Digital Dale Carnegie
Volume 24/Number 12
Keys to a more powerful online selling presence
He’s been called one of the most influential men of the 20th century.
His name is on the #1 best selling business app in the iTunes store.
He’s been placed alongside Thoreau, Twain, Hemingway and DuBois, as author of one of the Ten Books That Shaped the American Character.
His book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has sold over 30 million copies, and has been translated into 47 languages, including Hindi, Nepalese, and Telugu.
Dale Carnegie — author, lecturer, and developer of famous courses in salesmanship and interpersonal skills — would have been 122 years old this month. But his principles of interaction and connectivity are as fresh and as relevant today as any of the recent musings of the bloggerati.
And his teachings, when applied to your website, provide a blueprint for transforming it into a powerful online selling presence.
“Talk in the terms of the other person’s interest.”
The cornerstone of Dale Carnegie’s philosophy is a simple, rather obvious thought: “The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.”
Obvious it may be, but nearly every B2B website has the exact opposite orientation. Call it the About Us model.
Their home pages are devoted to a description of Who We Are. Secondary pages tell visitors all about Our Mission, Our Vision and Our Values; followed by Our Services, Our Team, Our Partners and finally, Contact Us.
The harsh truth is, nobody cares about your company’s mission. Or your vision or values or your team or your partners or anything else until you can answer the basic question: Can you help me?
Do you have what I need? Have you ever solved a problem like mine? Can you show me how you did it?
As Mr. Carnegie famously said, “You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.” Instead of the About Us model, he would suggest an Ask You architecture, organized around who your visitors are and what they’re looking for.
Start by bringing your customers’ issues front and center on your home page. Rename the buttons on your navigation bar. Add a search function. Ask questions. Solicit opinions.
“Dramatize your ideas.”
“Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt,” Dale Carnegie wrote, and it’s as true for a 21st Century website as it was for a 20th Century toastmaster.
Now that the infrastructure for streaming video, audio and dynamic reports is universally available, your prospects expect your website to act less like a text-heavy brochure, and more like HBO, a channel for premium content:
Rather than the usual carefully-crafted but dryly-worded mission statement, why not post a video of your CEO (probably your firm’s most passionate advocate) sharing the company’s story?
A list of your current and past clients is fine, but a single short quote (either video or text) from a happy client will be far more powerful than even the longest logo parade.
Stock photography is quick and inexpensive, but photographs of your actual team doing actual work for an actual client are better. Don’t worry if you don’t have a bunch of supermodels on staff; authenticity trumps attractiveness every time.
“When dealing with people,” Carnegie reminds us, “Remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”
“Develop success from failures.”
There’s a great temptation, once you’ve launched your website, to say, “There! Done!” and walk away from it.
But as Mr. Carnegie said, “Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” Even though he was speaking in purely psychological terms, his thought also applies to your website’s structure.
To be a strong sales tool, your site must be constantly monitored, measured and refined. To do this, you need two things: The ability to know exactly what’s working and what isn’t. And the ability to change them.
The first is extraordinarily easy to acquire, thanks to the host of website analytics providers. You can determine exactly how many people are visiting your site; how many are new visitors and how many are returning. You can see which pages they visit, and how long they stay. More important, you can tell which pages are being completely ignored.
Once you know that, you’ll know what needs to be changed. And if you’ve built your website on a content management system (CMS), you’ll be able to make those changes quickly and easily.
Essentially, a CMS is a set of page templates that allows you to easily change text, graphics and other content within pre-defined areas. If your site already has a CMS, learn how to use it; they’re usually no more difficult to use than Microsoft Word. If your site doesn’t have one, get one.
“Get to the point and stop.”
In this world of instant messaging and 140-character Tweets, the issue of depth of sell — that is, how much information you need to present to close a sale — is a subject of real concern, particularly for marketers dealing with complex financial, pharmaceutical and high tech products and services.
How much should you put on your website? How many pages should you have? How much text should be on each page?
On the one hand, most B2B sites seem to adhere to famous ad man David Ogilvy’s classic “the more you tell, the more you sell” approach.
On the other hand, Steve Krug, in his book, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, proposes the more modernist Half/Half Rule: Write as much as you think you need, then cut it in half. Then cut that in half.
But, as usual, Dale Carnegie said it best in1936. “This is a hurried age we’re living in. If you’ve got anything to say, say it quickly. Get to the point and stop.”
Amen.
