How to close more merchants

We’ve all heard that saying “”People love to buy, but hate to be sold,” right? Well, this applies across the board, even (and sometimes especially) in business to business sales. Now, for every merchant who voiced this complaint, I’d wager that there are another five merchants who turned down the deal site salesperson because they felt they were ‘being sold,’ or they declined to run another deal with that same salesperson.

We’ve seen this lot even in the deal industry. Almost every time one of us at Daily Deal Builder goes out to dinner with our wives/girlfriends, or we visit other types of establishments, we like to talk to merchants. We ask them if they’ve run a daily deal. Many have, and so we ask them how it went and we get the full spectrum of responses, and it’s truly disappointing to hear any merchant say they had a poor experience simply because they were pushed into running a deal without the salesperson thoroughly explaining how everything works. This caused the merchant to oversell, or undersell, or not price their deal correctly, or in the worst case scenario caused a merchant to go out of business.

This is the same problem we’ve all experienced with used car salesmen, or those people at malls that hose you down with cologne before you had a chance to politely decline. Half of the art of closing a deal is treating people well, and by that I mean take a minute to get to know the person before launching into your sales pitch; teach them something about their industry they might not have known. Make the merchant feel like even if they decline to accept your sales pitch they walked away from the meeting with you smarter and armed with more knowledge to better succeed in their industry. Then, when the day comes when they decide to run a deal, they’re going to remember you, and call you.

This is the same old information you find in any sales related industry, and I don’t really understand why in the deal industry ‘the sale’ is treated differently. It’s almost as though the salespeople for deal sites truly believe they are helping the merchant more than the merchant is helping them/the deal site. I for one say the opposite is true and it’s time to close more merchants in the deal industry selling them right!

I was just surfing around through Daily Deal Press and came across an article about how VC's are still enthusiastic about eCommerce website. The headline got my attention, and is mostly about how VCs are still tossing money at deal websites despite the post-IPO ordeal of Groupon.

According to Daily Deal Media’s Megan Bildner,

“While personal Daily Deal WebSites such as LivingSocial have experienced similar appraisals decreases, continuous financial commitment in e-commerce/flash product revenue seem to indicate that VCs view the daily offers business structure, which mainly works as a traffic car owner for third-party companies, in a different light as opposed to e-commerce organizations with real customer experiencing product revenue functions. Overall, the personal e-commerce industry has continuous to produce powerful interest from traders looking to take advantage of the new reproduce of online retail store organizations looking to affect current product revenue designs or take advantage of large fragmented customer sectors.”

This is a good indication for organizations operating deal websites as well as anyone looking to get into the area.

Now, a quick product of observe here is that Groupon is not seated around twiddling its thumbs. Groupon is out strongly making products in a lot of different areas, but that is doing little in the short-term for the stock price. And as we at Daily Deal Builder have said for a few years now we still see the decrease of the big gamers like Groupon to be a advantage for small sized, market gamers in the offer area.

Would you purchase a regular deal site?