Why do most eCom teams suck at selling?

Single digit conversion rates will get you out of business. Sorry to say.

But first, thank you Affiliate TactixX for letting me ask and answer this question. This is whre this picture was made last week.

In case you missed my talk, short answer: Because they just never learned how to sell.

And if your conversion rate is below 10%, you should read this.

The real reason is a bit more complex, but stay tuned, you will find a few gems.

A fairy tale begins

A long, long time ago, the was this new shiny thing called the internet.

And as with all new shiny things, Marketing was the first to adopt. That went even faster with Social Media, as they didn't have to talk to IT for this one.

But anyway, most of the sales people stayed offline.

But this internet thing was a success. And suddenly, people wanted to buy stuff online. That created a little bit of trouble, but IT found a solution. Thy called it: shop-software.

And now the revenue flew in. Each year, more and more growth, mostly driven through more and more people coming online. Everyone was happy. Who needed sales, anyway?

And now in 2024? No more organic growth. Revenues struggle.

But first, no one noticed and later, we reassured ourselves that this was "normal".

Single digit conversion rates.

As reference: for a sales professional, everything below 20% is a sign of bad preparation.

But we continued to use this software, and said to ourselves: "Yes, but amazon does it this way, they will know why". Or even better: "I am sure, the software vendor has tested it, and the default ist the best practice."

The reality is: Different product categories are bought and sold in different ways, but we use the same Product-Detail-Pages. Over and over again.

Why? Because it's a software, developed from an IT perspective. And from this perspective, everything makes total sense.

You want an example? When was the last time you wanted to buy this thing online, the sales rep asked "what's your budget?", you answered: 1000, and you went out of the store below 1500? Now let's look at the same thing online: We send people to a wall of products, called Category or List Page, and offer this thing called price filter. You enter your budget and guess what: They now just want to sell you stuff below 1000.

You get the point?

A classical offline sales process has four steps

1. Acquisition

2. Demand analysis

3. Objection handling

4. Closing

4 steps. Really simple. And powerful. Tested trough a few hundred years.

And In Online we have:

1. Acquisition (eg, Google Ads)

2. Closing (eg Shop-Software)

Any idea what could be missing?

There is a saying in sales: If you do your demand analysis well, closing becomes no effort.

People will buy not because of the price but despite the price.

In short, this is why. But there is a way out…

And just for the record, I was one of those Marketing people. I went through all of this.

But a few years ago, I had the chance to challenge the status quo.

A classical brand manufacturer online shop, 1% conversion rate, AOV > 1000€, Google Ads traffic (product category + brand).

As a quick win, we wanted to start a project to double the conversion rate.

And I brought a colleague in, who had way more experience in sales and was training offline sales people for over ten years. Katharina Stapel She now was supporting companies to start really selling online. And still does today.

And we delivered. After a lot of internal discussions, because you know, "but we never did it this way" and "this doesn't work for us", "no one clicks through more than 3 questions" — way more from online people than offline people...

We delivered a more than 10X uplift. High double digits. A/B tested, the same traffic as before, the old page was still at 1%.

And no, there was no AI involved. And no magic product advisor tool. Because this is again just software. It's the people who believe they can change things, who will.

This is the medium-sized answer: They just don't know how to sell stuff online.

No one told them. And it worked (in some way) for the last ten years...

So if you are responsible for an eCom team, and you run on single digit conversion rates, you should ask your team, if they really know what they are doing.

How you can do it yourself

Learn how to sell. Really. There is old and massive knowledge available.

And then translate it to digital.

Learn about behavioral economics.

Learn about the needs of your customers. do a good demand analysis.

Learn about their objections, Handle them well. On Page. Yes, SEOs, i hear you. "But this would mean duplicate content!" I don't care. It's about the customer, not the search engine.

And btw. this should not end on a FAQ page. Because you can hide dead bodies on FAQ pages. Just like on the second page of google.

Off course there are way more details. I showed a few in the talk.

Just another sneak peak: Did you know that the most important buying decision for single women buying household appliances is the question if their dad will be free on the planned delivery date? We can show you how to handle this purely online. No dad-jokes involved.

Your short-cut

And for the rest of you, if you want to know more, we now both do workshops to help people to get out of this dead end street.

Just drop a comment below. Or drop me a PN and we will get in touch.

Thank you for your time,

Pascal Fantou