The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [62]
This is several years ago, when LeAnn was dominating the charts. She was at the pinnacle (so far) of her career and red smoking hot.
I gasped and just repeated, in shock, “LeAnn Rimes, hmm.”
I think he thought that I was cold on the idea—but I was just in shock—so he proceeded to pitch me on why I would want LeAnn to play Emily. And it was a great pitch indeed, showing me why this fellow is so successful. He ended by saying: “And Warner Bros. wants to make a movie with her, so I think you might get a deal over there. Do I have your permission to let LeAnn read the script?”
My permission to let LeAnn read the script…? Hmm, let me think. “YES, YES, YES!!!!” The story goes on. It took her a month to read it, while appearing on every award show known to man—and me watching all of them, thinking: “That girl is reading MY script right now. How cool!”
Ultimately, LeAnn liked the project and we walked into Warner Bros., where they bought the screenplay from me. This certainly would never have happened if I had not first been completely systematic in getting the script into the hands of the most powerful people in Hollywood. They were my Dream 100. While it would have been easy to get discouraged and give up after a few initial rejections, my experience showed me that with determination and discipline to keep targeting the most powerful potential buyers, I would get a deal for my movie. The Dream 100 effort strikes again! One of the lessons for you is to build that list, organize your approach, and never say die.
No matter what you sell, there are dream prospects out there. If you’re committed and stay in their face, you’ll be surprised how easy it is. Really. My clients have included the largest companies in the world. These are companies that do $200 billion per year, and the toughest among them took about six months to penetrate. Chapter Nine will give you step-by-step instructions on how to build your full-on Dream 100 effort. For now, however…
Business-to-Consumer Sales
If you are selling business-to-consumer, you need to learn the best-neighborhood strategy. If you’re a dentist, an accountant, a jewelry store, or a chiropractor, for example, you could take out ads in the paper and reach every one. (In Chapter Seven, I’ll offer some great ideas on how to make those ads as effective as possible.) But while you’re doing that, and for a lot less money, you could send a special direct mail effort to just the best neighborhoods where the best buyers live. The secret is to do it continuously so that you build top-of-mind awareness among those best buyers.
A real estate broker followed this advice and focused on the area where I lived for 16 years as her dream neighborhood. It had 2,200 upscale homes. Every single month she sent a simple mailer that listed the houses that sold in the neighborhood and their selling prices. When do you look at a flier like that? Only when you’re interested in selling your house.
When we were ready to sell, she’s the person we called. This woman had top-of-mind awareness. She made the commitment that these 2,200 homes in this neighborhood were going to know who she was. What does that cost her? She sends a very simple three-fold flier that probably costs her $0.60 so she’s spending about $1,320 a month on this effort. These are $1 million to $5 million homes, so if she gets one client a year, she more than pays for her effort. The commission on a $1 million home, at 5 percent to 6 percent, is $50,000 to $60,000, easily paying the $15K or so she’s spending. But she doesn’t get just one client a year. When she came over to our house, she showed us a three-ring binder listing all the homes in the area that she’d sold. She’d sold nearly every house in our neighborhood—and next to many addresses she’d noted, “sold twice” or “sold three times.”
If you sell to consumers,