What Zappos Can Teach Us About Sincere Sales

What Zappos Can Teach Us About Sincere Sales:by Aswin Natarajan

The stories of Zappos customer reps are the stuff of legend. These anecdotes have created the Zappos culture, world recognized and referenced frequently in the mainstream media. This corporate culture, ingrained with a sense of responsiveness, empathy and quirkiness has and continues to fuel incredible growth.

But the Zappos story is more than just culture.

Many companies have admirable cultures and incredibly motivated employees, but few reach over $1B in sales. This company has sincere sales strategies worth learning from. Lets take a closer look…
#1 Word-of-mouth advertising
Zappos does not sell discount or unique products. They have no competitive advantage when it comes to products yet they still make over $1B in sales. How?
Their secret lies in customer service and word-of-mouth referrals from people who have been absolutely delighted by their purchasing experience. Zappos invests heavily in creating experiences for its customers in the buying and service process. Zappos uses gestures of sincerity to remove customer anxiety during and after the sale. This is responsible for their incredible word-of-mouth sales success.

Our Takeaway: Sincere selling for Zappos resulted in word-of-mouth advertising, eliminated potential leaks in their sales funnel, and created a self-sustaining brand image.

#2 Transparency with Customers
Zappos has pioneered the concept of corporate transparency through social media. Each month, they have a combined 1200 organic conversations with their customers.
Although typically known for its animated chatter on social media, Zappos has shown equal candor in delivering bad news. In January 2012, the company was thrown into a tailspin when a cyberattack on its servers enabled hackers to access 24 million customer names along with their contact information, shipping addresses, the last four digits of their credit card numbers and encrypted passwords.
Rather than attempting to ignore this situation, Zappos openly admitted to the crisis and encouraged its customers to change their passwords. Compared to Sony, which responded to its security crisis by attempting to downplay the situation, Zappos fared much better. The news surrounding the hack died off quickly for Zappos but beleaguered Sony for nearly two months.

Our Takeaway: Maintaining customers is just as important as acquiring new customers. Zappos understood that transparency, regardless of whether the news is good or bad, is the right way to do business.

#3 Organizational Efficiency
Zappos takes employee growth very seriously and has actively created a leadership pipeline which can funnel entry level employees to senior management within 5-7 years. Employees are regularly benchmarked, promoted, exposed to increasing responsibility and are offered training courses to upgrade their skill set. This pipeline creates employees agile enough to handle the role of their superior and junior colleagues.  The salesforce is not dependent on the work of a few exceptional salespeople surrounded by an army of “assistants” but rather, is composed of a strong team of individuals who grow together.

Our Takeaway: A growth pipeline based on constant skill building confers competitive advantages in employee agility and collaboration.

The recurring theme for Zappos is “sincere sales.” We think that sincerity in selling is a powerful tool as well. Here’s to delivering happiness!