Consultative Sales Approach: Crafting the Perfect Pitch

• Similarweb’s Sales solution offers a consultative sales approach for crafting the perfect pitch.
• There are a number of ways to define a competitive set. Cross-referencing as many as you can and filtering based on additional criteria will reveal the most useful list.
• Once you have defined the competition, deriving data-driven insights about their relative strengths and weaknesses will help generate the most compelling sales approach.

What Do We Mean by a Consultative Sales Approach and Why is it Important?

Consultative selling is about establishing trust with a prospect, by demonstrating a deep understanding of their struggles and successes. Once you can show your potential value, you need to deliver with real value, actionable insights and winning, data-driven strategies.

The two most important stages in establishing a consultative sales approach as you engage with a client are:

1. Build the most useful list of competitors to show you understand your client and its place in the market
2. Explore key competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to craft the most compelling strategies for your client

Throughout this post we will use zara.com’s presence in the US as the example and show how you can establish a competitive benchmark for a prospect and provide actionable suggestions for growing its digital business.

Build a List of Competitors

There are at least three different methods in Similarweb’s Sales Solution for identifying a competitive set for a particular site.

• By Category Analysis
• By Competitive Landscape
• By Audience Interest

Using one or more of these methodologies and filtering to focus on Specialty Private-label Apparel (SPA) retailers, like Zara, rather than multi-brand stores like Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, offers a comprehensive competitive set of SPA retail sites for zara.com viewed here based on average monthly traffic over the past year.

Comparing Sites by Growth

Once you have established a set of sites, you can further demonstrate your understanding of the market by analyzing performance over time. Calculating the change in average monthly traffic gives an indication of site performance and improvement, particularly in retail.

While most SPA retailers showed year-over-year growth in Q3 2018, zara.com saw its traffic drop by 8%. There were also declines for express.com and bananarepublic.gap.com.

To learn from its competitive set, a pitch to zara.com should include an analysis of sites exhibiting growth such as uniqlo.com and jcrew.com. It may also be interesting to learn from anthropologie.com, madewell.com and everlane.com. While all three get less traffic than zara.com, they were able to gain traffic while zara.com was losing.

Comparing Sites by Engagement

Growth in traffic is one part of a site’s digital profile. Measuring engagement offers more insight about a site’s performance. While zara.com wasn’t the top performer on traffic and growth, it had the lowest bounce rate of the competitive set. This is a terrific indication of the site’s organic search strategies where visitors to the site are happier with what they find and are more likely to explore further on-site.

Explore Competitors’ Strengths and Weaknesses

The next stage in crafting a perfect pitch involves proving value by showing companies what their competitors are doing differently that works. Analyzing the fastest growing SPA retailers relative to zara.com, you can spot the most successful strategies based on their desktop traffic sources.

In the past 12 months, zara.com was heavily focused on direct and organic search traffic, at close to 90% organic traffic. This suggests that the site did not invest in growth via other channels – like affiliates, paid search, display or social. Even their email marketing strategies are delivering a lower proportion of traffic for the group, generating less than 5% of their traffic.

In contrast, uniqlo.com saw a wider variety of traffic sources, with a high proportion of traffic from social media. The most visited site in the group, jcrew.com, was highly focused on referral traffic, while anthropologie.com received a high percentage of traffic from paid sources like paid search and display ads.

Drilling Down on Referrals

There are many directions to choose from here and the category you prospect operates in will dictate the best approach. For online retailers, referral sites or affiliate partners have proven to be a potent source of traffic that can drive user acquisition in an affordable and sustainable way.

Having identified that many of Zara’s competitors are more heavily invested in referral traffic, it’s worth exploring further to look for suggestions that might help zara.com grow this source. Taking four companies from Zara’s competitive set and looking at the volume of referral traffic to each we see that zara.com had the lowest share of referral traffic in the group.

Further analysis reveals the referring sites that are delivering the highest proportion of traffic to each of our retailers.

It appears that, of the sites in the group, zara.com’s affiliate strategy has a way to go to match its competitors’. Jcrew.com was the only retailer to work with joinhoney.com and also received a significant proportion of the traffic from the Reward Style network.

Reward Style was also a significant contributor to anthropologie.com which also partnered with buzzfeed.com. Top growers, uniqlo.com and madewell.com, each showed different focus areas. While uniqlo.com centers around deals engine slickdeals.net, madewell.com employed a more upscale, content-focused approach with refinery29.com.

Summary

When reaching out to a company like Zara, you can use these types of insight to show how zara.com could improve its standing among its competitive set. In zara.com’s case the company’s decision not to invest in paid sources of traffic may be contributing to its traffic decline. Using referral traffic as one example of an area for improvement that offers sustainable ROI, we compiled a list of potential partners that Zara could work with to grow traffic. Further investigation along these lines could reveal a number of other data-driven insights to be turned into suggested strategies for digital growth.

In future posts we will review how highlighting different search tactics, paid keywords, or display ad strategy can help you craft the perfect pitch for a range of potential sales targets.