The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [64]
It may take you some time, but there is no market in the world that you can’t penetrate if you’re committed and willing to do something on a regular and consistent basis. Throughout my entire career in the trenches, I simply picked the clients I wanted and went after them with constant marketing. I “decided” that they would be clients and then just went after them until I got them.
Exercise
First, take five minutes to create a bullet-style profile of your ideal buyer or neighborhood of buyers. Think about specifics such as income range or company size (if you sell b-to-b), location, size of sale, and frequency of sale.
Next, list your ideal affiliates, partners, or lead sources. In Chapter Nine, we will lay out your Dream 100 effort for you and you can customize it to fit your particular needs.
Lifetime Value of Client
Once you have one or more dream clients, what are you going to do to keep them? What is the follow-up going to be like? What level of ser vice are you going to provide that is special because these clients are special?
I worked with a company that owned a chain of upscale restaurants. On my advice it hired a bunch of high school kids to go around to all the upscale homes in the neighborhood with the following script: “Hi. I’m with XYZ Restaurant. We have a special effort going right now to get people like you to become our clients. In fact, we’d like to buy you a dinner at our restaurant as a way of putting our best foot forward.” The kids would then give them a certificate for one free dinner. Others have done this with a “buy one, get one free” approach to ensure that people will bring someone else with them. When someone showed up with one of these certificates, the restaurant staff knew to treat this person like gold. The manager of the restaurant would go over and personally introduce himself to make the person feel special. Who wants to go to a restaurant where you get treated like every one else when you can go to a restaurant where you get treated like a king?
Using myself as an example, let’s see what the lifetime value of a client can be. I eat out four or even five nights per week. I frequent three restaurants whose staff I have trained to treat me like the “frequent diner” that I am. I make sure they know who I am and that I am a good customer. Since I always want to get a table and the finest ser vice, I tip heavily. I even tip a few hundred dollars every Christmas to the manager of my favorite restaurant. If I eat at a restaurant just once per week, spending $100 each time, and I go there for five years, I’m worth more than $25,000 to that restaurant. If you own a restaurant, do your waiters treat your customers like they are worth $25,000 in business or like they are just worth the $25 meal they’re buying that night?
Exercise
How are you going to treat your best buyers when they buy from you? What can you do that is special that you wouldn’t do for all buyers? A jewelry store where I have spent more than $100,000 over the years gives me 25 percent off and throws parties every year for customers just like me who spend a lot there. Write down three things you can do for your best clients to keep them feeling special.
The Power of Referrals
What if you only sell items that are one-time sales or sold very infrequently, like boats, cars, and houses? Car companies have become pretty slick about trying to maintain brand loyalty. One dealership we’ve purchased from many times has a prepaid maintenance program. It gives you such a remarkable deal on price when you pay in advance for maintenance that you’re definitely going to take your vehicle there for oil changes and even tires. The woman who sold us our house was so excellent that I have since referred her to three other people, whom she has helped as well. This book is not going to focus on referrals per se—they are so important, I should devote an entire chapter to them—but I do