The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [6]
The EPA found that professional carpet cleaning actually gets carpets 1,500 percent cleaner than even vacuuming every day. The steaming hot water used by professionals kills germs and bacteria that build up in your home.
This is an example of how market data can motivate purchasing when people might not even feel they need the product. Product data like “We sell carpet cleaning” only appeals to people who think they need their carpets cleaned right now. The goal of most people when they get their carpets cleaned is to get them to look better. Little do people realize that it makes their home healthier. This puts cleaning your carpets on the same level of importance as taking the kids for their yearly checkup.
Here’s a company that has actually gone beyond product data to study every aspect of carpet cleaning, right down to the government studies about the cleanliness of your air quality within the home. From the EPA’s research, we created a concept called the Gold Service. The goal was to get customers on a schedule to have their carpets cleaned every six months.
The company owner was very excited about this concept. So was I. We could both do the math and understand how much this would mean for him if it worked. Here I was hired to find the big breakthrough, and I felt I had delivered! Victory was mine. Using the market data, I created a script for their top producer to test for a week. The following week I met with the entire staff over the telephone with the CEO listening. The dialogue went as follows:
CHET: So how did it go?
SALES REP: It didn’t work.
CHET: It didn’t work?
SALES REP: No. It didn’t work.
CHET: Well, how many people did you offer it to?
SALES REP: I offered it to 10 people.
CHET: And nobody bought it?
SALES REP: No, two people bought it.
To the sales rep, the perception was that eight no’s out of 10 pitches made the concept a failure. But do the math: if you have 30,000 clients buying once every three years, that’s about 10,000 sales per year. Now imagine an extra 6,000 of them (a mere 20 percent) buying twice per year. What does that do for this business? It’s an enormous increase in volume.
But if it were up to that sales rep, the idea would have died right then and there. This is where pigheaded discipline and determination make the difference between mediocrity and greatness. In fact, it took six months of pigheaded discipline and determination to get every salesperson offering that ser vice to every prospect, every time. This is where most executives fail. Building a sales machine is not going to be about doing 4,000 things; it’s going to be about doing 12 things 4,000 times each.
Just one hour a week changed this CEO’s life. He made a commitment to spend this hour every week improving and integrating the Gold Service concept. It wasn’t easy—it took six disciplined months to integrate this into the fabric and fiber of the business. But, remember, it was six months of only one hour per week. Every Monday night at five o’clock without fail the whole company would gather and talk about how this concept could be made more effective, how we could make it easier for the salespeople to use, what ideas the salespeople had to make this more effective, and so on. The whole focus of that hour was to integrate this one concept fully and completely into every aspect of the business.
Not only did the implementation of the Gold Service improve sales, it also stabilized the business. Where the owner used to hope every month that customers would respond to his fliers, he now knows, going into each month, how many people are signed up for the Gold Service cleaning. It made the business more stable in every way and it transformed sales performance.
When I started working with the staff, the lowest sales rep was doing $13,000 a month and the average