The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [40]
PROSPECT: The free lunch sounds good.
REP: Great. We’re doing three of those this week. We have one today at noon at [restaurant name]. Then there is one on Wednesday and one on Friday. Which day works best for you?
PROSPECT: Can’t do it today, but Wednesday looks good.
REP: Great. I’ll put you down for Wednesday. Now this is a very expensive program for us, but there’s no cost to you. Like I said, we thrive if our local community thrives. So we have only one condition for you attending. You’ve agreed to attend on Wednesday. When we fill up that day, we will start to turn people away who want to attend. So once you commit, all we ask is the professional courtesy that you attend or at least give us 24 hours notice to fill your seat if you can’t come. Does that seem fair?
PROSPECT: Sure.
REP: Great. Write my phone number on your calendar so if you need to reschedule, you’ll have it handy.
END SCRIPT.
Now the business owners gather to see the information. Here is the basic content. The session begins with overall data on businesses: how many businesses there are in the United States, how many start each year, the failure rate of business, and so on—just good general information of interest to any business owner. This data is eye-opening because it shows that 96 percent of all businesses fail within 10 years, with 80 percent failing within the first two years.
From there the session goes on to show five common reasons why businesses fail. This data is very easy to gather and you can tailor it to your needs. For example, according to Entrepreneur magazine, the top reasons for failure include bad customer relations, bad budgeting, lack of staff training, failure to anticipate market trends, and poor and inconsistent marketing.4
When we get to the last—poor and inconsistent marketing—we go into some core ways to market. Again, not hard to assemble. The last section of this educational program teaches that “advertising” is one of the best ways to get customers. And guess what. There are studies that show this. There is no need to make up anything. The section on advertising compares the various ways to advertise (the yellow pages, radio, TV, direct mail, etc.), brilliantly showing why each has its drawbacks to an advertiser—except, of course, newspapers.
To be very clear, every thing until this point is educational. This is not a veiled sales pitch. All the data is legitimate and so good that people take notes. But then, of course, the last part goes into “the power of newspapers.” We found that newspaper readers tend to be more educated than the average consumer. Newspapers are a major driver of commerce in their communities. The presentation is very compelling.
In my experience with my newspaper company client, by the end of the session, every one who saw the orientation wanted to advertise in the newspaper. No one felt sold. They felt educated. Why? Because when you sell, you break rapport, but when you educate, you build it.
In the words of my good friend and fellow sales trainer Andy Miller, sales is all about building rapport, not breaking it. When people feel they’re being “sold,” they automatically resist you. When people are being educated, they have no resistance—especially if the information is good. Sales is an art form, and that’s why we dedicated Chapter Ten to just that skill. But this chapter is about being a brilliant strategist before you deploy a single tactic. And it’s also about creating vehicles that more or less force your salespeople to build deeper and stronger rapport, by making sure they are highly educated with information that serves the buyer.
Let’s look at all the strategic objectives accomplished by education-based marketing:
It made it a lot easier to get appointments.
It enabled you to get in to see just about anyone—including the 90 percent who were not buying now.
Since the information was so good, it established the salesperson as an expert rather than merely a salesperson.
Since