The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [28]
Continuing Workshops
With a training tool like that, pretty soon you’ll be able to hire 50 people in one week and turn around and do it again the next week. Workshops help any company at any size get all the current activities working much more like the Ultimate Sales Machine. The key is to do continuing workshops. In fact, here are step-by-step instructions for another workshop with a specific problem you’re trying to solve. If you want to get the most out of this, you need to actually do these exercises with your staff. Follow the instructions, in the order presented, doing each step as you go. You’ll get more out of the experience.
This is a great workshop for every body to do: what is something else you can offer the buyer at the point of sale?
Step 1: Appoint the person to lead the group. In small companies, the CEO is often best, unless he or she wants to defer to someone else in the group. If you’re a one-person army, do it by yourself. It will be very valuable.
Step 2: On a whiteboard, write down the focus question: “What is something else we can offer our buyer at the point of sale?”
Side Note on This Workshop
In my experience of implementing this particular workshop, after we are done and have tested various offers, we have found that one out of three people will buy something else if offered at the point of sale. The most expensive thing you have to do today as a business is to acquire new customers. Once those customers are in the door, anything else you sell them increases profit margins dramatically. So every company should have add-on sales at the point of purchase. In one case, I worked with a calendar company that got some stores to put “spinners” (racks that hold the calendars) up by the cash register, and the cashier would say: “Have you picked out a pictorial calendar? We have 26 different types and they make great gifts for around $10.” About one out of every three people would buy a calendar. Many would buy a few as gifts.
And here’s a great spin that you definitely want to consider when you’re trying to increase your profits. I know a software company that struck a deal with another software company to add on a complementary product. The first company sold the second company’s software and the two companies split the profits. The first company had done the hardest part: acquiring the customer. It was able to increase its “profit per customer” by adding an additional product from another company that it didn’t even have to develop.
So as a side note to all companies, this is a very good exercise. Let’s continue with how you might get more ideas for this.
Step 3: Now have participants in the group write down on their own pad every single idea that comes to them. Give every one a few minutes to work on this. Do not let them call out ideas. The leader must participate as well. You’ll see that most of the people will run out of ideas after about two minutes, so that is a good period of time. If you’re doing this by yourself, the exercise is the same: write down every thing you can think of that you could offer your buyers. The benefit, of course, of doing this with a team is that, among every one in the group, you’re going to think of a lot more possibilities.
DO NOT READ AHEAD. STOP HERE AND DO THE EXERCISE.
Step 4: Now the leader of this exercise will ask participants to give their ideas. The leader will write them down on the whiteboard, summarizing them as he or she goes.
Step 5: Prioritize. Now organize a vote to decide