michael Fix Custom. What an awesome guitar… I’m still excited about it, even though I haven’t bought it yet!

Michael came back to me with an awesome price that was much less than the RRP. No pressure. Do you think I’m going to bother to shop around now?

The thing is, what this guy was doing wouldn’t be considered “selling” by most people, probably even him. In fact, this was selling at the highest professional level because professionals are genuine. They never make you feel like you’re being sold to.

The professional service that the Acoustic Centre offered included:

1. Showing personal interest and genuine intention to help
2. Knowing their products extremely well and communicating on the customer’s level
3. Offering a selection of products (solutions) that would be likely to suit me and my budget 
4. Allowing hands-on time so that the customer can make their own choice 
5. Offering a great deal.

The question is, how you can apply each of these professional service qualities to your website? You can apply each of them.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too !

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages®is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

The question is, what differentiates you in a price sensitive market? Is the way you treat your customers on the phone, in store or online? Is it your enthusiasm for the product? Is it your follow up? Is it the useful information that you share with them? If it’s not, then your customers have only 2 options:

1. They shop around for the cheapest price
2. They shop around and stumble upon a company that treats them better, and they pay a reasonable, but not necessarily the best price.

People shop on price when they have no other option. Unless you give your customers more than a price you will never know whether your they really are price sensitive.

From the author: If you run an eCommerce website then you might wonder, “How do I know if I’m getting as many orders as I could be through my website?” The answer to that question is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your eCommerce website you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too !

Contact us on 1300 248 362 to find out how you could boost the conversion rates of your eCommerce website.

It still shocks me how many sales people are unprofessional. You can spot an unprofessional sales person straight away when they:

1. Immediately start talking at you
2. Launch straight into the great features of the product that they’re flogging
3. Start bagging the competition
4. Offer you a solution without knowing what you want
5. Start demonstrating their product.

If you are a sales person ask yourself, “Whose voice do I hear the most when I meet a prospect for the first time?”  If it’s your own, then it’s time to brush up on your skills.

Now it may be that you truly have something exciting to say to them, but the problem is that:

Your prospects don’t care!

That is, they don’t care until they know that you are interested in them and that you understand their specific circumstances.

How can you establish interest in your prospects and develop understanding? That’s the easy part:

1. Ask questions to develop rapport, to uncover needs, wants and emotional drivers.
2. Have the questions prepared in advance and written down.
3. Take notes on your prospect’s answers to your questions, taking particular notice of the things that they really get excited about.
4. Only offer a solution based on what you’ve uncovered through asking questions.

Trying to “pitch” to a prospect is hard work. Asking questions on the other hand is easy because you don’t have to feel pressure to perform. You can just sit back and listen while your prospects happily talk about themselves.

The interesting thing that not many people know is that this principle fits perfectly with web marketing. Take a look at your lead generation website. Is it telling or selling?

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.