The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [24]
With consistent training every week in every area of your company, you can put higher and higher standards into place and raise the bar of performance for your entire staff. If you really want to become the Ultimate Sales Machine, training is an absolute must at every level, no matter how large or how small you might be.
Executing Effective Meetings
How to Work Together to Improve Every Aspect of Your Company Using Workshop Training
The best way to build the Ultimate Sales Machine and to keep it running as smoothly as possible is to hold regular, highly productive, workshop-style meetings dedicated to improving every aspect of your business. In each of these meetings you will focus all of the relevant people on fixing just one small part of the business. Together, you will brainstorm plans for how to improve this specific area, draft procedures to test, and ultimately create carved-in-stone company policies that every one will be trained to follow. This constant attention to what I call the “three Ps”—planning, procedures, and policies—is essential if you want to easily and quickly grow your business into the Ultimate Sales Machine.
One of my clients became one of the fastest-growing companies in America, hiring 50 new people a week. Here’s a question for you: could your company hire 50 people this week and weave them seamlessly into your organization? And, before you answer, could you then hire another 50 people next week?
Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or haven’t hired even your first employee, you need to have the systems in place that would make hiring 50 people every week a breeze. This makes the difference between success and failure. A company that thinks like a small company remains small. A company, even a one-person army, that thinks and acts like a big company is going to grow faster, smarter, and better.
Most entrepreneurial companies don’t install enough of the three Ps. Larger companies are more likely to have the three Ps in place, but most don’t go far enough in perfecting and implementing them. In this chapter you will learn how to take any company or department to the next level through weekly workshop meetings focused on further developing the three Ps in every aspect of your business.
While you are improving the company, you need to be thinking like this: “What if I were hiring 50 people next week and I wanted all of them to enter the business and quickly be able to perform at peak levels? What kind of a training program do I need in place to do that?” So, for example, as you are improving your current sales effort, document every thing as you go. You will be creating a training manual for future hires—even if, like this client, you are not hiring a single additional person right now. By thinking this way, you are forced to spell out each and every step. Leave nothing, or very little, for the imagination.
The Large-Company Model
Large companies typically already have training and procedure manuals, but they don’t always go deep enough. Far too much is left up to individual interpretation. For example, I’ve never seen any company, short of those that have had my training, that has well-planned and-executed follow-up procedures after a sales call. That is almost always left to the individual salesperson. When you do that, the quality of follow-up is going to vary widely.
I recently looked to buy a new vehicle to tow my boat. The salesperson took my card, but I never heard from him. Instead, to my surprise, I got a “quality control follow-up call.” After a few questions, the person got around to asking why I didn’t buy. I told them why (the trade-in offer was thousands below the Kelley Blue Book value). I then asked a few questions of my own and found out that the dealer had hired a group to do the follow-up. Here an entire side business has been born: selling telephone follow-up to dealerships that can’t seem to figure