An old sales trainer of mine used to teach his pupils to “Show the chain.  Sell the link.”  The phrase means that rather than trying to get people to make a major commitment early on, and rather than keeping people in the dark about where you intend to take them, you should tell people the process and get them to commit to just to the first step.  Many professionals outside of sales and marketing use a similar procedure.  Think about a doctor explaining a surgery or a lawyer explaining a trial and appeal process.  Fortunately, the doctor gets to stop selling links once they knock you out.  The rest of us aren’t so fortunate.  Every link is a miniature sale, and each of these baby sales has what we might call an abandonment rate; a certain percentage of people that don’t buy the next link.

I bring this up in the context of professional web design for a couple reasons.  First there’s the “show the chain” part.  If you’re at all familiar with web design, you’ve read stories about how simply adding an indicator in a cart to tell you how much is left will drastically decrease the abandonment rate.   But what’s also on my mind is the process of designing the right chain.  If your chain is too short, you risk each commitment being so big that your prospect won’t buy the next link.  If the chain is too long you risk that they’ll get bored or frustrated and move on to something else.  I’ve reviewed a couple sites recently that required users to go through 3 or 4 pages to accomplish what easily could have been done on one page.  These site owners have far fewer leads completing their desired action because they lose a percentage of visitors with every link.

Then there’s the “sell the link” part.  Another thing that’s been on my mind recently as I review sites is that people aren’t selling the next link in the chain.  Take for example a mortgage company.  Because of the nature of their business they can’t currently offer their primary service through ecommerce.  But their site lists several types of loans and other services they offer.  After reading one of their product pages I asked their owner, “Ideally, what do you want a visitor to do now?”  “Call or send us an email.”  That’s interesting, because the copy doesn’t specifically ask me to do either of those things.  Worse, the email and phone number aren’t available at all on the product pages; I’d have to navigate to the contact page or to the home page to get that information.  So design your chain with intention, show it to your prospective customers, then SELL each consecutive link.  Don’t expect that your customers will want or know how to do it on their own.

Have you seen great results by designing a new “chain” of commitments for your prospects to follow on their way to becoming your client?  Have you had an experience that seems to go against what I’m suggesting.  Let your voice be heard!