The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [43]
Performance, and Sales.”
During this magnificent education, the prospect learns a ton of information about all these areas. The end result is that the prospect becomes much more educated about the power and use of incentives in the running of his or her business. Prior to seeing this data, the prospect’s buying criteria may be extremely loose and uninformed. After seeing this data, the client is highly educated and motivated not only on why and how to use incentives but also on my client’s company in particular. This company is perceived as more educated and sophisticated than any of its competitors. So the market’s buying criteria shift in favor of the expert every single time.
You should have this goal for your product or ser vice. What information will help set the buying criteria in your favor? No matter what you sell, data makes your information work harder. Also, it needs to be said that the more complex your product or ser vice, the better the opportunity to appear as an expert.
Important Point
If you come from the place of truly wanting to serve your buyer, then being a market expert—not just a product expert—means being more knowledgeable than any of your competitors. This is easy to do as most of your competitors will be more concerned about selling product than about positioning themselves as experts. In every case where I have personally run companies using these strategies or helped clients do the same, we have literally slaughtered our competitors. Even after they see what we are doing, they cannot grasp it. Truly, building a core story or stadium pitch is working smarter, not harder. The one who gives the market the most and best information will always slaughter the one who just wants to sell products or ser vices.
Here’s the key to choosing which data to include: market data is way more motivational than product data. Most people think that a shoe is a shoe (product data), but when you learn that your feet connect to every organ in your body, that’s market data. It makes your choice of shoe much more important. So think about what market data is there that makes your products or ser vices much more important.
Two More Examples of Education-Based Marketing
I worked with a company that sold research aids to tax experts (accountants and lawyers). It was focused on product data: “Here’s our research aid and here’s what it does.” I got them to focus on market data: “The IRS now requires you to take these 22 steps in your research. These are steps you can’t possibly bill to the client, as no client will pay for all this. So what you can do instead is use our products. These products speed up this process.” Market data made the product data much more important.
Example 2: I had a client who sold pictorial calendars that ranged from puppies to Pamela Anderson. We did some studies and found that, per square inch, bookstores were outselling massive retailers by 40 percent more volume. Why? Bookstores were putting the calendars right by the cash registers. When do you buy calendars? At the end of the year. So there you are, standing in line waiting to pay for all your Christmas gifts, and you see a calendar on Mustangs. Your boss loves classic Mustangs. You buy him a calendar.
The mass merchants were putting the calendars in the stationery department. They weren’t moving nearly as many calendars per rack or spinner. By showing this data to more and more stores, my client increased sales 20 percent in a single year whereas the company had not had an increase in sales for four years prior to using this market data to motivate better positioning of the calendars.
And it goes on and on. No matter who you