Stop confusing your buyers.
I was so frustrated. I was trying to contact a prospect and couldn’t find the company phone number on their website. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but the phone works. I wasn’t cold calling, I was calling a referral—who, by the way, had no contact information on his email signature.
I’ve walked out of many retail stores when no one even bothered to acknowledge I was there. That’s just plain rude, and it’s certainly not how to build customer loyalty. It’s equally rude and appalling in a business-to-business setting—whether that interaction is happening in person or online.
When companies make it difficult for their prospects to buy, they lose business without knowing it. Customers get equally frustrated when the buying process becomes ridiculously complex, and they can’t get answers to their questions.
Companies invest significant money on marketing—email campaigns, SEO, and strategies for getting found and building customer loyalty. Then they blow it by being hard to reach. Prospects give up, and customers start looking for a more attentive vendor with a simpler buying process.
Why do companies make it so difficult to buy?
I found the answer in this post by Mareo McCracken: “How to Create Immediate Customer Loyalty.” He says when we strive to continually exceed customer expectations, we confuse the customer with too many options and too many hurdles. As he puts it:
Most sales and customer success leaders try so hard to keep customers satisfied, often by using the vague term: “exceeding expectations,” but meeting expectations does not equal customer loyalty.
The experts from Gartner also found that when sales and customer success representatives focus on exceeding customer expectations they end up creating confusion and unnecessary expenses for both parties along with wasted effort and time.
Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Read the rest of Mareo’s article to find out why we need to make it easy for customers to buy from us—and exactly how to do that.
