Intelligent Selling : The Art and Science of Selling Online

Intelligent Selling: The Art & Science of Selling Online is your resource for proven e-commerce strategies and techniques that improve the customer relationship and build sales. Anyone involved with selling online -- whatever the product or service -- will benefit from this insider’s view of selling online.

This book is for any manager or executive looking for the right way to sell to customers online. Author Ken Burke -- Founder, President, and CEO of leading e-commerce developer Multimedia Live -- presents the Intelligent Selling(tm) strategies and techniques his company uses to help catalogers, retailers, direct marketers, and manufacturers improve customer relations and increase sales by:

* Increasing conversion rates
* Increasing average order size and frequency of purchase
* Improving customer loyalty and retention
* Reducing abandoned cart rates
* Decreasing customer service costs
* And improving the overall customer experience.

Burke provides innumerable hints and tips based on lessons he and his company learned in the real world of online marketing. He covers everything from effective merchandising, to improving the way your customers respond to you, to refining the way your website interacts with your other business channels. This is not just theory; what you read here has been proven to work on hundreds of successful e-commerce websites.

Intelligent Selling: The Art & Science of Selling Online describes the philosophical foundations of Multimedia Live’s Web development techniques and strategies. Intelligent Selling does not require a specific technology, consultant, or Web developer. Rather, it is a way of looking at the entire Web presence, learning how to embrace your customer’s interests and needs, and choosing the techniques that will allow you to reach out to them most effectively. Thus, this book is an exposition of the thought processes that guide Multimedia Live as it creates a client’s Web presence and ties it in with their overall business goals. The philosophy of Intelligent Selling has driven everything Multimedia Live has done over the last several years, and has brought great success to its clients.

Because every website will undergo constant evolution, this book was conscientiously created as a resource full of hints and tips that you can use to build upon, improve, and expand your Web presence once it has launched. If you are just starting your first e-commerce endeavor, it lays the groundwork for getting it right the first time through tried-and-true methodologies worked out by one of the most effective e-commerce developers to be found.

Ken starts the book with the core premise of Intelligent Selling: that the purpose of your e-commerce website should be to build a good relationship with your customers so they choose to buy from you. The development of the all-important customer relationship is emphasized throughout. It is the driving force behind your personalization efforts, your merchandising strategies, the way your website interacts with your other business channels, and the way you execute your e-mail initiatives. Every chapter methodically illustrates how these and other vital aspects of Intelligent Selling can be implemented.

Everybody wins when e-commerce works like it should; the customer’s needs are fulfilled, they have a good shopping experience, and you make more sales. The ideas you will find here will help you optimize all selling opportunities, create a stellar customer experience, and rapidly analyze and deploy change in a constant cycle of customer attraction, conversion, and retention. Intelligent Selling: The Art & Science of Selling Online is your guidebook to building a good relationship with your customers so they choose to buy from you in an environment where the competition is only a click away.

Ken Burke began developing his vision for successful e-commerce in the mid-1990s, before most people had even heard of the Internet and before most companies had a Web presence. In 1995 Ken founded Multimedia Live, the company that would put his pioneering vision to the test and in the process grow into one of the most successful and longest-lived e-commerce technology and development companies in the U.S. Starting with only $500 and the computer he used in college, Ken built the company with sweat equity and the determination to make successful online selling a reality.

The past eight years has seen Multimedia Live develop thousands of e-commerce sites, each one helping to refine the company’s principles of effective e-commerce Web design. This vision is now known as Intelligent Selling(tm), and is the driving force behind websites for some of the best-known brands in the cataloging and retailing arena: General Motors, Playboy, Keds, Norm Thompson, L-Com, The Limited Too, Wine Enthusiast, and The Swiss Colony to name a few. Under Ken’s guidance, Multimedia Live has developed e-commerce software applications that power these and many other merchandising websites, putting the concept of Intelligent Selling into practice. Ken is a sought-after media source for industry insights, a frequent speaker at Internet and e-commerce conferences, and a regular contributor to industry magazines. Through a series of educational seminars, he has personally trained over 10,000 entrepreneurs how to do business on the Internet. He studied multimedia and the Internet at the University of Southern California, where he completed a BA in Marketing and earned honors as an MBA graduate in Venture Management and Entrepreneurship.