Thousands of businesses fail by giving their customers decision constipation. However, an excess of visual stimuli can actually hamper a customer’s decision-making. This is why streamlining the sales process is such an important part of closing the sale. You have to be able to help your customer arrive at a choice. Ken Courtright discusses the Black Velvet method, and how this can help you close more sales going forward. Let Ken help you help your customers buy from you.
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Black Velvet Selling
This is episode 72. This is called Black Velvet Selling. How many of you have ever been in a jewelry store where you’re looking at a bunch of jewelry and the jeweler says, “Which three of these do you like the best?” You pick out three pieces that you think are decent and they take a piece of black velvet, put it on the top of the display case, and all of a sudden you went from looking at hundreds of items to looking at just three. I’ve covered a little bit of this before but I’ve never covered it in exactly the way I’m going to talk about it now.
The question is, why does the jewelry store owner do that and have they done that forever? The answer is when you’re looking at many things and multiple different types of things, it’s easy to get distracted and to get what is called Decision Constipation. You can’t quite make up your mind and you buy nothing. The jeweler knows he must teach every sales rep that works for him the two steps of selling jewelry. First is, you build rapport. Second, you lay black velvet down and only give them three choices max. If you want to see another one, they’ll remove one of the three from the black velvet, put that back in the case and pull out another one. They will never pull out a fourth. That’s as far as I’ve ever seen.
When it comes to selling online, one of the biggest mistakes we see is people come to us and they say, “Can you please look at our website? We cannot figure out why our product isn’t selling.” I say, “Before I look at your website, can you grab a pen and paper? I want you to draw two squares. The square on the left, above that square, I want you to write “Landing Page.” Above the square on the right, I want you to write “Website.” Below the left square, I want you to write “Sell.” Below the right square, I want you to write “Prove.” In the middle of the left square at the bottom, I want you to write the words “More Info.” I want you to draw another smaller square above “More Info.” On the right side, I want you to scribble all over that square inside so it looks like it’s got jagged lines, a bunch of little squares inside the square so it looks messy.
For selling purposes, websites with lots of noise will be a train wreck. Click To TweetHere’s what we got going here. On the left side, we have a landing page. If you want to see an example of what I’m describing, go to our website, IncomeStore.com. That’s the right-side box. That’s a website that has a lot of navigation buttons, boxes, noise, colors and different fonts. For selling purposes, it’s a train wreck. We don’t ever sell from that website. However, if you add on that website /learn and go to IncomeStore.com/learn, you’ll see a similar color palette. You will not find any navigation buttons. You will not find anything, not a single thing except the sketch video. It’s the same sketch video that’s on the right-side website, but it removes everything else. If we send someone to a landing page, usually, it’s via a paper click campaign, a Facebook campaign or some referral mechanism.
We only send people to the landing page. The only option they have, it’s like the black velvet selling, they can either look at the sketch video or nothing. There are no navigation buttons to click on. The only other button they can click on is the More Info button. It takes you to the IncomeStore.com website. How does this work for you or for anybody? If you are going to sell, meaning you need to educate people. Everybody knows what their presentation is. Everybody must hear for them to buy something. That’s what you put in the sketch video. After they’ve heard what has to come first, they can click More Info and then you send them to the website. You sell on the landing page. You prove everything in the sketch video and everything you claim in the sketch video on your website. What’s on our website in the right-side box?
What’s on every website we’ve built it that we’ve either counseled people on or tweaked? It’s simple. It’s the repeat of the sketch video. It’s simply what can we put up, especially on the homepage and preferably if you can switch your website to some type of a parallax, which is a long scrolling homepage. What specifically goes on that page is proof. What kind of proof? Social proof, media clips, thumbnails of your book, thumbnails of your podcast, pictures of you with celebrities, speaking on stage, getting an award or your company getting an award. It’s proof that you are who you say you are and what you claimed in the sketch video can be trusted. If you can do that little two-step approach, which we call Black Velvet Selling, most companies that do that, it’s simply about how many different marketing campaigns can you get pushing into the landing page for split testing. I hope that helps. Take care.
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