Smiles All Round? Tips For A User-Friendly Ecommerce Store

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
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Customer satisfaction is essential for any business, and these days consumer standards are more demanding than ever. If the experience your customers get from your website is even a little clunky or inconvenient, then you run a huge risk of alienating them and crippling your bottom line. A smooth user experience and flow of information is essential to ecommerce success these days. Here are some tips for making it as user-friendly as possible.

Don’t Leave it to the Machines!

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Real-time, human support is now one of the most sought-after features for any B2B and B2C website owner, and if it isn’t a given in your industry, I assure you it will be soon! Many online retailers are also starting to use a co-browsing function. This is where a customer service agent can redirect a user’s browser in order to help them reach a product or some information that they’re having trouble finding. Millennials, especially, are beginning to prefer live chat over any other form of customer support. I know that your staff may be pretty strained, but having someone on-call for the live chat is definitely a good investment to make. Live, human support always beats FAQs and waiting for an email.

Keep an Eye on the Checkout

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As you may have discovered, one of the biggest issues for any ecommerce business is cart abandonment. You manage to get the customer onto your site, they fill their cart with all the products they want, get to the checkout page, and then poof! they disappear without giving you a penny’s worth of revenue. There are various reasons for this, but one of the most common is a clumsily designed checkout. Look at your options, and wherever possible, give your customers some way of making their purchase without having to create an account. The time it takes them to create an account gives them more opportunities to second-guess the process, and many people simply can’t be bothered with it! If you’re targeting a fairly wide target market, or offering both B2B and B2C products on a single store, then it’s also important to keep a flexible range of consumer financing solutions. There are all kinds of ways you can make the checkout process more user-friendly, make sure you’re leveraging them!

Keep Navigation Simple and Easy

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We’re all pretty spoiled and highly strung these days, and that means there are all kinds of things which can annoy us about a website, and make us hostile to the brand that owns it! However, if there’s one pet hate that absolutely every web user has, it’s poor navigation. I’m sure you’ll agree that there are few things more irritating than a website that’s difficult to navigate. Everything needs to be intuitive and user-friendly, rather than cluttered and complex. Whenever you’re designing, put yourself in the user’s shoes, and make sure everything functions as smoothly and easily as you’d want it to. Yes, even if you have to delete half the features you’ve paid for!

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Take these tips on board, and you’re sure to put smiles on your user’s faces!

5 Signs That You’re Losing Your Grip on Your Employees

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Managing your employees can be a tough job. It’s not something that can be taught and each employee you have is a different case. Some employees might be motivated by gifts and promises of a promotion, and other employees are motivated when you criticise their work and tell them bluntly that they aren’t meeting your standards. However, there are times when our lack of care for each employee can lead to them slipping from our business, and their loyalty might slowly be fading because of it.

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Monitoring employees isn’t easy, but with the help of some software solutions, social interaction and showing genuine compassion for your workers, you can keep them from slipping away and joining a rival business and leaving you.

Do your employees show less enthusiasm?

If it feels like your employees are showing less and less enthusiasm about their jobs, then it’s a sign that the work is either far too easy for them or they are losing the motivation to work for you. One of the best ways to reinvigorate that enthusiasm is to give them a challenge. Stimulate their minds so they are more productive and prepare some more difficult work or a task that will define an outcome for the business. For example, give your marketing team some funds to host a marketing campaign or promotion, or ask your tech team with upgrading the office computers and give them a budget.

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Do your employees argue with each other?

If you feel like your employees argue with each other on a regular basis, then it’s worth monitoring them and trying to settle disputes. When employees argue with each other and no senior member of staff steps in to intervene, it can feel like their boss doesn’t care if they are at each other’s throats. You can strengthen your team with performance management services, or take them to team-building events and activity days. Your team is a vital part of your business’s success, so remember to strengthen that bond.

Do your employees look stressed out?

You should never give too much work to your employees and overwork them. A loyal employee will gladly take overtime for the extra money and the chance to help out the business they work for, but you should never abuse this kindness because overtime is additional work that they don’t have to engage in. If you start to force your employees to do overtime, then back off and give them some room. Don’t ever be a boss that pushes extra work on people, give your employees some space or else they’ll get fed up and leave.

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Do your employees call in with problems more often?

This can often be a sign of discontent with your workplace, staff members, the job or a combination of all three. While your employees are entitled to sick dates and taking breaks now and then, it should never feel like they don’t have time to work for your business or that they’re intentionally skipping dates. This might also be the sign of a lazy employee, but if they used to work hard and put in extra time, it could just be a sign that they’re growing tired of working for you. The best way to prevent this is to keep your employees motivated and make them feel like they’re part of a team that appreciates them.

How a Sales Manager Can Think Like a Leader

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Almost every sales manager was, at one point in their career, a peak-performing sales professional, top dog on the team. When promoted, everything changed—except, perhaps, them.

This presents a problem because managing and leading a sales team requires a completely different mindset from selling. Yet what sales managers have to rely on are the instincts and competencies they developed when they were selling.

That’s why, above and beyond any specific techniques they learn, every sales manager needs to re-frame their thinking around leadership mindsets so their decisions will be driven by what’s good for the team not what’s good from a salesperson’s perspective. Here are some examples of what that means.

War #1: Player vs. Observer

Every great salesperson I’ve known wanted to be in on the action, down on the field, making the plays. That strong drive is what made them great and brought them stellar results.

But sales managers are not put in the job to keep selling. They are put into the job so they can help others become the best salespeople they can be. Great sales managers see themselves as observers and coaches, not players.

This switch is perhaps the hardest of all. But it’s only by observing that a sales manager can properly evaluate what the problem is and offer suggestions to a rep that will lead to lasting improvements.

War #2: Results vs. Inputs

Sales is a results-oriented profession. Every month you and your salespeople get judged and paid on sales results. So a company culture that is focused on results is healthy and necessary.

The irony for sales managers is that a constant push to reach a sales number can keep them and their teams so focused on end goals that they miss opportunities to identify problems with skills and processes and improve future results.

To do the latter, they have to focus on the inputs that produce sales process results, such as:

  • How well reps identify customer needs and prioritizing the customer’s solution criteria
  • How well reps understand and can explain your solution’s competitive advantages and weaknesses
  • Whether reps can shape a proposal or presentation that presents the best possible case to the customer

War #3: Tasks vs. People

Effective salespeople have high energy. They like to do stuff, they like to complete tasks. It’s what contributed to their success as salespeople. “Getting things done” sounds like a good attribute for a manager too, doesn’t it?

Not so fast. A sales manager who is overly task oriented can spend too much time making sure mundane To Dos get done while ignoring the development needs of their salespeople.

Sales management is a contact sport. It’s about the relationships you develop with your sales reps. So instead of focusing only on completing tasks, focus on your people. That means filling your time with coaching and helping your reps create their personal development plans. It means figuring out what motivates and demotivates each of your reps.

Developing Your Leadership Mindsets

How many of these instinct wars did you identify with? I’ve met very few sales managers who had problems with all of them, but have also met almost no one who has none of these issues. As the classic cartoon character Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” So the secret is finding out which sales instincts pose the biggest problem for you and developing a better leadership mindset.

About the Author

Kevin F. Davis is the author of The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness: Ten Essential Strategies for Leading Your Team to the Top (Greenleaf Book Group, March 2017). Kevin is President of TopLine Leadership, Inc., a leading sales and sales management training company.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Taxing: Simplifying Your Business Tasks

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Think of everything you have to do in your day as a business owner. Think of the mass of tasks and work you have to perform. Think of the systems you rely on.

When you stump it all together like that, running a business seems like hard work! And it is. There is no doubt about that whatsoever.

Now, technology moves at such a fast pace in the modern age. If you want your business to succeed, you’re going to have to build a good relationship with tech and understand exactly how it all works. You’re going to have to appreciate that your gadgets and computers are going to be outdated. You’re going to have to adapt to thrive and the future is now.

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Now, let’s return to the beginning. If you are adapting so your business can thrive, you’ve still got heaps of tasks to complete. It is now time to knit everything together and see how we can simplify your business tasks.

Let’s talk money first. Accounting software like Sage accounting online is going to save you a lot of headaches. Not only can you keep yourself in the know with your finances with some simple data entry, but it’s also going to be automated and can save you the hassle of replicating invoices and calculating your tax. What does this mean? Well, it means you can spend more time on your actual job than counting coins!

What more is there to know about money? Well, payment is crucial! Sites like Paypal can offer you a cloud-based payment solution that automatically exchanges payments into a currency of your choice – meaning you’re not the one heading to the exchange! This is an amazing solution whether or not you have a lot of overseas customers.

With accounting and currency exchange out of the way, there are already two heavy tasks dealt with. Now, it’s time to talk communication.

Basecamp is an amazing software package that can do it all for you. Basecamp’s Campfire organizes your internal communication and projects in a single dedicated place. The advantages of this are too often underestimated and having a single platform for multiple, yet linked, subject matter (like work) is a brilliant way to increase the productivity of your staff. The campfire app within Basecamp allows you to communicate instantly, like an old school instant messenger app, and in-real time and you can even link to work. This cuts a number of steps out the process and allows your workflow to be centralized with a single piece of software. There are no more messy and long email chains between staff members. Instead, Basecamp offers topic based message boards, instant chat tools, to-do-lists, staff check-ins and instant work reports. Not only can you simplify your staff’s communication process, but you can get everything moving forward in the same direction.

Communication, work flow, accounting and payment – four huge tasks have been broken down and simplified with technology – find out what else you can simplify and launch your business forwards.

5 Steps To Designing A Product

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So, you have an idea for a product? Before you start pitching to manufacturers, investors and retailers, you’ll need a final working prototype. The design stage is crucial – and the more thorough, the better. Some people will take their design through all manner of stages, but here are really the five main stages that you should be worrying about.

Brainstorm ideas

Before you embark on your design, it’s worth having a brainstorm session to cover every angle of your design. Consider your target market, the cost, the function, the materials and all manner of other factors. Your product should solve a problem – or satisfy a pleasure. Assuming that you want your product to make you money, consider how much of a need there is for your product and what you can do to make it more desirable.

Do market research

Market research can tell you many things – whether there is a need for your product, what changes you may be able to make to appeal to a greater market and what competition there is out there. A survey is brilliant way to assess these things (you can create these online and share with friends, family and strangers). You should also do a few Google searches of similar products. Read reviews to find out any criticisms, so that you can avoid your product suffering the same problems. You can even buy a rival product and dismantle it for inspiration.

Start designing

Start sketching away. You should begin freehand and then move onto designs with calculated measurements once you’re comfortable with exactly how you want it to look (you may wish to download graphics design software for this or hire professional designers). Come up with a few designs until you’ve settled on a favourite.

Create virtual prototypes

Before making working physical prototypes it’s often advantageous to make a virtual version. This will allow you to see your product in 3D and test various measurements. There are software and services that specialise in iterative wireframe development that can help you with this.

Create a physical prototype

Now it’s time to make a real life prototype. You may wish to start with models. From here you can build up to fully-working prototypes. Invest in the materials and tools you will need and get building. You may have to build several versions if you come across complications. Some products may be too complex to be hand-built and may require a complex set up of machinery – this will be costly but may much needed in order to get a fully working prototype. Find a testing team to trial your product once you have a fully-working prototype. If they mention any issues, you have to go back and make some changes. After a lot of hard work and patience, you will eventually have a final product that you can start pitching. This is only the beginning of your journey – you now have investment, marketing, distribution and all manner of other things to consider – although providing you’ve followed all the designs steps up until now, your product should be pretty flawless and getting people to help in these areas shouldn’t be too hard.