It's All Geek To Me - January 18th 2006

Sales-ucation Ever make a sale to a customer by “accident”? If you spend much time online, you've surely made a purchase this way - walking right up to a commission salesperson, not even saying hello, and telling them you'd like to buy model number 78439, please. You've experienced Sales-ucation. Sales-ucation occurs when the focus is all about the product and you almost ignore the fact the item is for sale - it is one of the things the web does best. The more “impossible” it is to sell your products online, the more effective this technique is.

In the beginning, the web focused on things that were “easy” to sell – books and CD's. Next came electronics and computer gear, but they had a built in advantage in that their most important customer group is very wired. Clothing hit some challenges with sizes and looks – oodles of effort has been well spent building virtual models and such. Then came the cars – the first industry to make sales-ucation really work.

The first thing car manufacturers did was to be certain that it was not possible to sell cars online. In addition to the facts of how dealership agreements work (which would make it a heck of a legal problem to sell direct), the car companies were sure that the product was so complex and required so much hand holding that no one would ever click an “add to cart” button for a car.

A rather curious way to succeed indeed.

They began with what you'd expect – pictures of the cars and replication of the existing printed brochures. Next, and upon experiencing the joy of no printing costs, came more and more photography. Following this, all the sub catalogs (like paint colors) were added. Dealer locators and brochure request forms received lots of activity.

And then – a shift occurred.

Words like “virtual showroom” and “vehicle tour” and “car configurator” were used. They started to use the unique power of the web medium to get more and more decisions made outside of the showroom – allowing people to shop in their own way and at their own pace.

Then the PR department saw some unique opportunities for press-worthy sales to those poor souls in Alaska who were more than a day's drive from the nearest dealership, for instance. Those folks had configured cars and found that delivery was going to be a problem – the closet dealership in California got credit for the Alaska sale, and the manufacturer did the delivery with plenty of cameras in tow.

Today we expect to be able to research, configure, and virtually “build” our cars online. When that has been completed, we print out our list of choices and financing offers, along with the location of the nearest dealer. This has expanded the reach of dealers and resulted in a fundamental shift in the way cars are sold today. The leads generated are data mined extensively, to say the least.

The thing to remember is that it was never the intention to sell cars online. The education process for the products simply got so good and complete that the sale “happened” on its own.

The sales-ucation trend meshes quite well with the shift in how medical doctors have been impacted by their “customers” (patients) surfing online. With WebMD print outs and such in hand today, they are often discussing specific drugs and treatment regiments with patients.

This trend also has created a diminishing return on “print clones” - it is not enough simply to put your paper catalog on-line. People expect sales-ucation features like reviews, options, and oodles of product info.

The focus for entrepreneurs today is how to adopt their complex products to this sales-ucation trend. If it is done well enough and in a sustained way, they'll find themselves with sales that just “happen” more and more frequently.