The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [31]
I had learned the secret to creating change: you have to put people in pain.
Using the practical example of the carpet cleaner, we first showed those salespeople how they were not serving their clients. Here was this old woman with a walker trying to figure out on her own how to get a rug pad. They could have helped her, but they didn’t. Second, we did a matrix that showed them how their commissions would be impacted if only one out of every five people took just one of the up-sells. In the course of the past year of not doing the up-sells, they had potentially already lost $20,000 in commissions. Talk about motivation to adapt to a new strategy.
Another exercise to increase the pain of not changing is to simply have every one work on that. Tell them to each write down, “What are the drawbacks of not changing or improving this behavior?” and then list those drawbacks. Let them intensify their own pain.
2. Hold a Workshop to Generate Solutions
We’ve already covered this. If you are in a management position or are the CEO, you only have to bring with you to this workshop questions and your judgment. Whatever the problem, your staff deals with it every day. They will have many ideas on how to solve it.
We asked the sales staff what would be the best way to make sure they offered all six ser vices every time they talked to a client. As stated, the solution that ultimately solved the problem was to list the six ser vices on the order form and require salespeople to check them off as they offered them to the client.
3. Develop a “Conceptual Solution or Procedure”
You’ve isolated what you want to work on (offering the up-sell every time) and you have a plan for what procedures you will follow to do this. You might even have scripts, outlines, and cheat sheets. In the case of the carpet company, putting the list of ser vices on the order form was the conceptual solution. We say each solution or procedure is “conceptual” until it is “proven” by you and your staff. In this case it is cut-and-dry, but other solutions you attempt may not be so simple. These more complex solutions will need to be worked on in this phase of your implementation.
In order to have the salespeople go through the list of ser vices every time, we had to present them in a way that positioned what we were doing as servicing the customer and not selling to the customer. We developed some dialogue to make this happen, such as, “We feel it’s our obligation to alert you to other ser vices that you might want to take advantage of today. So I’m just going to list these for you. If you have an interest, I can go into more detail.” The salesperson would then give a sentence or less on each up-sell. Often, this prompted questions.
Recently, I activated a new credit card. Usually, this is all done by electronic recording. This time the recording said, “Please hold for an operator.” I thought that something must be wrong, but, to my surprise, the only thing the operator did was try to sell me additional ser vices—protection plans, group buying discounts, and so on. Here’s a company that instead of automating the activation process decided to use it as another opportunity to touch down with buyers and thus potentially increase profits. In order to get this implemented, I’m sure they tested scripts and went through the steps I’m outlining in this section.
Back to testing: do this step for any area for which you don’t have a procedure. Using up-sells as an example, how many up-sells do you have and how many different ways do you offer them? How does your company or department generate referrals? How do you address customer