The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [72]
Here’s a practical scenario: You go out and present your core story. This is the educational orientation you have built with market data that you give to potential clients. It goes well and the prospect now wants to present the information to his boss or at a committee meeting. He asks for a copy of your orientation. If your core story is a masterpiece, you might not want to give it to your prospects, many of whom may have a relationship with one of your competitors. But you can give them a brochure that includes the highlights of your core story. This is important because in giving them a brochure, you’re giving them a sales tool that turns them into a core story presenter for you.
I’m working with a company called United Multi Family (www.umf.com), which sells apartment buildings. Their core story is a masterpiece of information that not only encourages owners to sell their buildings now but gives many reasons why you want to list your apartment building with this particular company over all others. This core story has an 80 percent closing ratio. The company brochure is a miniature version of the core story, highlighting the main data in the core story. So now, when a rep meets with an apartment building owner and that owner wants to talk to the spouse or partners, the rep can leave the brochure, which acts as a mini core story. Or if the rep can’t present the entire core story for some reason, that rep can pull out the brochure and do a minicore story right on the spot.
Let’s flesh this out a little further. Most brochures are a waste of money. They are totally focused on you instead of the buyer. I call them ego pieces. Let’s imagine that you are an apartment building owner. You’re at a trade show for apartment building owners and on one of the tables there are dozens of brochures. Most say something like “Kimberly and Wayne: Why we’re great.” The only people who will pick these up will be people who already know about these companies and are interested in contacting them. But there’s one that says, “The five most dangerous trends facing apartment building owners and how to maximize your apartment building asset.” Who wants to know about that? Every apartment building owner at this trade show would want to pick up that brochure. Which brochure are you going to want to read?
When done properly, brochures are awesome sales tools. Also falling under this category of corporate literature are promotional pieces. We have more than a dozen superb reports that we use as marketing tools. When people subscribe to our email list, they begin to receive these reports every few days. The reports offer excellent information, and at the end of the report there is a subtle plug for the ser vice we want to sell. It will say, “To learn even more about building your sales, go to www.howtodoublesales.com.” Subtle, but very effective. As of this writing, 30 percent of those who get the reports end up clicking on that link at the end of the article. It’s an outstanding method of driving traffic.
When I sold advertising, we had a series of excellent one-page promotional pieces, each explaining another sales point. These were used for our regular campaigns, but the sales staff also deploy them on a case-by-case basis for specific objections they would get from prospects. For example, if someone only wanted to take one ad, we had a promo piece that made a case for why you should advertise with frequency. If someone wanted to run only a black-and-white ad, we had a promo piece that gave excellent data on why color was a much better way to go.
Exercise
Write down 5 to 10 major sales points for why a prospect would want to buy your product over another, or why you would want prospects to go deeper and/or