Problem:
Most people or 99.99% of businesses, salesmen, or marketers online do not know the first thing about selling so they waste everybodys time and demean their reputations more times than not even while having a legitimately valuable offering with sufficient demand.
So what do internet marketers do? How will they catch the surfers attention and lure him to all of the wonders to be had? Well simply put by offering something upfront. That means lets say some body clicked on an ad or opted in an email after a brief description of what was being offered. That person wants to be immediately taken to the sales page where the price is fully disclosed in plain view without lines of discounts or the lined values of each component of the full product or package or course. On the same page they want to see the offer, meaning they want to see what they are getting for their money in clear plain English. If the surfer wants it and has the money or inclination to find the money by various means they will purchase the product. If they aren't sold or dont have the money nor the desire to attain for this purpose then they won't. Simple as that. All of the other clickbait or bait and switch tactics that lead prospects on these long journeys to eventually find out what is actually being sold and at what price is complete garbage and only serves to deter the prospect from not only buying then but also in the future by virtue of deliberately wasting his or her time.
Their should be three components to every online sales flow:
1. Ad/pitch/rough idea of product or service 2. Sales Funnel to a checkout page with a video outlining the value gained from the product or service and or written description of offer
3. A checkout page with the upfront price of the product displayed clearly without any added filler or marketing tactics that do not serve to illustrate or demonstrate the value gained from your purchase plain and simple.
This approach accomplishes a few things that will convert more customers overall than the predominant methods employed by all sales flows online:
1. Shows that you respect the customers time by being blunt and displaying brevity.
2. Shows that you respect the prospects intelligence to be able to know what he or she wants without having to being convinced of it or manipulated into it
3. Retains respect and dignity within the value of your own product by retaining the right for a prospect to decide if it is worth it to them through not implying that the product is not good enough to be pitched directly, articulately, and with confidence effectively enough to be sold on its own without added filler, jargon, clickbait manipulations, or appealing to unconscious desires primarily. Having to maniuplate sends the message that your product or service is not good enough to be outlined clearly in order to sell itself but that it must be surrounded by tactics of manipulation in order to be sold because its a piece of crap. This automatically discredits the value existent within the product, nullifys the ability for that value to be transferred in any substantial way that reflects the originally explicitly agreed upon exchange , and discredits the salesman as either stupid, arrogant, or a con artist for not understanding sales, their prospects needs, and how to effectively transfer value from start to finish.
4. Retains the baseline assumption or hopefully implied agreement that you respect your prospect and therefore your customers by doing the aforementioned which facilitates real sales and the transfer of real value in fact. Many marketers focus way too much on the pitch and implanting the aftermath result of actually transferring the value effectively in their prospects minds so much so that whenever the prospect is half way about to buy the product they are also half way apathetically purchasing a fantasy, a dream, and an end desire as a result of this implanted in them by the salesperson where they get to the point where they feel as if purchasing the product is half the journey. This facilitates a completely ineffective transfer of value to the prospect by virtue the marketer not actually respecting that prospect.
Question and A Lesson:
Why is this scenario and paradigm so pervasive online vs. The real world where marketing is much more straightforward, openly suggestive, and openly manipulative in such a blatant way? One word...TROLLS..well sort of..
Its much easier to be impersonal, not care, or blatantly disrespect people as an online persona rather than in physical reality. Its a whole different ballgame because apparently no one can retaliate physically if such activity is exchanged. This paradigm became so pervasive online coupled with the countless schemes to steal or apprehend your identity, character, reputation, and money that the internet became synonymous with fraud, deception, and abuse. Internet marketers and salesmen were selling white T shirts and khacki pants to soldiers on the battlefield riddled with bullet holes running red with their own blood. It was not a good place to sell anything as you were automatically presumed to be intentionally defrauding or deceiving your potential clientele, after all on the internet the clientele could be anybody so it
Lacked any personal connection which automatically increased the likelihood exponentially of a potentially disingenuous or even malevolent motive, incentive, or goal behind any effort to sell anything online. This was the environment that preceeded the paradigm of marketers and salesmen practically pounding the sale into you by creating 'rapport' over-extensively before any offer to buy anything is ever presented because the forgone conclusion was that you wouldnt be even remotely interested nor feel even remotely secure buying anything online without an extensive knowledge of the seller coupled with sufficient feeling of 'comfortability' built up over time. Therefore the means to accomplish this was blown out of proportion to accommodate this disparity in the baseline level of trust between any two parties meeting on the internet for the first time where this baseline was presumed to be at a negative from the start rather than 0 or slightly more than 0 like in the real world. Thus sellers embarked extensively on this journey to build rapport with each and every potential client so as to offset the negative gamma that they were destined to start off with from the beginning in the pursuits of a endless sea of potential clients along with the streamlined process that internet commerce offered sellers. This was simply a challenge that was worth overcoming because the potential to profit was too great to not at least try to crack the code and break down the barrier between an internet salesman, his product or service, and the endless swath of potential customers he knew would be interested in his product or service at some sort of baseline human instinctual, intellectual, or emotional level. But as the internet became more pervasive and more technologically efficient, the opportunities for well know brick and mortar companies to tap into this endless and instantly accessible swath of potential clients became greater and greater as did the potential to profit. Brick and mortar presented on the internet already were 100 ft ahead of the race because they had the advantage of their baseline levels of trust being much higher from their preceeding interactions within the real world. More so than any solely or primarily internet based company such as Google or Amazon just starting out. Google utilized the advantage that brick and mortars displayed within internet commerce by creating an ecosystem that streamlined this new avenue of relationship between real world clients on the internet and their trusted brick and mortar companies to conduct business with. Thus Google bypassed the trust element by doing one thing very well, connecting people to companies they do in fact already trust enough to purchase from again, albeit this go around happening online. All they had to do was do this enough times with consistency that people would then begin to trust them to be the intermediaries to the companies they would actually be buying things from online. This was a surefire way to be successful online and carve out a sustainable business niche that would survive within the landscape. The other internet based companies essentially accomplished a version of the same thing ie. Yahoo and AskJeeves to a certain extent. Amazon pioneered the first internet based ecommerce business that would take off by implementing a very practical business model that utilized the strengths of the internet while minimizing or eliminating the foregone weaknesses inherent within internet commerce. They sold books used and new essentially guaranteeing the fulfillment of every transaction to customer satisfaction at a discounted rate. Buying a book online was probably the least trust weighted transaction you could make online considering the only things that could go wrong were that the books could come in worse shape than advertised, not receive it at all, or end up being the wrong book altogether. Amazon effectively eliminated these barriers to sales by guaranteeing every transaction while slowly implementing ways to reduce the cost of shipping which existed as the potential annihiliator of 'online savings' of which Amazon pioneered, which was one of the key incentives presented to those looking to shop on the World Wide Web.
So all of the ecommerce sites and websites intended to do business in some form or fashion online were challenged with the same problem of which they dealt with in different ways in order to become legitimate businesses for profit online, that problem being the inherent landscape or dynamic as it relates to how people interacted online considering the inherent nature of distrust pervasive throughout the majority of interactions. This problem would have to be mitigated as best as possible wherein the ones who were able to do so the most effectively would become the gold rushers of the internet commerce age.
So how does the origins of ecommerce still relate to how marketers and salesmen behave online still today? Well essentially they are still dealing with and confronted with the same issue or problem that the pioneers within the industry were confronted with at the onset and thus had to solve in a way that would establish their presence online with legitimacy while accumulating the essence of that which was missing from the entire landscape as a byproduct of solving the trust issue in itself. So coincidentally by solving the trust issue well enough to facilitate the transaction of business within their guide or under their name, they started to accrue that which they were poised to absolve or mitigate from their respective business models as the great barrier to fluid ecommerce for themselves. This created a doubling effect of their operations for as the more they solved this centric problem existent within the core fabric of how people communicated or exchanged ideas online, the more they began to embody the nature of what was missing within this fabric in order for transactions to occur and multiply over time within and across the landscape. The more they were seen as the beacons and preservers of trust within a landscape inherently absolved from seemingly any accountability whether it be casual interaction, business soliticitation, or personal expression. This would set them up to become the dominant superpowers within and through the landscape and coincidentally acquire more personal information of its users than any brick and mortar company would ever be able to in its entire lifetime.
So marketers and any business online are still faced with the same fundamental problem with transacting over the internet that the now superpowers have became masters at solving. That is the issue of trust. And each in a way are starting at ground zero just like Google and Amazon had to albeit there exist a few more lubricators whose job is to help solve this problem for businesses or individuals like them than there were at the inception of Alphabet aka Google(there were virtually none). But today's new online sales people, businesses, and self promoters even while having the "advantage" of intermediaries to establish trust in their brands for them, they still are essentially operating at ground zero as far as the nature of the landscape perhaps even farther behind considering the rate and volumes of which the nature of anything online can occur are exponentially higher, thus in many ways existing within a more cynical, toxic, and paralysed environment than before. The illusion is that in a way these pioneers have increased the threshold and baseline starting point of trust on the internet but that is only so regarding using their infrastructure because they did raise that bar, and sometimes the pervasive hands of these superpowers are so ubiquitous that it seems there is more trust on the internet but actually only more trust relative to how these entities were able to capture the trust of millions thus negating the levels of trust soley to where their hands lay, which is coincidentally or seemingly everywhere on the web. These giants have gained so much user trust they have molded the very framework for which people perceive the internet itself irregardless of the mass of untapped, unwalked, and undiscovered territory throughout the world wide web they will probably not witness in their lifetimes.
So the baseline level of trust within the structures that are ubiquitous online have increased but yet the overall sentiment of trust inherently existent within the fabric of the internet itself has not changed, only morphed into a sort of reflection of perceived homeostasis or higher levels of baseline trust but yet the opposite is true. The base foundational point of how the level of trust has seemingly increased is based on the inherent ethics promulgated within these superpowers propaganda campaigns to facilitate people to seek knowledge and understanding. This almost ubiqitously altruistic predesigned plan for 'those that use the internet' has created the foundation from which people commonly and similarly seek out more information and more knowledge utilizing the systems of power and capability that these powers present, thus creating a vacuum effect where everyone is united or more comfortable with each other because of their increased knowledge as a result of coexisting within the landscape altogether, seemingly naturally compelled to explore greater realms of knowledge intellect and history than ever humanly possible in the history of mankind. So this common thread coupled with the overarching framework that the average person is used to navigating as well as the propagated and subtly implied 'purpose' enveloping all user navigation within this framework creates the illusion, feeling, or perception that people trust each other more or should trust each other more than ever perhaps even more so online than in real life because of the inherent "safety protections" involved with remote to remote communication, which seemingly eliminate many of the natural risks involved with real physicality, but yet do not solve the problems of trust inherent within such paradigms where little precedent is established, little interaction takes place, and little communication can take place except by way of a group deliberately pooling together their expressions and communications through the written word as point of individual necessity existing within the framework of the group so as to cumulatively and togetherly establish that cross network of trust deliberately over time, to eventually fill the void of that which is so dearly missing from the internet and thus our human interaction, confidence, connection, and trust within each other so that we can pull together and make it through this EARTH TEST. ❤
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