The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [113]
My company sells a comprehensive training program and then we add on a few thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses. Here’s our risk reversal (paraphrased): “We’re so sure that this program is going to help you, we’re going to give you $2,000 in bonus products. Take this program and use it. If you feel it is not more than 1,000 times worth the investment, send it back and get a complete refund. And for your trouble, you can keep the $2,000 in bonus products.”
When we did this, our sales doubled. And yes, you have that 1 out of 10 who might buy it just to get the bonuses, but you still had nine more sales you would not have gotten if you didn’t make the offer in the first place. A money-back guarantee is a great way to take away objections, but the idea of offering a bonus that they can keep soups it up quite a bit.
Exercise
Write down eight things you can do to close more sales. What can you add that would encourage people to buy right now? How can you use risk reversal? What gifts could you give away with purchases that would motivate your buyers to buy? What product or ser vice can you get for free that would be of great value to your prospect?
And then do workshops with your staff on overcoming objections and closing techniques. There is nothing that increases sales skills like role playing. Some people hate it, and I don’t care. They have to do it if they work with me. I will be gentle at first, but I will get every salesperson role-playing. I worked with a group of industrial technicians who had to get used to selling a new product that was highly technical. When I started working with them, not one of them was very good at any of the techniques I was introducing and not one of them liked to role-play. I role-played with them for six months, one-on-one with every one else listening. By the end of the six months every one of those technicians could do a decent job of every aspect of selling the product. It was impressive to watch the progress, even though, in the beginning, I’m sure they all hated me.
Sales Step 7: Follow Up
The process after the sale is so important that the entire next chapter is devoted to it.
Conclusion
These seven steps are core sales skills and procedures. Just as basketball coaches must constantly train their players on lay-up shots and blocking, sales managers must constantly train their reps on polishing every angle of the seven steps to every sale. Smart companies build tools, policies, and procedures that support these seven steps. The more standards you set, the higher the performance you can expect from every level of talent. Only constant practice and repetition will create master-level salespeople.
Follow-up and Client Bonding Skills
How to Keep Clients Forever and Dramatically Increase Your Profits
If you look at most companies and their efforts to grow their business, the majority of their focus is on the first six steps of the sales process to get new clients. They think their job is finished once the sale is closed. Yet it costs six times more to get a new client than to sell something additional to a current client. If you want to build the Ultimate Sales Machine, you need to have highly procedurized follow-up and follow-through.
The hardest thing we do is to get the attention of the client in the first place. Everywhere you go, there is a commercial message in one form or another. As the number of messages grows, people ’s memories shrink. This is called the clutter factor. It means that if you touch down with someone and get her attention, you need to do it again and again and again as fast as you can or she will cool off and forget about you. Once you’ve made the sale, you may have achieved top-of-mind awareness, but if you are out of sight, you are very quickly out of mind. You need to have excellent follow-up procedures to stay at the top of your client’s mind.
Follow-up—the seventh step to every sale—is so important that it gets this entire