The better way to sell online

Even online businesses need face-to-face communication

We run online businesses, so it makes sense that most of our customer engagement will occur online. And while that’s true, it’s important to not forget that we’re still selling to real people.

With the advent of the internet and the rise in popularity of online stores, customers, clients and remote workers seem more distant than ever. That’s why it’s so important to focus on staying connected: and sometimes that means face to face.

We still sell to people.

Looking at our monitors, we could easily be forgiven for thinking of customers as numbers. We see income, sales, locations- and it’s easy to send away emails and texts to them without further thought. And we do the same for coworkers – many of us have remote employees or outsource certain services.

But emails and texts can only convey so much, and they don’t allow us to fully engage: you can’t react real time when you’re reading, and conversations can’t really flow organically. It’s also hard to read tone online: the same email could be interpreted in many ways depending on who reads it.

That’s why, in teams and for customers, it’s so important to facilitate face to face time.

Use video chatting services to connect.

Want to help your customer make a decision? Explain an idea to a worker? Using video chatting services like Skype and Google you can quickly connect and communicate.

If you sell expensive products or services, arranging a call with a customer can help you sway any of their concerns and explain your benefits in a meaningful way. And if you have a remote team, speaking fosters healthy relationships and connections and two-way dialogue.

Just make sure that if you use video chatting services that you troubleshoot before you call: you don’t want a poor internet connection or incorrectly formatted program to ruin your conversation.

We run online businesses, so it makes sense that most of our customer engagement will occur online. And while that’s true, it’s important to not forget that we’re still selling to real people.

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Keep it structured.

Conversations without clear goals quickly go off track and become time wasters. It’s difficult to curate and plan out conversations the way you can plan texts and emails, but it is important to go into every meeting with set objectives.

Optimize your time! Ask yourself some questions: what’s the goal of your conversation? What do you need to find out? What do they need to find out? Which format will you follow – question and answer, brainstorming, presenting?

In order to have really productive conversations It’s important to go in with a plan.

Connection matters.

Our businesses might be digital, but we’re not- we’re still just people looking for connections. Leveraging this in your business strategy can help you create lasting, positive relationships between you and your customers, and you and your employees.

Lena Klein

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