Why faceless exchanges on the web can damage your sales

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Web 2.0! How about Cottage Industry 2.0!
Copyright Henry Winter and The Livewirebusiness.com 2007
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When the web first started it was created as an information exchange.

It helped create the "Global Village".

Direct marketers saw it as a sales exchange. Joe Bloggs saw it as a money exchange and a life style exchanger, a route to make bags of money, with an autopilot system for mega bucks, no effort and could spend all day on the beach. Maybe, but it's harder than they think.

Now the web is a crowded place, everyones web site is screaming with bolder headlines,
hyped product launches come and go (many still with great product), but the audience
is now more educated, increasingly sceptical and harder to convince.

Why? Because the web has made them so. It enables them to learn more, review more things
more quickly, attend forums that can burn you before you start. They have become a more educated consumer, education brings knowledge and that can produce resistance to sales messages. The more informed they are the more pertient things they will need to know and they will ask you more searching questions of your business and what you do, too.

In the Pre industrial age businesses were "cottage" industries, local, community based. The industrial revolution changed all that, the country side emptied as everyone was attracted to the cities for employment and money. But now the reverse is happening.

The Global Village is now re enabling "Village" living. The web enables total connectedness so you can work any where, and many are now choosing to vacate the crowded cities, head for the hills, and enjoy a more flexible quality of life. "Cottage" industry is returning to the countryside, it has become fresh again. Businesses, large or small, can be run "virtually". You may still need to go to the city offices to please the powers that be, but that may now be just 1-2 days a week, if you remain in "employment" but more and more people are discovering their own entrepreneurial flair, enabled by the web.

Cottage industry was about knowing thy neighbour, knowing their wants from bumping into them on the street, or at socials or gatherings and sales were made from a solid base of knowledge and relationship. The web, whilst enabling dispersed communication, sales letters and sites to be put up, and processes to be put in place to capture a lead, enter a dialogue, convert a sale, and develop the customer, made all that more remote, with no intervention. Great at the start but beginning to fail now.

Increased resistance and with prospects and customers being in more control, can be overcome by reactivating the cottage industry values, values of personal contact and relationship building, still via the web, but at point of enquiry, point of sale and on an ongoing basis. How?

By incorporating interactive web tools that enable immediate contact with a web site visitor, right off your home page (or any other page fo that matter). They and you can see each other, talk to each other, exchange cyber handshakes. It's like bumping into them in the street again, except you are in New York and they are in Northampton, UK or any where else for that matter. That way the visitor can ask you questions, seek information, there, and then when they are hot on the trail of their purchase of product or service. They and you can start building a sales relationship, personally.

You can pick up immediate feedback on what you do, you can guide them to more information, a lead capture page, send them information and many more applications besides. Interactvity tools and sales systems can make the site visitor experience better, more personal and convert more. Try it. Talk to me live.

Long live web 2.0 - Long live Cottage Industry 2.0.