The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [96]
Choose the gifts.
Create your Dream 100 letters.
Create your Dream 100 calendar.
Conduct Dream 100 follow-up phone calls.
Present the executive briefing.
Step 1: Choose Your Dream 100
In Chapter Six you made lists of your dream clients, neighborhoods, and affiliates. Take a look at those again. This is your starting point to create your Dream 100 target list. Make sure you are clear on your criteria for your dream list. What kind of clients or neighborhood qualifies as your Dream 100? Are they successful, so they have the money to spend if they want or need to buy? If you’re in healthcare, do you want to go after the biggest hospitals? If you’re in real estate, you probably want to target the neighborhoods with the most expensive homes. For companies that sell business-to-business like the office supply company I used as an example, you will want to decide on criteria such as the number of employees, value of company, location, industry, or whatever else qualifies a company to buy faster, more, and more often than any other buyer. You can do this easily online. One way is to go to www.zapdata.com. Input your criteria and, in minutes, you’ll find out all the companies of a given size in any industry in your area.
It is important to create a database where you can store a lot of information about your prospects. The more you know about your dream clients, the better you will be able to target them. Also, by getting your salespeople to capture great data on each client and having a database to store it, you’ll have all the information you need to continue targeting them even if a salesperson leaves. If they are really big clients, it’s worth the time to do a little research on them before you begin your hunt. Check out their Web site and any other promotional materials or articles on them that you can find. Every phone call you make to that prospect—even if it’s merely to find out the correct address or spelling of the CEO’s name—is a great learning opportunity. Another common tool used by many sales reps to get more details about their prospects is www.hoovers.com. Hoovers is a subscription ser vice that provides up-to-date information on companies as well as industries and markets.
If you do sell business-to-business, you need to decide who at each dream company will be your ideal prospect. Here’s the rule for choosing your target: approach the one who has the authority to say yes. In the case of the manufacturer, the reps sold to a line executive who only had the power to say no. If that line exec wanted to add that client’s product, he had to go higher up in the company to get permission. The person who would give the permission is the one you want to target with your efforts. This also dictates the kind of information you send. In the case of the company selling art to hospitals, the information in its core story was of ultimate value to the CEOs of the hospitals. Therefore, the education-based marketing approach enabled it to get hundreds of CEOs to participate in its free education.
So who is the person who can say yes to your product or ser vice? Is your market data targeted effectively at that person?
Step 2: Choose the Gifts
I’ve found that one of the best ways to get noticed by your Dream 100 is to send them small gifts every two weeks. Choose gifts like the Rubik’s Cube I’ve already mentioned. It’s just an inexpensive plastic puzzle that is slightly bigger than a cube of sugar. You want to consider many ideas for this. Just keep the gifts inexpensive. Expensive gifts come off like you’re trying to bribe them. I have a client who has paid me millions and he won’t let me buy him anything expensive as a thank-you present. For Christmas he has sent back the $1,000 pen I tried to give him to thank him for his business. Some executives will view expensive gifts with discomfort. So cheap is better. The prospect smiles at the gesture and doesn’t feel bribed.
Another key to this is that the gifts should be useful, things that they will want to keep or play with—or