Here’s a scary admission, one that I hope won’t make you turn and run: I used to sell double glazing for a living. It was a long time ago, I was young and naive and I didn’t know any better, I was barely out of school. What did I know?

While I was working as a salesperson, tramping around damp Bournemouth housing estates knocking on doors and being turned away more often than I’d have liked, I learnt a few things about selling. The biggest lesson was that I definitely didn’t want to do it for a living, but besides that I learnt that people are actually incredibly receptive to sales messages so long as you pitch them properly. If you respect a person’s point of view, if you’re polite and courteous, and if you’re not aggressive, then most people will at least listen to what you have to say before closing the door and complaining about people knocking on the door at all hours.

How does this apply to the web?

One thing that has always struck me as a little odd is the distinct separation between website technical people, the developers and designers who make things happen, and the sales people in charge of marketing products to the customer. Techies, on the whole, tend to shy away from any sort of overt marketing on their websites, preferring to do things that they believe won’t annoy or irritate the customer.

The problem that I’m leading to here is simple – things that we think would annoy the customer very often don’t. People aren’t all turned off by the same things. And so long as your message is delivered in a courteous and polite way people will usually sit and read it before leaving. If you’re a technical person, and you don’t have any sales experience, you probably shouldn’t be the one deciding on the marketing messages on a website.

Case Study: Ling’s Cars

Ling’s website, on first viewing, looks a lot like someone vomited it on to your browser. It’s harsh, brash and garish, it flashes and it scrolls. If you talk to a techie about it you’ll hear talk of how it looks old, out-of-date and awful.

lingscars

Despite this apparent design disaster the website works. Ling makes a living from her business, and employs 5 staff. It might seem counter-intuitive from the perspective of a developer, but that’s because, and this might be a harsh reality, developers don’t always know how to promote a business. Ling’s publicity message is that of “cheap!”. Her leasing prices reflect that. A crisp, beautiful website would give the user the wrong impression.

To draw an analogy to the high street, Ling is the equivalent of Primark. If a typical Primark customer walked in to find beautiful, tidy shelves filled with neatly folded clothing, lit with soft white pearl light and Mozart playing in the background as you might find in a high-end boutique, they’d turn around and leave. Their first impression wouldn’t be “isn’t this lovely”, it’d be “I can’t afford this”. Your website needs to reflect the needs and wants of the customer. If the customer wants cheap then it’s got to look cheap.

So how do we fix this problem?

Ideally all web developers should have some sales experience but that’s not a practical solution. Instead I suggest that if you’re a web developer you should try reading some books about selling, about marketing, and about how customers think. Customers are a strange breed who don’t appear to think like rational human beings some of the time. If you’re a client commissioning a website you need to make sure that your web development company understands the way you do business – do not assume that they will understand who you sell to and how your customers like to be addressed. You’re the expert in the way that you do business. Communicate that expertise to the people working for you.

What this doesn’t mean is that web developers and designers should ignore their experience and just do whatever the client asks. There are things that don’t work online that do work offline. The development of a new website needs to be a collaboration between the client and the developer.