Online Sales | E-commerce
It’s hard to say which is first in EVERY case, the story or the community or the goods. It depends business to business. [Well write a blog post about how to asses the situation of your business, to know where your selling journey starts, the story, community, or goods, and link to it here.]
The story
What’s the most difficult part to telling a good story? Believing the story. When you believe in the story you tell, the people listening to your story can believe it too. Fiction is great in the arts, a joy to see, but in business, the job is to tell non-fictional story, with tales of hopes and dreams, that you can bring to life. It’s the “what could be…?”(looking off into the horizon)
Whatever the good or service, so long as it fulfills a desire, you have a customer, and the story can create that desire. When your good or service is already high in demand, it’s still important to maintain desire through the stories that are told, keeping in mind that stories can change over time.
A community
People are a community, and people can be very different, but people in a community will usually have at least one thing in common. Communities are born when people recognize their common trait and choose to come together, at times, because of this common trait.
Businesses can create personas, or target audiences, that define the shared traits of their customers. This is how a business gives birth to a community, because a real community is not only the customers, but also the employees of the business that sells to the customers. Truly great companies have employees who feel like they’re part of the community of customers to whom they provide their [employees’] services.
The goods
What desire are you satisfying with your good or service? If you don’t know the answer to this question, you may want to rethink your good/service.
We all need things; we all want things, and because there’s ~8 billion people in the world, there’s a lot of need and want to go around. Make sure the goods you sell are meeting your customers’ needs and/or wants.
If your goods don’t meet a need, then the story is ever more important and necessary for creating the the desire that your customers didn’t know they had. Some goods will present more of a challenge at creating the desire, but remember… ~8 billion people… there’s likely a community out there open to the new desires your selling.