The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [30]
We gathered all of the salespeople in a workshop and asked them, “What would you say is the best method for offering every client every ser vice every time?” One suggested we put the six ser vices they offer right on the order form. As they’re talking to the client, they would be able to check off all six things on the order form to show they offered them. This was a great suggestion, so we decided to test it and implement it as a procedure for the company. We followed 10 simple steps and, after several months of pigheaded discipline and hard work, we had it so that every salesperson offered every ser vice to every customer every time.
Now let’s go over the 10 steps to implement new concepts, change, and growth into your organization.
10 Steps to Implement Any New Policy
One of the finest executives I’ve ever known is Scott Hallman of Business Growth Dynamics, who built a company up to be Inc. magazine’s 59th-fastest-growing company out of 500. He is the executive I mentioned earlier who was so systematized he was hiring 50 new people a week. In fact, at the height of Scott’s growth, he was hiring 55 new people every week. Scott has since gone on to become a trainer himself, teaching people how to enhance profit in their organizations and also how to implement. The following uses some of Scott’s ideas as a foundation along with some of my experience in the field and as a trainer who has had to master implementation.
1. Get Everyone to Feel the Pain
To create real change in any organization, you have to help every one, including yourself, to define, outline, and intensify the pain of not fixing the problem. When people start to think about their problems, they put themselves in the mood to learn, and that’s the mood you want them to be in to get profound results.
The first time I did a Fortune 500 implementation, I went in and conducted an audit. I had good ideas and presented them to the CEO. He was impressed and felt his fee was well spent. He flew his entire sales team—255 people—to Denver, where I presented my ideas to them. They intellectually understood them, but they only half-heartedly agreed with them. The next day, they went out and tried them here and there. The ideas didn’t work right away, so the salespeople abandoned them almost immediately and the program totally failed.
You probably already know what kind of person I am. Failure doesn’t go over very well with me. I don’t take on clients and then fail them. I learned right then and there that having a system for implementation was much more important than the ideas I might have for growing a company. The first thing you need to do if you want people to change is to show them why what they’re doing now isn’t working. Make it as intense as possible.
One of the best ways to put people in pain is to ask them what challenges they are facing. The next time I did a large-scale implementation, I started with this exercise. There were a few hundred salespeople in the room. I began by asking them to list the biggest problems they were meeting in the market. I then had the salespeople form groups to discuss and vote on the group’s agreed-upon problems. Misery loves company. I had an entire room complaining about their competition, lack of time, the challenges to get in the door, and so on. I had some rather profound solutions to their problems, but they required a radical upgrade in selling over what they had been doing. In order to get them open for something that needed a new learning curve, I knew I had to put them in a lot of pain with their current model.
After the groups discussed their problems, I had each group tell me the top three challenges that they had voted on. I wrote all their problems on the whiteboard and then asked them if they liked having these challenges. I asked how many people in the room would like to solve these challenges.