The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [44]
Today the Internet makes market data readily available. Sites like www.census.gov and www.CNN.com have great information on just about any subject you can imagine. You will have no trouble gathering massive amounts of data for your core story. The problem is finding the time to put it all together. Luckily, there is a company called Empire Research Group (www.empireresearchgroup.com) that can actually do all this work for you.
The Smoking Gun
In the legal market, the term smoking gun refers to that piece of evidence that makes it so your opponent cannot win. You’ve found the smoking gun that makes the other party guilty. It’s the same with research. There’s always that smoking gun that positions you above everyone else. The fact that art actually facilitates healing and that calendars sell like crazy when you put them at the register are both smoking guns. I can list hundreds of examples and I can tell you this for sure: there’s always a smoking gun. Always.
I had a client who sold lawn care ser vices, and every year some of his workers would break off on their own and steal away his clients by offering to do the same work they were already doing for less: “Just pay me personally instead of my company.” The research team turned up a case in which the state of New York actually sued a homeowner, forcing that homeowner to pay worker’s compensation on the lawn care person who hurt himself while working on the homeowner’s lawn. Take that piece of data to a customer who’s switching for $5 less per month and ask them: “Are you sure that your new lawn care person has worker’s compensation insurance? Because if he doesn’t and he gets hurt on your property, you could actually be responsible for his worker’s compensation payments for as long as he’s injured.” This is definitely a smoking gun—a single fact that makes it unlikely that any client would want to switch to a single worker who didn’t have all the proper licensing and insurance.
To get the most powerful market data and to uncover the smoking gun, the trick is to look at things over time. That’s where you’ll find the big breakthroughs. I had a client who deliberately avoided selling his products through the big mass merchants like Wal-Mart. The company was doing all its sales through gift shops. A little research revealed that there were 36,000 gift shops. That looked like a big number until you looked at how many gift shops there had been in 1985. There were 96,000! That means 60,000 gift shops had gone out of business, while Wal-Mart was adding more locations every day. That made the client change strategy in a hurry. Go look at data over time. It’s amazing.
I had a client who was selling alternative therapies to doctors. A study showed that consumers were spending $460 billion on alternative therapies. Good stat, no doubt. But if you went back 10 years, it was only $46 billion. It had grown ten fold in 10 years. In fact, today, there are 350 million visits to an MD every year. But there are 420 million visits to alternative practitioners. Yes, 70 million more visits to folks who don’t prescribe drugs. These are trends, and, for some reason, almost no one ever looks at them. Yet buried in those trends are strategic advantages that slaughter your competition, get you in the door more easily, and give you something of great interest to your buyer.
Exercises
1. List your strategic objectives. Look at those listed for the newspaper company as a guideline. Then do a workshop with your team on each one of them. It will be profound. Ask your staff, “What would make us more respected?” Do a workshop on it. Then ask them, “What would position us as an expert in the eye of our buyer?” and so on. Go through all 13 strategic objectives listed for the newspaper example, and workshop each of them with your team. Those will be very fruitful workshops.
2. Do some market research on your industry over time. Keep track of every thing you find out that