Better User Experience Podcast #23: Two Keys to Improve Your Sales Funnel

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Today is the day that if you’re a small business owner, reminds you that you’re not dead. Because if you were dead you wouldn’t be mailing in your quarterly tax payment.

The thing is, doing your taxes can feel like a fate worse than death. And even when you stay on top of it, it still manages to be a hassle.

This week, we look at several online accounting software solutions. But we don’t look at their products. We look at how they sell their product on their website.

Key 1: Speak Their Language

Users want a website to speak their language. As a website, it’s not enough to say what you mean, you also have to say it in a way lets visitors hear your message. In the FreshBooks tour, rather than talking about “invoices”, “expenses”, and “how you can extend your software by using 3rd party plugins” they do this:

It’s all about getting paid, managing your books, and adding other features. That’s a message that any business person can process. It’s how they talk.

The dry words – invoicing, billing, and so on – while being a big part of keeping books – don’t resonate. It’s a foreign tongue.

Key 2: Tell Their Story

The more we looked at FreshBooks the more we noticed that they don’t show you their product. You don’t earn that until you Try It For Free.

It’s a brilliant bit of distancing.

What they do instead is tell my story as a small business. They break it down into 3 digestable hunks above and then pull out the specific tools in their product and talk about how that solves my issue.

For example, in the first bit “It’s all about Getting Paid” these are the following sub-headings:

Get paid fast with online payments
Hassle free invoice follow-up
Professional invoicing
Pull time & expenses into your invoices
Recurring invoices & payments
Invoice clients in any currency
Send invoices via email or snail mail

They address all of the common invoicing needs for small businesses and say so, simply. Their message is we get who you are.

And its effect is that it’s a trust builder. It makes you think that these are the kind of people that you can trust with your financial data.

Also on the podcast…

We also talk about Newman’s current A/B Test that he’s running and go through our recipe for a smoothie we’re calling The Purple Dinosaur.

The Purple Dinosaur Smoothie

1/2 banana
1/2 apple
1/2 pear
handful of spinach/kale
12-15 blackberries
1/2 cup water
handful of ice cubes

Directions: blend spinach/kale mix and water for 30 seconds first. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend until smooth. Pour and serve immediately.