The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [57]
By focusing intently on those dream 167 buyers, I was able to get 30 of them into the magazine in the first year. Suddenly executives who had never heard from us before were now hearing from us so intensively from every direction that within six months we had 28 of them in the magazine. That alone doubled the advertising sales of the magazine. These were the big advertisers. When they came in, it was for premium positions—full-color spreads, the inside front cover, back cover, and so on. Up until that point, we had been scraping by on revenue from quarter-page, third-page, and a few half-page ads. We doubled the sales the next year by keeping those best buyers in the magazine and bringing in another 30. We doubled it again, a third year in a row, by bringing in the rest of the 167 best buyers.
When I doubled sales three years in a row, Charlie Munger said, “Are you sure we’re not lying, cheating, and stealing? In all my years, I’ve never seen anybody double sales three years in a row.”
Naturally, we weren’t doing any such thing. We were just marketing and selling better than any of our competitors. That, and we truly had built the Ultimate Sales Machine with procedures and policies for selling that all the salespeople had to follow. This book will cover every aspect of this in the ensuing chapters.
Best buyers buy more, buy faster, and buy more often than other buyers. These are your ideal clients. No matter what else you are doing, you should have additional effort to capture them. I call this strategy the Dream 100 effort. It is your program for targeting your 100 (or whatever number is appropriate) dream clients constantly and relentlessly until they buy your product or ser vice. The goal of the Dream 100 is to take your ideal buyers from “I’ve never heard of this company” to “What is this company I keep hearing about?” to “I think I’ve heard of that company” to “Yes, I’ve heard of that company” to “Yes, I do business with that company.”
In this chapter you will learn the strategy for getting your dream clients. You will also find a plethora of creative ideas to capture the interest of those best buyers. You’ll see how to focus your efforts on the best buyers or the best neighborhoods (if you sell to consumers) and how to maintain that focus over the long term with pigheaded determination and discipline. Master this and you will see breathtaking growth in your revenue. The fastest way to grow any company is to focus a special and dedicated effort on your dream clients.
Business-to-Business Sales
One of my clients sells research aids for law firms. In large law firms, a managing partner acts like a CEO of the firms. They have an executive committee that helps to manage the firm and make decisions. Next in line are the senior partners of each specialty—intellectual property, litigation, bankruptcy, and so on. Then you have the lawyers, then the paralegals, librarians, information systems people, and so on.
Since my client was selling research products, he was dealing with the librarians because that’s who manages research tools. If you’ve got a revolutionary product, you can probably get an appointment with a librarian and you will probably impress that librarian. Librarians in some firms have great influence with partners, but many do not. You can spend an hour selling to that librarian and the librarian might get 5 or 10 minutes to try to explain your product or ser vice to the lawyers you want to reach.
So the challenge with this client was to build a program that would skip the librarian and go straight to the management committee. If you called a law firm partner and said, “I have a great research aid that will help