The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [65]
Conclusion
The Dream 100 strategy has doubled the sales of many clients and it can work for you. You just have to have the pigheaded discipline and determination to build a great Dream 100 program and stick to it like white on rice.
The Seven Musts of Marketing
Turbocharge Every Aspect of Your
Primary Marketing Efforts
Before you can obtain the Ultimate Sales Machine, every aspect of your business must run with razor-sharp precision, and that includes your marketing. Consider this a $50 million learning curve on the absolute necessities of marketing, along with how to use them as part of that machine. If you build that stadium pitch or core story as outlined in Chapter Four, all of your marketing weapons will work more effectively and more as a united front. Here are what I call the Seven Musts of Marketing. Every company that wants to be number one in its industry or profession must deploy them:
Advertising
Direct mail
Corporate literature: brochures and promotional pieces
Public relations
Personal contact: salespeople and customer ser vice
Market education: trade shows, speaking engagements, and education-based marketing (as described in Chapter Four)
Internet: Web sites, email efforts, and affiliate marketing
Most large companies are doing all of these already, but often how they are doing them can be dramatically improved. In small companies, you may not be able to afford to do them all, so you have to pick and choose which weapons will get you the most impact for the least money. This chapter is going to show you how to maximize each of these weapons separately and then how to coordinate all of these weapons as a united front. In the companies that already use all seven marketing weapons, I usually find that each is treated as a separate little island. This is especially true in the biggest companies, where there is often no synergy between the ads, the brochure, the look and feel of their trade show presence, the direct mail effort, the PR activity, the sales team’s work, and the Web efforts. You may think you’ve got synergy or, at the very least, a uniform “look” to all your marketing, but this chapter will show you how to soup it up even more.
Often the PR staff has collected and put into a lovely photo album all of their press releases and the articles they’ve gotten placed in various newspapers and magazines. When PR people proudly shows me examples of their accomplishments, I frequently reply: “Gee. That’s a great article. It points out a lot of the benefits of doing business with your company. Have the salespeople ever had that as a sales tool?” By the look on the face of almost every PR person I’ve said this to, I can tell that the salespeople haven’t seen it and that they will get that article within minutes of my leaving the meeting.
Additionally, those same pieces may be powerful when used with direct mail or at trade shows, yet no one may be coordinating that effort. Another example of this lack of coordination comes when the marketing department assembles a brochure without asking the salespeople what sales points would make the brochure a more effective communication piece. In essence, these marketing weapons are not working together as a highly strategic and organized attack. But when they do, they all work more effectively as part of the same machine. I call this stacked marketing. It involves coordinating all of your marketing weapons rather than having varying and even conflicting messages from each separate weapon. With stacked marketing, you develop a consistent message, look, theme, and slogan that carries throughout all of your marketing efforts.
Also, your core story or stadium pitch will provide you with data that will make all of your marketing weapons work harder. In the case of the carpet cleaning company, the owner put all the EPA data