The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [88]
Exercise
Who is the audience for your presentation? Write down five overview facts you’d like to know about that would be interesting to them. Then set about finding this information over time. How many of them are there? How many were there 30 years ago? What is the failure rate of this type of company? Or if it’s a consumer matter, what are the issues surrounding those consumers that are going to be of interest to them? The same information you put on your Web site can be used in your presentations.
I had a client that wanted to sell skincare products to day spas. So I asked the researcher to tell me the failure rate of day spas. I was looking for the pain point to motivate spa owners to take interest in my client’s hot new ser vice. The data came back—the failure rate was very small. However, because we asked the researchers to look at data over time, we discovered that the growth rate was unbelievable—from approximately 90 day spas in the U.S. in 1980 to 16,000 today. So instead of focusing on the failure rate, what conclusion could we draw from that data that might be bad news for day spas? Competition—major competition. When you do the research, it will give you all kinds of ideas you’d never think of for positioning the importance of your product or ser vice.
Rule 4. Build in Opportunities for Stories
Well-told stories increase recall by another 26 percent over making a point without a story to illustrate it. People love stories. When I was selling advertising for a magazine, I tried to get to a big advertiser. I met with the director of marketing, who would not let me meet the owner of the company. But he loved my ideas, and I was sure I had the sale. After I left, he went to the owner with the information. The owner said no. The marketing director thanked me for trying and sent me on my way.
I deliberately didn’t follow up with him because I knew the only thing he could say was no. In fact, I waited six full months, hoping he would forget me altogether. I then went over his head to the owner of the company and got an appointment. If I had done this right away, the marketing director would’ve felt slighted. How dare I go over his head? But since I waited six months, it went exactly as planned. Basically, he had forgotten all about me, and when I got there, the CEO called in the marketing director to join us. He said to me, “Hey, I know you.” We shook hands and I got to present my material to the owner with this fellow in the room. He was supportive once, so I figured he’d be supportive again.
When I finished, the CEO said: “Okay. You convinced me. We’ll take a page of advertising and try it out.” I said, “One page is not the way to test advertising.” The owner said, “Atta boy,” impressed that I was pushing him to make a real commitment. He took three pages for his test. They sold training programs and needed to make 28 sales to break even on the ad. He pointed out: “I don’t even need to make a profit on it—I’ll make that on the back end. Once a client buys from us, they keep buying. So all I need to do is break even and we’ll advertise again.”
The first ad ran and they only got six responses. It was an awful response rate for an expensive magazine ad. I did tremendous amounts of follow-up. I went to see him and showed him letters with impressive success stories from other companies