Marketing Studies

The Sales Conversion Path is the online process that takes an online prospect and brings him to ultimately placing the order or any of the other key steps that aids you in your online sales process, be it in B2B or B2C online marketing.

One of the worst things you can do to hurt your Sales Conversion Path and thus your ultimate Sales Conversion Rate, is putting obstacles in front of the prospect during the sales cycle.

I especially see companies doing so with their E-commerce B2C Online Sales Cycle, usually by requesting the prospect to register and then log-in before completing the order.

While this can make perfect sense for an experienced internet veteran, our E-commerce tests at Studio Moderna show time and time again that shortening the E-commerce Sales Cycle always improves conversion.

In B2B, the Sales Conversion Path usually does not include making the final order online, but is rather focused on lead generation, lead qualification and lead education ... which still does not warrant for putting obstacles in our prospect's way.

To get the drift, just take a look at the SiteExecutive content management system website.

Their online Sales Conversion Path clearly includes demonstrating their product to interested prospects, which they are trying to do with a highlighted product demo.

Certainly an excellent idea ... up to the point where they want you to undergo a "difficult" registration process before giving you access to the demo. Of course, the process is used to generate leads and acquire data that will help SiteExecutive make the sale ...

However, placing the registration barrier in front of the product demo is just bad practice. There are other ways of capturing this data, for example by providing a how-to e-zine on content management, and so on, including an "additional information request" form after the demo.

The moral of this somewhat too long story is simple: don't put obstacles on your prospects' path when they are taking part in your Sales Conversion Process ... you'll just annoy them and in many cases lose them outright.