Your store; your identity. With your own site, you’re not
just another marketplace seller, but your own entity. It’s up to you to
establish your brand, and build your business and reputation.
Fewer transaction fees. Online marketplaces assess fees for
the convenience and features of their sites, and many sellers feel
“nickel-and-dimed.” The fees are usually small on their own … but they
add up fast! With your own store, you’ll certainly have costs – like
hosting and credit card transaction fees – but you also may have some
control over those fees.
You make the rules. Large online marketplaces usually have
numerous rules and regulations in place – many with good reason
considering the scope of their businesses. But with your own website,
you can run your business as you see fit.
CONS:
Success isn’t always simple when you’re on your own. With the
freedom of your own store also comes the responsibility for a lot of
the details that marketplaces like eBay and Amazon take care of for you.
You need to be prepared to put in hours for setup and site maintenance,
as well as dealing with your inventory and customer support issues.
Success comes at a cost. As mentioned earlier, you’re going
to be paying fees. Website design, prepackaged sites and hosting can get
expensive, not to mention fees for third-party credit-card sales.
Your customers need to find you. Online shoppers frequently
visit sites like eBay and Amazon first for their searches, so
maintaining your own site removes you from that potentially lucrative
equation. You’ll also need to factor marketing and advertising into your
time and monetary costs.
Option 2: Selling Via Third-Party Marketplaces
PROS:
Start selling … immediately! There are
millions of shoppers already on sites like Amazon and eBay and by
searching for what you’re selling, they can easily get to your store.
It’s easy to expand your reach. You can list your products on
multiple marketplaces (e.g., on both eBay and Amazon). In addition, you
can test shopper interest in products before committing to a
large-scale selling operation.
It’s turnkey. You won’t have to set up checkout and
fulfillment support when you sell on large marketplaces, such as Amazon
and eBay. And don’t forget loyalty and frequent-buying programs (like
Amazon Prime), which can be very difficult to develop on your own –
especially in the beginning.
CONS:
The cost of doing business can be high. The turnkey model comes at a cost to sellers, usually deducted as a percentage of each sale along with othe.
Your identity is tied into the marketplace’s identity. You
may find it’s hard to stand out when you’re part of large online selling
sites, and that could limit your branding and ability to connect with
customers on a personal level.
You need to do your homework … and legwork. Large e-commerce
marketplaces usually have strict listing requirements, and making sure
all of your products conform to the rules can be a challenge. In
addition, if you’re selling on multiple marketplaces, you may need to
customize your listings to conform to the different rules – which can
mean double the setup work.
The Bottom Line
Clearly, there are pros and cons to all of your e-commerce
selling options. Carefully weigh what you think will work best for you –
it can even be a combination of options! And remember, you can always
change course as your business dictates. Happy selling!
THE ART OF ONLINE SELLING
Imagine you had
an interface on your computer that told you what things were going on in
your customers’ lives based on their posts on social networking forums
such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It might be useful to know if a
customer was car shopping, or planning a wedding, or looking for a new
job.
It helps salespeople build a professional
social presence, alerts them to when customers post relevant buying
signals and provides a content library of ready-to-post comments or
articles to share “to make you look like the expert you are.” Its
customers include small businesses such as insurance agents and wealth
advisors, as well as the larger firms that employ these salespeople and
relationship managers.
Chris Andrew, the founders’ first company hire in 2010, is now the
managing director for the company’s operations in Europe. In 2013, he
moved to London from the San Francisco headquarters to lead Hearsay
Social’s international expansion. Gary Liu, vice president of marketing,
guides all aspects of the company’s marketing, including the company’s
social media, website and demand generation functions. He previously was
at Siebel Systems and ServiceSource and says that “the common thread
around these three companies, including Hearsay Social, is that they’re
enterprise-focused: they’re software firms that are really focused on
helping business sales leaders, marketing leaders and, in our case,
compliance leaders, be successful growing their business.”
Andrew and Liu spoke with Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane, an associate
professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at
Boston College and guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s
Social Business Big Idea Initiative, about how Hearsay Social customers
are using the platform, what’s different in Europe, and how compliance
issues factor into social business management.
Give us an example of how your platform works.
In our customer base we have a lot
of large financial services and insurance firms. So imagine a wealth
manager or a financial advisor that’s using Hearsay Social.
They’re essentially a relationship manager or a salesperson. They’ve
got a set of clients, and they want to be able to continue to manage and
nurture and best understand what’s happening in their current customer
base. They also want to continue to build out new clients.
Traditionally, they have done that by hosting info seminars or asking
for referrals from good customers. Best practices have long dictated
that reps need to connect with existing customers in the physical world,
in the real world, in order to develop long-term relationships.
But our lives (and where customers spend a great deal of their time)
have increasingly migrated online in recent years, so why wouldn’t reps
want to connect with customers on the social media front as well? Follow
them if they are on Twitter, connect with them on LinkedIn or even
friend them on Facebook, if they have that sort of relationship. It’s
one more opportunity to foster the relationship, and social media can be
used very effectively to enhance real-world interactions.
Same thing with non-customers, with a referral, or with someone you
hosted at an event. The latest best practices are that you say hello,
remember their names, remember details about them, and then connect with
them in an authentic way online, saying something like, “Hey, let’s
keep in touch.”
What Hearsay Social does is monitor across your connections on social
media and identify the most relevant posts that people are sharing
across your network. People are sharing information on social media at
an incredible rate — everything from cat videos to what they had for
breakfast. They’re also sharing an incredible amount of detail around
what’s happening in their personal lives that include life events, which
are very relevant to a financial advisor.
Hearsay Social flags personal things people have posted on social media, like getting married or having a baby?
Getting married, having a baby, yes, or getting
a new job or moving. What the application does is, through machine
learning algorithms and our technology platform, we’re able to distill
those key life events and show them in a dashboard so that only the
relevant signals, if you will — and buying triggers are presented to a
financial advisor.
So if I’m a financial advisor, and if a client just got married, I’ll
know that because I’ll see an alert or social signal that there are a
lot of congratulations in his social media network, and perhaps because
he updated his profile. I can reach out on social, congratulate him, but
then now in the real world, I’ll know to reach out to set up some time
with him as well to say, “Hey, this is a key milestone, and if I can
ever be of service, let me know.”
In addition, on our platform, you can share content in social media from our content library. There is value-added and thought leadership
content, say, about the top five things you need to do when you get
married related to insurance, life insurance, etc. Our customers can
take that material and share it with their contacts, and really be that
resource in a very critical time in his life. It’s all designed to help
build authentic relationships and engage with the right customers at the
right time.
Gary touched on the social business element
of how you might use identification of key events at scale to engage
more effectively. Another angle that pertains to how these global
institutions are using our platform would be content distribution.
The standard way that brands get their message out to consumers,
prospects and clients is kind of a one-to-many approach, where you have
the corporate-approved message, it’s broadcast in a very big way and may
be localized a bit for specific markets, but it’s done through print or
CD or radio. One of the things that can be done through our platform is
localized content distribution in two models.
The first would be corporate-to-local, which is what we started —
taking corporate-approved content and suggesting it to certain groups of
individuals that represent your business. So, maybe you’re targeting
content based on a region or targeting based on a specialty of what you
sell or who you sell to. We allow those local individuals, be they in
support or sales or marketing, to fine-tune the message for their
immediate audiences. This helps get a more relevant conversation going
at a local level through the person who represents the brand, rather
than just the brand itself.
The other area we’ve been able to support is what we’d call
local-to-corporate flow of content. Through our platform, when you’ve
got thousands or even tens of thousands of employees on our solution
distributing content, they’re doing a lot of very unique things at local
levels that may work on a global scale and inform the corporate
marketing teams.
Can you give an example of how something happening at a company on a local level moved out to a wider audience?
Yeah, there’s an interesting story from a
global insurance company where they had an insurance agent who published
a piece of content in his hometown in Ohio. He took a picture of a sign
that was made at a Little League baseball field basically saying, “Hey,
parents, chill out. It’s a Little League game. You know, we’re all here
to cheer on the kids. You can stop yelling at them.”
That post went viral within his local community as a nice message
from a local insurance agent, a leader in the community. There was a
spike on the reports, so much so that the corporate marketing team said,
“Oh, this agent in Ohio seemed to have a message that really caught
on.” So they took his post and suggested it to a number of his peers
across the country.
And what happened is that post also worked in a number of other local
markets where Little League was happening, and all of a sudden there
was a very positive brand association between this insurance company and
Little League community baseball. It ended up going so viral that Major
League Baseball heard about it and reached out to the insurance company
and said, “We’d like to sponsor the purchase of tens of thousands of
these signs to be distributed through these insurance agents at a local
level — and furthermore, we want to buy these signs from a customer of
that local insurance agent who makes signs for a living.”
So that was a flow of content, enabled via social, which went from
local to corporate. The platform helped corporate figure out how to
listen locally for events that are relevant that either can have a more
global impact or can help lead to a specific one-to-one sale.
I’ll touch on just one more, and that’s the way we enable corporate
organizations to have some visibility into trends on local levels. Maybe
there’s a certain amount of change in the job sector happening in a
region. Or maybe there’s a concentration of people purchasing new homes
in a certain area based on the social data we’re gathering at the local
level. What we’ve seen some of the more sophisticated organizations do
is take this data to their internal analytics and statistics teams and
ask how the data should affect the company’s regional advertising,
content marketing and sales strategy, both locally and globally.
And we’ll see this affect their marketing campaigns on a global
level, where they adjust their message based on the significant events
that are happening so that targeted content is made more relevant to
specific regions. It kind of goes back to what Gary was saying — the
right content for the right person at the right time, tying marketing
more closely to sales. And that’s been a key for us over the last four
years.
I assume your platform can be tailored to whatever situation the particular agent finds himself in, correct?
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So whether it’s
multiple languages or multiple workflows or different things that need
to be archived, it’s completely configurable from a settings perspective
for each business to use the product wherever they need to.
Just to be clear, when you’re dealing with
these very large companies and you’re talking to them about how to
enable their field sales, this is an enterprise-class solution, so it’s
not something you can download from the app store and deploy and do all
these things. There’s a need for risk management and regulation
compliance, and an element in terms of workflow for approvals if it’s
going to be secure and adhere to regulatory standards depending on the
line of business.
Each company has its own risk profile, so it can turn on and turn off
certain things. Companies also need to be sure all social media
communications from employees follow their general communications
policies, of which social media is obviously now a very important
channel.
Hearsay Social recently moved into the U.K. and Europe. What are the
big similarities and differences between those two markets? How do you
handle global differences in social media — or do you?
Well, we have pre-existing relationships
with global financial services and insurance companies which began with
our U.S. relationships. From a global perspective, these are some of the
largest insurance companies in the world. They operate on a global
scale, as opposed to some other U.S. firms [that] are a bit more
confined to the U.S. market.
When we began to support some of our European rollouts from the U.S.,
European business units unanimously agreed that they are a year or two
behind the U.S. in terms of social media maturity. It’s kind of
interesting, because they may have skipped some of the early steps where
they focus a ton on brand building, and they’re moving more towards the
ROI of social. They’re saying, “We don’t want to spend two years
listening globally, trying to identify who loves us and who hates us.
Let’s figure out what we can do that actually drives sales and revenue.”
They’re moving faster toward that area, learning from what the rest of
the world has done. So we’ve been supporting a number of rollouts across
continental Europe — Germany, France, Switzerland, plus a couple
others.
Certainly, the consistent challenges of supporting those rollouts
from San Francisco and New York led to the move to London. It was an
acknowledgment that the market in Europe is really almost as large, if
not as large, as the U.S. market when it comes to financial
institutions, both insurance and banks. We can support them much better
from a local perspective as we hire individuals with local language
support and understanding of the local markets.
As we’re moving into Europe, we’re helping companies focus on our
four social business steps, which are, one, get found; two, grow your
network and build that local community of friends, family, colleagues,
past university classmates; three, research and act on signals by
identifying those key life events; and four, build credibility as an
opinion leader through relevant and timely content distribution.
But one of the important differences in Europe is making sure that we
get a solid base with our early customers on those first two steps
before they really move aggressively into the latter two steps in our
social business best practices.
You hit on the similarities. Europe is a couple of years behind,
perhaps, but they’re gaining fast. Do you find any differences in the
markets?
There’s a bit more skepticism in some of
continental Europe, specifically in locations like Germany and
Switzerland, where data security and privacy are historic issues, and
they want to make sure that their reputations are protected and that
none of the local laws are broken.
And what gives us an advantage in these locations is the configurable
nature of our software, where you can start with just creating
presences or having marketing-based conversations, without digging into
significant local events.
But it’s kind of impossible to deny the momentum across Europe. The
local Internet population that is using Facebook is increasing about 10%
every year there, and when our customers see that the attention is
shifting to these channels, there is certainly acknowledgment that they
need to move.
It must be a big challenge for larger
companies with compliance issues, such as financial management firms, to
know how much autonomy to allow individual sales people who are setting
up their own Facebook pages or Twitter feeds.
Andrew: That’s one of the other big things that’s
similar in Europe to the U.S. Salespeople are opportunistic. Individuals
who represent the brand are already out there doing so, even if it’s
against corporate policy and even if there’s no support from corporate.
They recognize an opportunity and when they walk into a meeting, it very
quickly switches from “our policy is that employees cannot use social
media” to wanting to represent themselves online from a business
perspective in the most effective way.
From early on, Hearsay Social encountered having to build compliance
solutions for social media around archiving, around workflow management,
around roles and entitlements for very large enterprise companies. We
figured that if we’re going to build software that the Fortune 500 is
going to use, it needed to scale, it needed to be global, and it needed
to fit into complex organizational hierarchies.
What we found is that it often depends on what the local individual
is selling. If they’re selling financial-related products as opposed to
property and casualty insurance, the regulations are going to change
based on the type of salesperson and the products they’re able to sell.
But at a high level, some of the regulations that apply are basic
archiving of conversations. You can draw a parallel between emailing a
bank or an advisor. They would need to maintain a record of that
conversation that if called upon they could pull that up and show the
record of the interaction.
There would be different requirements based on the industry and
location of that individual, how long it needs to be retained and the
methodology about how it needs to be stored. Often it needs to be WORM
compliant, which is an acronym for “write once, read many.” It’s a way
to store data. That same model applies to social data. Some
conversations may need to be stored for x amount of time.
That said, one of our products is called the Rogue Page Finder, and
what it’s designed to do is identify where these brands have local field
agent representation across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We can run a
report before we go into a meeting with corporate to say, “Actually, we
found that you have 200 local Facebook business pages, 300 Twitter
handles and a thousand LinkedIn profiles. We understand your internal
corporate policy, but...”
“... but here’s what’s actually happening with your salespeople.”
Exactly. That’s a very real scenario that
was happening in the U.S. three or four years ago. Now, we’re seeing
that repeat a bit in Europe. For larger companies, there’s a bit of a
scramble. They’re at the point where they know, okay, our policy isn’t
working and we now know we have no way to surveil against this. Are we
going to completely block these networks on a global scale? Or, are we
going to find a way to protect and empower?
What do you say to skeptics who may be not as keen on the utility of the platform that you’re offering?
This kind of goes back to the early
reputation of social media. I would do presentations at a conference
with people who were not excited to hear another social media
presentation, right? Social has its reputation almost being a little bit
spammy; it’s about how many followers and likes can I acquire as fast
as possible, and it’s another place marketing can sink money into and
try to justify it.
And I think that reputation was deserved in a lot of ways, where
people were just replicating their corporate web presences on social
presences and paying to acquire what they would consider to be fans and
followers that might not be relevant in any way to their business. They
learned that if you give away an iPad, yes, people will like your page.
But that’s not actually helping your business.
Our method has always been about driving sales for your business
through the people that do your sales. That might be sales or support
staff, who might be relationship people; it might be the marketing team.
The best way we are able to do this with skeptics is through tangible
case studies that show an increase in sales.
And it’s really no sexier than that. Sometimes it’s reports that
we’ve done with third parties to show that relationship sellers who have
started to use social see a 25% lift in sales, or it’s insurance
companies that have closed the loop and shown that all the way from
first social connection to social conversation to lead in their CRM
software to a closed new policy as designated by the rep that, yes, this
deal happened because of an interaction on social media.
I’ll give you an example. I was in Barcelona recently and was with a
company that we visited a year and a half ago. They were absolute
skeptics about social media. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t
believe it was important for their local market. But I told them, “I
think Spain has the highest level of Facebook adoption in Europe.”
We convinced them to do a survey of their agents. And what they found
was that, of 300 agents they surveyed randomly, I believe it was 80%
said they wanted support from their corporate organization for a social
media program. Those agents believed there was value, and they wanted
some way to more effectively do it. And of the 300 surveyed, 60% said
they were already starting to do it in some way or another.
What was the conversation like when they came back with the survey results? Were they suitably aghast?
Andrew: Exactly.
A question about adoption for a multinational, taking Hearsay Social
across the world. How do you advise a company in one country to
implement the tool in other regions of the world?
Gary, did you want to add something to close?
Just that for our larger customers, as we’ve
been working with them and showing progress and success, and as they
continue to buy more seats for their users, they’re hearing a lot of
good anecdotes from the field. For many of them, the use of social for
business is going from “optional” to “recommended” to “mandatory.”
In addition to the ROI that Chris mentioned, it’s becoming
commonplace that in order to be considered credible as a salesperson in
the field or as a relationship manager, you have to be able to be found
on Google, whose search rankings are based in large part on social
network presence. To succeed, they simply have to be where their
customers are now.
Guided selling
Guided selling
is a process that helps potential buyers of products or services to
choose the product best fulfilling their needs and hopefully guides the
buyer to buy. It also helps vendors of products (e.g. brands, retailer)
to actively guide their customers to a buying decision and thus
increases their conversion rate.
Guided selling simplifies and automates the maintenance and
deployment of all knowledge that is required to analyze customer needs,
define the solution, and generate a proposal to fulfill those needs. A
functional definition of the solution is provided to the customer,
complete with commercial aspects of the proposal, such as prices,
margins, texts, illustrations, and lay-outs. In addition, the technical
specification of the solution (such as bills of materials and routings)
is generated for manufacturing and distribution.
Process and Practice
Guided selling is put in practice with an information system that
supports the central management and maintenance of knowledge;
furthermore, the system supports the use of this knowledge by web
services such as online product advisors, customers, dealers and sales
representatives. Such knowledge is stored in semantic knowledge models;
these models are interacted with by means of questionnaires and
explanations to / feedback options to product recommendations. The
knowledge stored is related to functional, commercial and technical
aspects of the customer needs and the possible solutions. The
proposal-specific functions of guided selling are recommender systems,
product advisors, product configuration, technical calculations,
commercial calculations and document generation.
Guided selling-solutions are applied in the following use cases:
Websites of online-shops, product manufacturer websites and service
providers. Guided selling-solutions are used to analyse user
requirements and generate buying recommendations to make sure
online-shoppers find the product best fitting to their needs
Kiosk-applications, call-center solutions and instore-devices in
specialised trade stores. Goal is to help the potential buyer and / or
the sales representative or service agent to efficiently guide through
the product selection and purchasing process.
Guided selling does not address the internal, private, offline, or
behind-the-scenes decision issues that buyers must address before they
are ready to make a solution choice.
Goal and Approach
The goal of Guided Selling-solutions is to bring together potential
buyer's needs and products or services that fulfill his needs in order
to facilitate buying decisions. The Guided Selling-system asks questions
and offers answer options that help the online-shopper to learn about
and define his needs, even for complex and technical solutions. At the
same time, the vendor understands step by step the refined customer
needs. Guided Selling-Systems increase the shopping experience and the
usability of the website since they typically offer a better access to
the product assortment than done by filtering systems or free text
search.
Guided Selling-Process
Guided Selling-Systems put in practice the following Guided
Selling-Process to advice, convince and sell (based on the
need/solution-placement dynamic):
understand the customer's needs: The potential customer is
asked for his buying needs. The product characteristics that are
relevant to a buying decision are explained. Since the Guided
Selling-System explains product attributes and use cases, buyers are
enabled to express their needs, refine existing needs and discover new
needs. Helping the customer to understand his needs and then really
understand the attributes important to him is key to calculate product
recommendations that fit the customer's requirements.
analyse customer's needs: Consumers typically can express
buying desires, but not technical specs - a consumer knows how he wants
to use the product, but not which exact technical requirements are
needed. A Guided Selling-System must thus be able to translate buying
desires expressed in consumer language (e.g. "I need a business
notebook") or concrete, but non-technical product attributes ("a fast
processor") in technical product specifications (e.g. a certain
processor type, hard disk size, operating system, RAM-size).
recommend products: The technical product specifications
inferred from the customer's needs need to be matched on the fact sheets
of the available products. In order to calculate valuable product
recommendations, it is not enough to filter out products that just
fulfill the requirements expressed by the user. However, all relevant
product attributes need to be evaluated and matched against the user
requirements. Product attributes that are always beneficial (e.g. longer
battery lifetime) need to be treated accordingly. If no product
fulfills all requirements, the Guided Selling-System needs to calculate
alternatives that come close to the actual requirements.
provide buying arguments and convince the customer: The goal
of the Guided Selling-System is to objectively advise the potential
buyer, create trust in the product recommendations and the products
offered and thus turn prospects into buyers. Thus, each product
recommendation needs to be explained using a reasoning engine and the
advantages / disadvantages of each recommendation need to be shown.
Technology Required
Guided Selling-solutions are software systems. The Guided
Selling-software allows to simulate a dialog to find out the buyer's
needs. A matching technology then maps the needs on technical product
details and matches the buyer's profile with the available products.
Guided Selling-systems are a kind of Recommender systems. Other than Collaborative filtering
that calculates recommendations based on historical data (e.g. website
usage data such as "users who watched this product also watched these
other products"), Guided Selling-systems rather analyse the individual
user's input to calculate recommendations that best fulfil his personal
needs. Guided Selling-systems thus require product information (fact
sheets). Goal of this approach is to calculate objective recommendations
that are based on the individual user's needs.
Boundaries
Guided Selling-Systems are different from Recommender systems
in the way that statistical recommenders calculate recommendations
based on usage data instead of the actual user input to a questionnaire.
The advantage of Guided Selling to recommender systems is an
objectively calculated product proposal and a needs-based product advice
that usually has a higher quality than products suggested by
recommender systems. The drawback is that Guided Selling-Systems need
domain-specific knowledge about the product category whereas recommender
systems (at least Collaborative filtering can work across all product categories of e.g. a website.
