The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [56]
Exercise
Now look again at your list of initiatives or jobs that need superstars. These are things you’d like to do to help your company or department grow or improve that someone else could do for you and a superstar could do better than you. Read over what you wrote about what these would mean for your organization and what their value would be in terms of your bottom line. Write a great job description of what those people would be expected to do. Then think about how much they would earn. If it’s a sales job, as previously mentioned, how much of what they bring in can you give to them? For other positions, can you change the incentive to be about performance rather than hours?
Now, take out an ad in a newspaper or online that says, “Can earn as high as [insert number here] if you are a star.” Follow the steps above to attract a superstar.
To make it easier for you, here’s a complete ad we ran to get top talent for a client.
SALES SUPERSTAR WANTED $50K TO $300K
Don’t even call unless you are the best and can prove it. Earn $50K if you’re average, $150K if you’re good, and $300K plus if you’re great. This is in the [type of industry here], but we hire star performers, not backgrounds. Young or old—if you have the stuff, we’ll know. Will train someone who has every thing we want. Small base, but huge performance rewards to get you to $300K and beyond each year. Must be awesome at opening doors and getting appointments from a cold start. Must be highly self-motivated, a terrific presenter and communicator, and a barracuda closer. Come and build your own empire within our fine, progressive company. We have a superb reputation and need real stars to bring in the best accounts. Email résumé to:
Think about that ad. That ad is the dream for any top-producing salesperson.
Conclusion
If you want to have the Ultimate Sales Machine, you need to have the ultimate salespeople. Use the blueprint in this chapter to set your company’s or department’s procedures for hiring. But don’t forget to add your own pigheaded discipline and determination to the mix. It takes time and persistence to create a superstar team. Resist feeling put off if your first hire or even your first few hires don’t work out. At my old company, we went through eight new salespeople for every one who worked out. We knew this was going to happen, so we even had a procedure for speeding that process up and getting rid of the ones who weren’t going to get the job done. If they weren’t great, they’d burn out fast.
Workshops can help you create procedures that are tailored to your individual company or department. Keep at it. I’ve doubled the sales of many companies with this simple strategy to identify, hire, and keep superstars. Put some top-producing talent in the company and watch it grow.
The High Art of Getting
the Best Buyers
The Fastest, Least Expensive Way to
Dramatically Increase Sales
The following strategy has probably helped more companies double their sales faster than any other single concept. In a sentence: there’s always a smaller number of “best buyers” than there are all buyers. That means that marketing to them is cheaper than marketing to all buyers. A direct mail effort to 100 “best buyers” is obviously less expensive to market than a direct-mail effort to an entire audience of 10,000 “all buyers.” But it’s how you market and sell to them that determines whether or not you will ever get them. When Charlie Munger put me in charge of ad sales for one of his magazines, it had a database