Where’s the friction in your sales process?
As a customer, it’s easy to see where companies make it hard for us to do business with them. Can you see where you’re making it difficult for your customers? Do you know how you may be chasing away good prospects because of extra steps or friction? See how your customer experience may be hurting you, rather than helping.
Listen to this new 11-minute episode and find out where the friction is in your processes.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
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- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
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Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
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– Where’s the friction in your sales process? Listen to this episode and find out. Let’s do that again. Where’s the friction in your sales process? Listen to this episode and find out. I recently had the privilege of having Shep Hyken on my podcast as a guest. If you don’t know Shep, he is one of the leading customer service experts in the world. He’s written many books and I’m privileged that he’s a personal friend of mine as well, and I love his books. I actually have signed copies on my bookshelf here that I give out to some of my consulting clients. And Shep and I were talking about friction because, in probably my favorite of his books is called the “Convenience Revolution,” and he talks about reducing the friction. So where is the friction in your process? Where is the friction in what you’re doing with your customers that you don’t realize that you’re putting up these points that are adding friction to the process? Oh, actually, let me define that for you.
Friction is when someone is trying to do something, find something and they can’t easily do that. So, if you have on your website, let’s say a navigation menu up at the top, you know, home and about and whatever, and if it says services and I have to click on services and then it drops down to list and then sometimes even opens up a secondary list when you click on something. That’s friction because instead of being at the content that they want to be at, they have to click to find where to go to get the content they want. So with a lot of my clients, we’ve changed that. So if you do, let’s say weddings and corporate and mitzvahs and Quinces, and schools and whatever, we’ve actually put those as the top line menu. So someone comes in and they’re getting married, they click on weddings. Now, let me give you another idea of friction. Let’s say you’re a photographer. And I go to your website, and up at the top, one of the menu items is weddings. And I go there and it’s just a gallery, right. This is very common with photographers. Well, if it said wedding gallery, then I would know what I was going to find. But if it just says weddings, I think I’m going to find wedding information, which on many, many photographers sites, that’s not what’s there. So somebody gets there and they’re like, okay, I already saw your great pictures on Wedding Wire or The Knot or they’re or Instagram or Facebook or whatever. And now I went to your website, and now you’re showing me more pictures.
So I always say, you’re selling what, you’re not selling why they should hire you. Pages that are too long. Pages that are not good for mobile. These are all friction points. Have you noticed the restaurants lately, instead of giving you a menu, many restaurants are giving you a QR code on the table and you scan that and the menu comes up on your phone. Okay, I can get that. You’ll always have the most recent menu. They can add the specials. They can do a daily. It’s easier for them. Except I was at one the other day and I scan the QR code and the menu came up except the menu was basically just a PDF of the printed menu. And it was a big page, if you had to print it in your hand and it shrunk down really, really small on the phone, that’s friction. I don’t mind the idea of the QR code because I don’t have to wait for a waiter or waitress to give me a menu. I don’t have to worry about it being updated, but that’s friction. When now I open it up and you didn’t take the time to make that mobile friendly. So many of you are doing something similar where you’re sending someone a PDF, which if you listen to one of my most popular episodes here on why you shouldn’t be attaching a PDF to an initial inquiry response, same thing, you formatted your PDF, your PDF brochure or your price list for a letter size or A4 paper. We opened it on our phones. It’s just shrunk that down to the size of the phone screen: that’s friction.
I have to pinch to read what’s on here. Documents, somebody recently I was working with in consulting, their process was when someone signed up with them, they were sending them a PDF of a contract. That person then needed to print it. They needed to sign it, scan it and send it back or put it in the mail and send it back. Now there’s many, many friction points there. The biggest of which is that a lot of millennials and Gen Zs don’t have printers. Now, I didn’t realize this because I’m standing in an office that has two printers right here, a color laser printer and a color inkjet printer; an all-in-one so I can fax. A lot of people, still like fax? Who faxes? Every once in a while, somebody says to me, “Can you fax that to me?” And a lot of it could be with maybe medical stuff. I’ve probably seen that the most. Where they don’t want you emailing for privacy reasons. They want you faxing. Well talk about friction, you want somebody to fax something who doesn’t have a fax machine, or it doesn’t even have a real phone line, you know, a regular landline, you’ve added friction points to the process.
You notice the friction on the receiving end. You don’t notice the friction on the giving end. So you, as a business, when you say, “Well, let me try to get them on the phone,” or “Let me try to arrange a meeting right away. That works better for you. I totally get that. And again, one of my more popular podcast episodes is why you shouldn’t be doing that right away. On the receiving end of that it’s, well, why do I need to have a phone call with you? I just want some information. Why do I need to arrange a meeting with you or come in for a tour? I just want some information. And I had talked in another episode about a Reddit post that someone put frustrated in their wedding. You know, why do I have to tell you my vision, or my budget, or come in or have a phone call or an appointment to get some information and pricing. And one person said that the venue had them come in, gave them a wonderful tour. The person was very nice. They sat them down, and found out it was three times what they were looking to spend for their wedding. So they wasted both of their time.
Again, that’s friction, these people took time out of their day to come to that venue, only to find out it was never going to happen. That that’s not aspiration when you’re saying to someone spend a little bit more. The average couple spends 30 to 40% more than what their budget is when they start. But this was three times what their budget. Well, would have been nice to find that out ahead of time. However, if you ask someone their budget, it feels like an intrusive question if you’ve not given them any idea of pricing yet. So, if you want to be more transparent and give them an idea of pricing, then you can say, “Does something within here work for your budget?” There are going to be more for forthcoming. Transparency reduces the friction as well. So, when you’re working with a business, when you’re the customer, start thinking about the things that frustrate you. You go to a website and it’s not real mobile friendly, or the menu at the top isn’t sticky. What that means is when you scroll on a webpage, does the menu bar at the top, with all the navigation choices, stay at the top or do you have to go back up to the top to go to another page? And I know a lot of sites on mobile have a little arrow that’s kind of translucent in the bottom right corner, but not everybody knows that. And if it’s really translucent and if there’s a photo, I may not be able to see it. And that would just click to take me to the top of the page. Well, why not just have the menu stay there; that reduces the friction.
So a good thing to do in terms of website friction is to find a buddy and you go look at their website on mobile and have them look at your website on mobile, and make notes. But I mean go to every page. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of that customer, corporate customers, mitzvah customers, Quinces customers, wedding customers, schools, fundraisers, whatever types of events you do, have them go through every page and say, “Oh, you know, this print went off the edge of the page on mobile” or “this photo cutoff kind of funny,” or “I thought this was a link and it didn’t go anywhere” or “what about broken links?” Right, talk about friction. Somebody gets to your website, they’re looking for something, there’s a link and you click and then you get that 404 page not found message, right. So that’s friction as well. And some things get broken, not necessarily your fault. I’ve had sites; I’ve even had it on my site where you go to look at a video and it tells you that video link isn’t working anymore, and I had to go to Vimeo and fix the link or whatever was going on there. These are friction things.
Friction is costing you money. So take a figuratively, not literally, a can of WD40 or oil or grease or whatever you want and go and find all these friction points in your sales process, in your marketing process, in your advertising, and your website and make it so that somebody, when they’re doing business with you, they just get to the information they want without even really thinking about it because it’s so easy and so intuitive. And then they do what you want them to do, which is to contact you without even thinking, oh, do I need to contact them now? No, because you told them if you’d like to get one of my favorite calls to action. You’ve shown them great pictures. You’ve talked about the results to them. You’ve put social proof with short testimonials for people telling their actual results. And then you say, “If this is the way you want to feel about your wedding.” and your wedding fill-in-the-blank, photographer, videographer, band, DJ, florist, invitations, officiants, whatever it is, then you call, email, or contact us today, or to check the availability, to get a price quote, or to arrange a phone call or in-person meeting with us, call email, or contact us today. And then just make it easy to do it. Call should click to link to dial you, email should link to open an email, text, if that’s an option send there or WhatsApp. It should just make it as easy as possible to do that so that they’re not thinking, oh, what do I do next? Or worse, they just leave. So reduce the friction in the process, you will get more inquiries. You will do more business with people. The easier it is you are to do business with, the more people are going to want to do it, and the more they’re going to refer their friends. I hope this helps.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
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