Selling Big-Ticket Items on Enterprise Websites

When it comes to selling big-ticket items, throw out everything you know about eCommerce!  A shopping basket on steroids is not going to cut the mustard. Let's look at selling luxury and high-value goods in the age of artificial intelligence, mass transactions, and quick turnarounds.

The Landscape

Premium products aren't always luxury items like fast cars, private jets, or gold watches. They could be less obvious items like tropical islands, sports teams, elite businesses or heavy equipment. In all these cases, the following applies:

1. The market is small
2. Leads are typically from referrals
3. A simple purchase is not the objective
4. Advertising is not focused on selling 
5. Relationships are everything
6. Quality dominates price

The Objectives

Websites selling premium products must have much loftier objectives:

• Establish the quality of the brand
• Create trust (in the company and product)
• Make it easy to start a conversation

Clear and simple messaging is more important than listing product features and the benefits of ownership are foremost. Unlike eCommerce websites, words like money, value, fast and easy are not necessary. Techniques like chat and popups look cheap.

In cases where a referral has occurred, the website becomes a tool that confirms the product is high quality and supported by a trustworthy competent company and management team. The site must articulate this with an immaculate experience to further validate the quality of the product. Case studies from satisfied purchasers often work well as can be seen in this great example.

The Call To Action

Like eCommerce websites, getting visitors to take action is still a priority. A Clear Call to Action and rapid response is very important. A 2011 study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that lead responses should be within five minutes to avoid losing them altogether.

When the pre-sales conversation happens it should reinforce the trust already established by the website. Initial conversation should be about gathering information. Again, price is not mentioned until the requirements are fully understood by both parties. In time, when the benefits of ownership become obvious pricing can be disclosed.

To summarize, when selling big-ticket items your website should be minimalist and focus on creating trust and promoting your brand.

FuseIT

At FuseIT we use Sitecore, an enterprise technology perfectly suited for building websites that promote big-ticket products. Our expertise is making website behavior available to the sales team (in Salesforce) so they have additional pre-sales call intelligence. Please contact us if you want to learn more about Sitecore and our S4S product.