The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [32]
4. Leader or Top Talent Personally Performs Procedure or Task
If you’re a smaller company, often the CEO or leader of the company can personally test and perfect the procedure. The leader has the biggest picture of how every thing fits together in the company or department, but he or she often leaves the details to others. Hands-on involvement at every level enables the leader to create the three Ps with certainty. When Scott Hallman was building his company to be Inc. magazine’s 59th-fastest-growing company, he personally tested every procedure. No one could snow him on any issue as he did each procedure himself and had a complete and very realistic view of how things should and could be done.
Of course, if you are a Fortune 500 company, the CEO does not usually step in and do a cross-sell or an up-sell. Instead, you pick champions. Figure out who is going to champion this idea. Then that person accepts the responsibility for making that idea effective in the organization.
Don’t be tempted to have every one in your organization test and perfect the procedure at the same time. You will spend a lot of money with lower-level talent trying to figure something out. Instead, have the higher-level talent perfect it and then train the rest. Just keep in mind that you have to constantly figure out how to make it scalable.
For the carpet cleaning company, we worked with the top producers and got the formula perfected enough that we could show the rest of the salespeople that one out of five customers did take at least one up-sell. Some of them took all five up-sells. Then we trained the entire staff on it. I always recommend testing new ideas with your top performers.
5. Set a Deadline for Testing the Conceptual Procedure
Set a deadline so you know that if you aren’t seeing results in a certain amount of time, you need to go back to the workshop whiteboard and look at additional options. At the minimum, your weekly meeting will always check in on the progress or lack of it. More on this in step 9.
6. Document Step-by-Step Procedure or Process
You want this to be a repeatable process, so spell it out. Write out your scripts, procedures, activities, and the results you expect to achieve. Make it so 50 new hires could come in today and every thing would be clear to them if they followed your three Ps manual. Even if your company or department is small, you need to put these procedures in place as if you were going to hire 50 people because it forces you to detail every step along the way.
7. Have Show-and-Tell and Role Playing
Take your documented steps and work with your staff to test and implement them. Show-and-tell and role playing offer the best methods of gaining experience before you put the process into the field.
Scott Hallman’s company processed more than four million medical record files a year. With more than 650 technicians located on-site at client hospitals, managing performance results was critical. Left to their own devices, new technicians might process only four medical charts per hour. However, by constantly working on the process and “procedurizing” it down to the smallest detail, Scott was able to get the technicians to average 9.2 charts per hour! That’s more than doubling their performance. What would it do for your company if every one could produce twice the results they’re producing now?
If it’s a telephone procedure, demonstrate it or record your high-level talent doing the procedure so your staff can actually hear how it works. Role-play and workshop every possible scenario. Work over your staff, forcing them to approach each scenario exactly as you would have them do it.
I was hired by a company that sold small to midrange technology solutions to IT executives. They