Human versus Automated selling

Online selling generates a sales lead, makes the value presentation and closes the sale online without human involvement.  Amazon is the preeminent example of this, no one does it better.  Amazon's focus is to design an online selling process that never requires human involvement.

Offline selling generates a sales lead makes a portion of the value presentation online but closes the sale offline using a human sales person or customer service representative.  This can be done on the telephone, in live chat, email or at the seller or buyers location.  The critical factor is the need to provide a venue to extend the value presentation and re-enforce the benefits of the item or service under consideration.  This can be a highly variable interaction hence the term complex sale.  The question that must be answered in most cases is "is this item the best one for me or my individual business situation"? Making the sale depends on the skill, knowledge and credibility of the sales person who is answering this question.  At this point making the sale has little to do with views, clicks or conversion ratios.  It all depends on the human and that's tricky. 

For the past 100 years the world has been on a quest to automate every possible process to reduce labor cost and improve quality.  Machines do as they are told most of the time and don't call in sick.  A fully integrated online selling process leverages automation to reduce cost, improve reliability and efficiency.  The offline sales process leverages the lead generation power of online marketing but retains the age old challenges related to recruiting and managing sales people.

The offline sales process still has a significant human element that increases complexity and cost.  It also brings an array of human based issues that must be recognized and managed.  The human element adds a dynamic to the online selling process that few involved in e-commerce understand or appreciate.  This can be a huge issue when introducing online lead generation into a human based sales model.  We'll talk about this in later posts.

Thanks for reading.

Bill