The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [5]
It is the same with any business; there are basics that you can do over and over again until every aspect runs like a machine. In the near future you can have every person in every department know how to handle any circumstance that arises. Where other companies have one or two approaches for getting appointments with clients, your salespeople will have 10 different approaches and they will perform each one expertly. Your salespeople will have answers and perfect follow-up letters for every possible situation. Your customer ser vice people will know how to respond to any complaint or special order or return situation that comes their way without having to consult their manager. Stress levels will be lower because every employee will have the information, training, and tools to do their jobs confidently and effectively. What will it take to get you there? One thing: pigheaded discipline and determination.
Look at any area in your life where you have a great achievement—you know you worked at it. Perhaps you are a great golfer. Perhaps you’re good at tennis. Perhaps you play piano. Any area of achievement in your life required you to stick with the basics until you became great. And yet so many businesses don’t do that. Being great at sales, for example, requires you to be good at only seven things. Yet, my sales audits of hundreds of companies reveal that few, if any, have outlined this process in the kind of detail that creates greatness.
Is your company or department growing at the rate you desire? In almost every company that I’ve helped to grow, every one is working very hard, from the CEO to the salespeople, right down the line. But if you don’t have the tools necessary to master each area of the business, you are working harder, not smarter. This book offers the tools. Not only does it supply you with the pigheaded mind-set, but it also provides you with complete how-to instructions to create the Ultimate Sales Machine.
Introduction
The owner of one of the largest carpet cleaning companies in the country—Rug Renovating, which covers the tri-state metro area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—came to me for help. Here’s a company with 30,000 clients that was finding that efforts to get new clients were becoming less and less effective over the years. Any business owner reading this has probably noticed the same problem. Although he came to me looking to gain more clients, my first reaction was to find out whether he had maximized the clients he already had. I asked him how often his current clients buy. He answered: “They buy about once every three years. We send coupons and discounts frequently, but the numbers don’t change.” I asked, “How would you like it if we could get your clients buying twice a year instead of once every three years?” He was very excited at the idea, but no previous approach had worked.
Like nearly every company in the world that sells carpet cleaning, this company was using product data in its sales process. Product data is straightforward and has very little strategic value. This is product data: “We clean X square feet of carpeting for Y dollars.” But adding market data can make the product data much more powerful. As you will learn in Chapter Six, every company can dramatically strengthen its sales and marketing materials by adding market data.
Here’s what we found for this carpet cleaning company:
FACT: Your carpets act like a giant health filter, capturing dust, dirt, bacteria, pollen, dust mites, their waste, and the bacteria that feed on it.
Government studies have shown that when you remove carpets from buildings, people get sick four times