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Length of sales cycles

Do people buy right away or come back and buy?

         

transactiongeek

12:36 am on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)



Any thoughts on the length of sales cycles?

I look through my log files on transactions and sometimes I see people coming from referers which they must have bookmarked or written down somewhere. My guess is that they came, liked what they saw, and came back later.

I am estimating 10-20% of my transactions are come backs, with the rest being immediate buys. My product is non tangible and less than $30.

bzprod

2:42 am on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think it definately depends on what you are selling. I sell a high priced item that is not an impulse buy. People who are spending $800 on my site usually research the product all over the internet and then buy over the phone. 1 out of 10 people on this site will purchase direct from my shopping cart.

This is where the importance of customer service comes in. I can sell the same product for $100 more than the other guys and still make the sale due to being available on the phone and answering emails as they come in.

I will be selling a lower priced product pretty soon, so it will be interesting to see how these numbers change.

-Patrick

fabfurs

4:07 am on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Same as bzprod

Sell expensive goods (up to 1.6K), client researches, comes back and buys (sometimes weeks later).

The diff between bzprod and us is that only about 2% need to phone in the order the rest use the cart.

tedster

5:32 am on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Lengthy sales cycles are the rule for some of my B2B clients. The person intially finding the page may not even be authorized to make a purchase, they're just doing research to build a short list for their boss.

One of the areas I'd love to get more ideas on is how to keep these long-cycle prospects warm. Newsletters can work ... well sort of, but they can be labor intensive.

It drives me crazy when I think of people who may have liked an offering but then sort of let it slip their mind. Same issues come up for big ticket items in the B2C arena.

CernyM

4:47 pm on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If you tend to attract prospects who are early in the evaluation cycle, and trying to come up the learning curve on a product space, you might consider white papers.

If you make them freely available and in PDF form, they are the sort of thing that people tend to print out and read. Then you have a document sitting on their desk, with your name, address and logo on it.

Sometimes, you can also force them to register, which gives you contact information to pass on to sales.

cfx211

5:46 pm on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I find I need to give my ad buys at least 3-4 months to figure out if they were worthwhile or not because that is the length of our sales cycle.

Our average order size is about $75 bucks, but we sell seasonal items related to an event. Often people start planning a few months in advance but don't buy until just before it.