The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [45]
Conclusion
One of the most strategic things you can do is to find market data that makes your product or ser vice more important. I don’t care if you sell shaving cream or overnight delivery ser vices—there is market data that will make your product more vital.
Now go back to those strategic and tactical executives. The strategic executive understands that a core story or an education-based marketing approach opens doors faster and more easily and allows you to build more rapport and close more sales. The tactical part of that brilliant executive will then make sure that he or she is implementing this approach with piercing effectiveness at the tactical level. If you want to build the Ultimate Sales Machine, you need to think and plan like a strategist and implement like a great tactician.
Hiring Superstars
How to Accelerate Your Growth by Using High-Octane Talent at Every Level
If you want to build the Ultimate Sales Machine, one of the key pieces of the puzzle is to understand the personality profile of top producers. Breaking it down, you need to learn how to recruit them and keep them and then apply all that you’ve learned so far from this book. And as you’ll see, every subsequent chapter goes even deeper.
This chapter will reveal 20 years of secrets in finding, interviewing, testing, motivating, compensating, and managing superstar employees. You will learn essential insights into hiring only the best people for any department. If you are an employee, you will learn how to perform and behave in order to be a superstar.
The average bad hire costs a company $60,000, yet most hiring decisions are made from an hour-long interview—if you’re lucky. I’ve talked to CEOs of companies who estimate that a single bad hire costs them millions. In this chapter, you will learn some unique and effective methods for finding people ’s faults before you hire them. Most companies do not find out any of the problems until after people have worked for them for several months. By then it’s a painful extraction process, or worse, you leave them in the job because they know how to do it and you don’t have the time or energy to replace them.
When I was top producer every where I worked, I thought the only reason I was top producer was because companies didn’t usually hire people like me who were difficult to manage. You know the type: eager to please, always looking for more to do, always wanting more responsibility, always wanting to know more than you think they need to know. I was like that—a pain—but they’re worth every penny if you properly channel their energy. So I swore that when I got into a position of authority, I would hire this type of person.
Then I went to work for Charlie Munger and had the freedom to hire anyone I wanted. When I tried to hire nothing but superstars, I discovered that they’re an incredibly rare breed. Consequently, I spent the next 20 years studying the phenomena that make top producers and superstar employees.
One-person armies may think they are not in the position to hire anyone, especially superstars. But you’ll learn otherwise. Think of what just one top-producing salesperson could do for your business. What could you focus on and accomplish if you had someone else who was expertly handling your sales? How much faster could your business grow? I’ve shown many entrepreneurs who didn’t think they could afford salespeople how to hire a whole team of salespeople on straight commission. This is a profound breakthrough for most businesses and can reshape your entire company almost overnight. So if you think you can’t possibly hire or don’t need a superstar right now, think again. This chapter spells out how to grow any company or area faster if you’re wise enough to share the wealth.
Exercise
For one-person armies and smaller companies: Take a moment to list three initiatives that you would love to hire someone to execute in which the reward could be great if