For ecommerce businesses, a lot of the traditional advice for sales teams about positive body language, active listening, and punchy presentations no longer apply. Modern, leaner businesses often lack formal sales teams. Instead, they attract their prospects through marketing, rather than a sales call or sales pitch. In fact, many don’t actually speak directly to their customers to close deals.
Effective sales techniques are different for ecommerce businesses, which must draw in their customers and effectively showcase the product and the need it fulfills—sometimes without a single direct conversation. Here’s an overview of traditional sales techniques and how to use aspects of them to promote your ecommerce business.
What are sales techniques?
Sales techniques refer to the strategies, methods, and approaches you or your sales professionals use to persuade potential customers to purchase your product or service. They often center on understanding the customer’s needs and guiding them toward deciding that your solution is the right one.
For many ecommerce businesses, effective selling means conveying these messages through marketing, including eye-catching website design, high-quality product descriptions, interactive assets, and more.
Effective sales techniques
“No single method will be the right answer for every business or even every situation within an individual company,” says Shawn Khemsurov, co-founder of Electric Eye, an agency that helps ecommerce brands sell more through strategic design and development.
“The core of most of these processes comes down to an important basic concept,” Shawn says. “You should always be guided by the needs of your customers. Focus on that, and you won’t get overwhelmed.”
Although there is no one-size-fits-all method, here are some of the top sales techniques:
SPIN sales technique
Sales consultant Neil Rackham coined the term SPIN in his 1988 book SPIN Selling. This method instructs you to ask potential customers questions about their situation, problem, implications, and need-payoff (SPIN), which reveals their objections to buying your product. This technique includes the following:
- Ask them to set the stage about their current situation.
- Zero in on the main problem they face.
- Muse about the implications of not solving the problem.
- Prompt the customer to consider how things would improve if they found a solution. (What is the need-payoff?)
The goal is to guide the potential buyer to recognize their need for your product. As the seller, you can take a conversational and fact-finding approach, rather than resort to a hard sell.
SNAP sales technique
Sales strategist Jill Konrath describes this sales technique in her 2010 book SNAP Selling. It focuses on making the sales process more straightforward and effective. SNAP stands for “simple, invaluable, align, priority,” and it encourages you to do the following:
- Keep the sales message simple.
- Demonstrate why your solution is invaluable.
- Always align with the buyer’s goals.
- Help the buyer see why solving this problem should be a top priority.
NEAT sales technique
The Harris Consulting Group and Sales Hacker developed this system, which focuses on identifying a customer’s core needs and pain points. This makes it clear which prospects aren’t a fit for your product, ensuring only qualifying leads enter the top of your sales funnel.
The NEAT (needs, economic impact, authority, timeline) method urges a sales team to dive deeply into the buyer’s perspective in the first meeting to do the following:
- Understand their core needs and challenges.
- Demonstrate the economic impact of the product or service.
- Persuade the prospect to champion this solution to the authority or final decision-maker.
- Set a timeline for the decision-making process.
Solution selling
Similar to the NEAT method, solution selling emphasizes the importance of understanding your potential customers’ needs and challenges, rather than just pushing your product or service. By knowing their pain points, you can offer them customized solutions built around your products.
With this approach, members of your sales team behave more like knowledgeable consultants, demonstrating the value and benefits your products could bring to prospective customers’ lives or businesses.
Tips for effectively selling
- Offer solutions
- Invest in your website
- Leverage visual assets
- Highlight customer testimonials
- Provide personalized recommendations
- Use digital marketing tools
- Analyze, test, and optimize
Even if you decide to use a specific selling method, many other factors can figure into how you formulate your sales pitch. Here are some sales tips:
Offer solutions
From your landing page to your product descriptions, the copy across your website should draw in prospects based on their needs and highlight how your solution can help.
“Depending on the product, your description could be bullet points, two paragraphs, or more,” Shawn says. “The point is to concisely explain what your product will do for your customer and what problem it solves. This is the basis of sales, so it’s important to get right. Step back and ask yourself what questions your customer would have and the top things they need to know.”
Invest in your website
Optimize your site’s user experience, with responsive design across both desktop and mobile devices. Storefront designs should be eye-catching, but your site must also be easy to navigate.
“A lot of ecommerce selling is about making people feel comfortable,” Shawn says. “There are so many trust factors—areas where you can gain or lose trust. Your site has to look professional. Customers need to understand what they’re buying and from who. If something feels sketchy, people won’t buy.”
Streamline the sales process with intuitive navigation, clear calls to action, and a user-friendly checkout process. A professional-looking design will bolster your brand’s credibility and foster trust.
Leverage visual assets
Copy is crucial for descriptions, but many sales pages for products and services also benefit from graphic elements. Close-up images of a product’s texture or a video of a product or service in action help ecommerce customers better understand the sales pitch.
You don’t necessarily need a professional photographer, but quality counts. Your photos and videos should be clear and crisp.
Highlight customer testimonials
Follow up with customers to encourage them to leave reviews of their purchases. Consider adding an incentive, like a $5 discount code for their next purchase. Highlight reviews and customer testimonials on your site to win credibility with potential buyers.
“Seeing other customer reviews is huge validation: It’s a trust factor because I can see other people bought this and did receive their product,” Shawn says. “Social proof is huge with ecommerce.”
While positive reviews are ideal, negative ones provide an opportunity for you to show you’re committed to ensuring satisfied customers. “Respond publicly to the review to show that someone’s reading, someone cares, and the company is working to make it right, “ Shawn says. “It goes a long way to show there’s a person behind the brand.”
Provide personalized recommendations
Personalization makes your customer’s shopping experience more enjoyable and engaging, increasing the chance of upselling and cross-selling additional offerings.
Some platforms, such as the Shopify Search & Discovery app, display recommended products that are complementary or related to products the customers have already searched for on your product pages. You can also provide recommended products with targeted emails.
Use digital marketing tools
Beyond product recommendations, leverage email marketing campaigns to stay in touch with your customers, nurturing the relationship and potential for sales. Promote new products, offer targeted or sitewide promotions, and follow up with customers who abandoned their shopping carts.
To attract new customers, search engine optimization (SEO)—placing popular keywords within site content and metadata—is a powerful tool to improve your site’s visibility. “Platforms like Shopify have SEO features built in, and it’s an organic and free way to get your site more juice in search rankings,” Shawn says.
Consider also using retargeting ads, which web pages display to customers who visited your site but didn’t make a purchase. They’ll see these ads as they move around the web, potentially encouraging them to return to your website and complete their purchase.
“You might try one of these tools at a time,” Shawn says. “Then once you master it, you move forward with the next. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you, but taking it one step at a time can help you stay focused.”
Analyze, test, and optimize
Selling does not work best as a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. There’s a lot of competition for a buyer’s attention, and you may need to change your selling techniques over time.
Consider running A/B tests to compare how different pricing or positioning affects buyers’ purchasing decisions, or experiment with a new software solution for SEO. The key is to keep a close eye on your sales data, which will help you improve the sales process for existing customers and attract new potential customers.
“If people visit the site but few are buying, you’ll want to focus on improving that conversion rate,” Shawn says. “If you do have a lot of customer sales, but they don’t buy much, you might look to improve average order value. Your sales goals should be aligned with your business goals.”
Sales techniques FAQ
What are the key techniques of sales?
Proper sales techniques encompass a range of strategies for persuading customers to make a purchase. The most effective sales techniques center around understanding the customer’s needs and helping them decide that your solution is the right one.
Do sales techniques work?
Yes, selling techniques are effective at driving more sales when you apply them. The right approach to your overall sales strategy will depend on a variety of factors, such as the demographics of your target audience, the sales channels where your target audience prefers to shop, your specific product offering, market trends, and more.
What steps should be taken after a sale?
The best sales techniques don’t just end at the point of sale. Many sales professionals and ecommerce brands follow up with customers to ensure their satisfaction, invite them to provide feedback, and continue the relationship. These post-sales activities promote loyalty, nurture the brand-customer relationship, encourage repeat business, and potentially provide an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell additional products.
