My piece about online authenticity was posted to Inc.com a few days ago. Read on …

Building Online Trust: 7 Tips for Being Authentic Online

The Era of Slow Selling caught my eye.  Over the years, like many of you, I’ve spent numerous hours trying to accelerate the sales process, yet this article by John Gerzema provides specific examples where slowing it down can work better for you and your customer.

We have wanted to believe that selling earlier than later brings both benefits to the buyer and revenue to the seller faster; I fear that we have often ignored the potential hazards of selling early.  Buying earlier than ready can produce buyer’s remorse.  Posting revenue prior to customer satisfaction can lead to overstated revenue.  Both can result in frustration, customer service issues, churn, brand deterioration and low employee morale.

I had a conversation last week with a marketing executive that validates the potential problem with accelerating the selling process.  He told me the story about the cancelation of a multi-million dollar order due to prematurely delivering product that was untested  in order to post earlier revenue.  Waiting one extra week would have enabled his company to post an additional $1M in 2011.

It’s hard to keep compensation out of the discussion.  One of our partners mentioned that in the effort to prevent overselling, one of his clients charges sales people more for a canceled order than they make for booking the order.  While I applaud the idea, this might result in a disincentive to sell anything.

In his article John says, “The ‘slow sales’ movement is betting there are intelligent, deliberate customers that prefer ‘do-it-your self’ service.”  I concur, and this seems the perfect extension to my last article about enabling buyers to buy.  I just wish I’d thought about how that translates to a slower sales process, and how that’s not only okay, but good.

When a company’s lost its sense of energy, Chopra says:

It helps to regain control of your own story, and to do that, you have to ask two key questions. When I sit down with senior management, I say, “Who are you? What do you want?” Everything starts with those two fundamental questions, and then you move on to: “What’s your story? What’s the story you want to create?”

More from Chopra on creating that story:

You have to think of your brand as a kind of myth. A myth is a compelling story that is archetypal, if you know the teachings of Carl Jung. It has to have emotional content and all the themes of a great story: mystery, magic, adventure, intrigue, conflicts, contradiction, paradox.

Is your website causing you to lose customers? Great design, on-target messaging, compelling calls-to-action, and valuable content are just the baseline for engaging your market online. But can your customers make a buying decision solely using content from your site? Too often websites address only the discovery phase of a buying process.

Even the most creative, pithy, or in-depth description of what you do for whom and why you’re the best is not enough. Your prospects must be able to evaluate your offering, believe your claims are credible, and understand what you’re like to work with—all from within your site. Leaving these key purchase criteria questions unanswered interrupts prospect attraction, creating a barrier to buying.

At Great-to-Market Labs, my executive consulting firm in San Francisco, we hit that decision-wall with a vendor last year and ended up buying from a competitor. We were in the market for an e-mail-marketing tool and were partial to My Emma. Its website clearly identified our problem and explained how it presented a solution.

The hitch? We couldn’t see the product. There were no pictures, videos, or free trials. Instead, the site asked us to call and talk to a representative for product details. Yes, we were curious enough to call (although I would argue that most prospects won’t). We asked why they wanted us to call before we could see the product, and they said they wanted to qualify prospects because they were wary of spammers.

There are plenty of excuses for not giving potential customers exactly what they want to see on your website. Here are some. We can’t:

- List pricing on the Web because then the competition will just beat it.
- Put demos online because sales people need to personalize the experience.
- Describe the implementation process because each customer is unique.
- Develop FAQs because that will point out unnecessary concerns.

Face it: It’s time to let these go. In the age of Google, Yelp, and Groupon, customers are in the sales process driver’s seat, and they’re happy to be there. Your customers want immediate access to information to help them buy. The solution is logical: Put it all on your site. You’ve got to answer their questions, address their objections, differentiate yourself and do it all credibly. Withholding information might feel safer, but you risk alienating buyers—they’ll think your claims are suspect—and injecting unnecessary friction that extends sales cycles.

So, how do you know what information your prospects need to complete a buying decision?

Start by interviewing your best salesperson to build a map of your sales process in action. Ask her or him to write down their view of the sales process from the first contact to final contract. Check out all of the materials your sales team members use during the sales dialogue (links to the website, presentations, demos) and at what point of the process they employ them. Finally, ask them to comprehensively note questions that the customers ask and the most effective responses to those questions (objections, comparisons).

Now, step into the role of your most promising prospect. Attempt to look at your website with fresh eyes, and try to make a decision to buy your product or service from your website. If you can’t be objective, then ask a contemporary or mentor outside your company to be your prospective customer. Follow this path:

1. Do a Google search to get to your site (it never hurts to check up on the effectiveness of your keywords).

2. Can you easily identify with the problem being presented and the solution being offered enough to want to continue? If not, then you need to work on your targeting and messaging. For example, a provider of healthcare services sold to employers, but used by employees, would separate content specific to each audience, emphasizing competitive evaluation for the employers (the buyer in this case), while focusing on service benefits for employees (the users). You can see here where Castlight Health separates its value proposition into employer and employee categories, minimizing confusion and speaking clearly to each audience.

3. Look at the sales process created by your sales rep. Does your site enable prospects to easily find information while in each stage?

For instance, while in courting prospects in discovery, you need to establish credibility. Great sites establish credibility by offering third-party validation (product or service reviews, awards won), customer testimonials (short video clips are effective), and lists of customers (think logo walls). For example, HubSpot is a relatively new vendor to the lead generation space, so it knows that advertising how and which companies are using HubSpot will create credibility. With that in mind, the company actually uses one of the six precious tabs on its home page for “Who Uses HubSpot.”

While in evaluation, the prospect is looking for you to differentiate yourself. Show photos, screenshots or video tours so prospects can experience your product or service. Demonstrate thought leadership by offering education content for free. Provide frequently updated, valuable insight via your blog and social media feeds. Offer contact information for domain experts within your company. For example, check out how 37Signals uses tours to demo its products.

Customers also want to know exactly what happens after a purchase (implementation, adoption). Have you posted case studies of successful customer experiences? Make sure you describe how you will deliver your product and service as well as what buyers should do for post-sale support. You can see how salesforce.com, one of the pioneers of self-service, has a section of its website dedicated to explaining how to implement. In addition to aiding the sales process, this is also an effective way to reduce implementation costs and increase user adoption.

4. Is all of the information that the sales rep is using in the sales process available on the site? Is it easy to find? Be careful not to hide information that feels uncomfortable to you just because you haven’t created your answer. Pricing is a great example of this. We talk to a lot of clients who don’t want to post it because they aren’t sure they have it right. Resist the urge to withhold. By putting it out there, you’ll find out if it’s right or not. And, you’ll once again move the sales process along for your promising prospects. See here how Vertical Response makes pricing very clear.

5. Do your FAQs answer the tough questions provided to you by the sales rep or is your prospect going to get the real truth when they start calling around or Googling you?

This can be an extremely effective test of the effectiveness of your e-selling (or rather e-buying from your customer’s perspective). When I became the VP of Sales for Vindicia, an online billing SaaS vendor, several years ago, I informally went through this process and found that the customer had to call to talk to a sales rep for nearly everything. And here we were selling online billing to e-merchants! It wasn’t that the executive team was opposed to exposing information; rather, it was that the material just hadn’t been created.

Salespeople are still critical to business models, but communicating effectively to prospects online can generate efficiency far more valuable than the risk of exposing too much information, even in wildly competitive markets. Use your website to bring prospects as close to a buying decision as possible and focus your sales teams on consultative, strategic selling, which is really what we pay them to do anyway.

While it seems counterintuitive to lessons of the past several decades, self-service of the buying process will create a positive relationship with your customer. It is not only what they expect, but also what they need in order to feel comfortable with you as a vendor. They will view you as current, transparent, and confident about your products and services. And that will win you more deals.

See entire Inc.com article and comments at Inc.com.

He did do wrong.

We’ve made a difficult decision we need to share with you.

After a year of cultivating a beta user following – people who believe, like us, the key to great work is continuous performance feedback – we’ve decided to shut down JomoWire. While we found that individuals and companies agreed on the need for micro-feedback, we simply couldn’t scale the business without compromising our core user-driven values.

Thank you all so much for your help as we built JomoWire and iterated the prototype. We’re incredibly grateful for your generosity — your time, ideas, feedback, and encouragement were invaluable. We’ve learned a tremendous amount on this journey and look forward to applying our new wisdom in our next venture.

We invite you to check out Great-to-Market Labs, our new executive consultancy focused on sales and marketing optimization. Leveraging our respective 20-plus-years in the tech sector, we offer on-demand sales and marketing expertise. Focused on serving technology-centric growth companies, we increase and refine understanding of target markets, ensure resonant messages for decision makers and influencers, and develop break-away sales and marketing strategies to accelerate growth. Do let us know if you’d like to hear more.

Again, thank you for all your help with JomoWire.

I just returned from the Inc. 500 Conference.  In addition to hearing from some of the greatest entrepreneurs and meeting the up and comers, I was most struck by what I learned building benches with them at the Inc. 500 Day of Service at the Boys and Girls Club of D.C.  Our job was to fix up the facility and my team of four was tasked with building a bench.

What I thought was going to be a lesson in how to hit the nail (and not your finger) with the hammer, quickly turned into a lesson in leadership.  We energetically read the instructions and got to work.  We had someone on our team who had been in construction (15 years prior) and another that is currently the CEO of an environmental building business.  We had so much expertise that we hardly needed the instructions.

So we thought.  We had so much knowledge that our team rapidly went through each step until a critical piece didn’t fit.  We called the “forman” over to tell him that he had given us the wrong sized wood.  He called the “architect” who said that the wood and instructions were correct.  We rechecked our work.

Okay, stay with me, I’m getting to the point now.

Finally, one of us noticed that we had put a nail 1/4 of an inch too low and that’s why the piece didn’t fit.  It was clear in the instructions, but because we “knew what we were doing”, we didn’t read the note.  Now this was embarrassing!

How often have you assumed that you had the knowledge that you needed and took action without referring to your staff, history, an expert?   I’m afraid my answer is too often.

While it’s frustrating in a social setting, in business, it can lose a deal.  When we were selling face to face, TMI was recoverable.  In the days of a four hour round or a one hour lunch, you had the chance to clarify.  Even as customer discussions moved to 30 minute online meetings and conference calls, there was recovery time.  But now customers seek answers to their questions on your site.  You have to know their questions in advance, make it easy for them to find answers, and without any unnecessary noise.

Apple has done a great job controlling TMI.  Consider how many products, features, benefits, they could talk about.  But go to their site, and you can find answers in a keynote, an ad or the FAQs that are all just a click away.

I’m always impressed when a company uses social media to drive a specific message that they have found to resonate with their target market.  One example is Narragansett beer.  They have a campaign that has set a goal of selling 7.5 million cases a year, and building a brand new brewery in New England if it succeeds. Fans are asked to take part in the movement by doing three things: sign a petition, buy a case, and report any stores or bars that don’t sell Narragansett.  The results are astounding.

Go to your site now and pretend that you don’t know anything about what you do.  Are you able to find the information you need?  If you can’t be objective, then ask a friend to do it for you.  And if the answer is no, then make changes quickly.  You could be losing a deal to TMI right now.

“The Voice of the Workplace, an internal measure of employee sentiment done every five years, showed more than two-thirds would quit if they had an equivalent job offer.” [Italics are ours.]

Hurd gets remarkably low ratings from HP peeps on Glassdoor, an anonymous employee review site. Seems his relenting push to make numbers demoralized people, leaving a “soul-less” culture — or at least a culture based on fear.

There are 300,000 employees at HP. And two-thirds want out? Ouch.

I was initially with Larry Ellisen on questioning the wisdom of HP’s board firing Hurd. But I’ve changed my mind. The story told when Hurd was fired didn’t make much sense. But a CEO who drives financial performance at the expense of their workforce should lose their job.

You don’t have a sustainable business when the people who are the business will jump ship for a decent alternative. The economy will recover. You can’t treat people like persistently pulled elastic and expect them to stay. Financial performance alone does not make a great company.