The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [95]
We followed this clever mailing with phone calls from all the salespeople. As I do with most of my clients, I role-played with the sales team every single week for an hour on a mass teleconference. I strongly urge every company to have a sales skills teleconference once per week. If your staff works in single location, you can meet live rather than use the phone.
Here’s how we spent our hour a week working on the business: I would ask each of the sales reps questions on what they said, what the prospect said, how they were turned down, and why they were turned down. Then we would role-play possible responses to effectively persuade a disinterested prospect and turn him into an interested prospect. As I mentioned in Chapter Two, when I first started with this company, not one salesperson was razor sharp at persuading CEOs who said they weren’t interested. That’s not to slam them; it’s just to say that these salespeople normally called on production people in the bowels of the factory, and here I had them calling CEOs. And they weren’t selling the OEM products they were used to selling—they were now selling a free educational program (that ultimately sold the OEM product much more effectively).
All the sales reps were rough in the beginning. But thanks to constant pigheaded determination and role-playing with them every single week, each rep got better and better. In fact, the whole team got surprisingly good. By the end of the five-month period, every role play with every rep was pretty darn effective.
Back to the mailers: We continued sending their dream clients a clever mailer with a cute gift every other week for five months. We sent a flashlight with the message, “Don’t be in the dark about the five biggest dangers facing manufacturers.” Then we sent a compass with a note that said: “Most companies are losing direction when it comes to manufacturing in today’s environment. Don’t be one of them. Get our report on the five biggest dangers facing manufacturers today.” Then came a tape mea sure: “If you want to mea sure up to the highest manufacturing standards, get our free report on the five most dangerous trends facing manufacturers.”
It might sound expensive to send a gift to every prospect every other week. The key here is that this company was only sending them to a few hundred prospects. Since these few hundred prospects were the biggest companies this company could possibly target, if the mailers got them one client, it would pay for mailers for 20 years.
We had sent only four such mailers when a huge client told one of the salespeople: “Oh, yes, glad you called. I just have to have you come here and meet with me.” The sales rep was so shocked he asked, “Why’s that?” The client responded, “Because I’ve been getting all those little gifts of yours and I just think your marketing is super.” When the sales rep arrived, the prospect had all the little gifts on his desk, where he constantly played with them. He even jokingly cursed out the sales rep because he was addicted to the Rubik’s Cube. This kind of diligent and consistent marketing effort wins over just about every one if you stick with it long enough. The point is that you stand out in the crowd with great marketing.
Within three months, we secured meetings with half of their Dream 100 prospects. The education, which was their core story, was so compelling that 100 percent of the prospects who responded and experienced the education took the offer to test my client’s OEM product. And of those that tested, 100 percent bought some product and a relationship began.
This single activity took this company from being $6 million in the red to being $2 million in the black the following year. Needless to say, the client was utterly thrilled.
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