In The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, marketing strategist Chet Holmes describes 12 competencies & strategies for doubling sales and business growth. Chet shared tools for marketing, management, and sales mastery.
Key Insights: Pigheaded Discipline and Determination, Dream 100, Education-based marketing, Best neighborhoods sales strategy, Stacked Marketing.
Chet Holmes got his break by working for Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. Chet doubled the sales of nine divisions under Charlie’s management purview. He shares 12 principles for doubling sales in the Ultimate Sales Machine.
Information Overload
With more TV and radio choices than ever, the large audience you used to be able to reach in one place is now scattered among hundreds of media channels. New technologies like satellite radio and TiVo have made it possible for consumers to avoid commercials completely. All this means that it’s getting harder and harder to reach the consumer, and the market that you’re in has become fiercely and viciously competitive.
Pigheaded Discipline and Determination
Mastery is not about being special or more gifted than anyone else. Mastery is a direct result of pigheaded discipline and determination.
Karate requires tremendous discipline. You’re just repeating moves over and over. This is true of tennis, golf, or any other sport. Practice, practice, practice and then, when you’ve begun to master your moves so that you know what to do automatically, it gets exciting. But pigheaded discipline comes first.
Six simple steps to time management
- Touch it once.
- Make daily lists of the six most important tasks to accomplish.
- Plan how long each task will take.
- Assign time slots for accomplishing each task.
- Focus on the difficult projects first.
- Ask yourself, “Will it hurt me to throw this away?
Tactics vs Strategy
A tactic is a method or technique used to achieve an immediate or short-term gain. You run ads or send direct mail pieces to get leads. You go on a sales call to make a sale. You attend trade shows to meet with potential buyers and get more leads. These are examples of tactics.
A strategy is a carefully defined and detailed plan to achieve a long-term goal. In business, a strategy is the overall impact, the ultimate position you would like to achieve in the market. To think like a brilliant strategist, you will design and combine your tactics with the long-term strategy in mind.
Education-based marketing
The hardest thing we need to do today is grab the attention of potential buyers and keep their attention long enough to help them buy your product. This approach of offering some education of value to them gives you a significant opportunity to attract more buyers and build more credibility.
You will attract way more buyers if you are offering to teach them something of value to them than you will ever attract by simply trying to sell them your product or service.
When you sell, you break rapport, but when you educate, you build it.
Sales is all about building rapport, not breaking it. When people feel they’re being “sold,” they automatically resist you. When people are being educated, they have no resistance—especially if the information is good. – Andy Miller
The Smoking Gun
In the legal market, the term smoking gun refers to that piece of evidence that makes it so your opponent cannot win. You’ve found the smoking gun that makes the other party guilty. It’s the same with research. There’s always that smoking gun that positions you above everyone else. The fact that art actually facilitates healing and that calendars sell like crazy when you put them at the register are both smoking guns.
To get the most powerful market data and to uncover the smoking gun, the trick is to look at things over time. That’s where you’ll find the big breakthroughs.
Strength of Ego
It takes about 8.4 rejections to get a meeting. And what makes the difference between people who will face that rejection one time and quit or 40 times and never quit is determined purely by the strength of their ego.
The fastest way to grow any company is to focus a special and dedicated effort on your dream clients.
Dream 100
Best buyers buy more, buy faster, and buy more often than other buyers. These are your ideal clients. No matter what else you are doing, you should have additional effort to capture them.
The goal of the Dream 100 is to take your ideal buyers from “I’ve never heard of this company” to “What is this company I keep hearing about?” to “I think I’ve heard of that company” to “Yes, I’ve heard of that company” to “Yes, I do business with that company.
Best neighborhoods strategy
If you sell to consumers, target the best neighborhoods with great consistency. And remember that you should be willing to do more to attract them than you’d do for every day buyers. Give something away; make a lot of attractive offers to get them in the door.
Dream Affiliate
Affiliate marketing means you ride in on someone else’s well-established relationship. This is far less expensive than trying to acquire a customer on your own. Dream affiliates can increase your sales dramatically overnight; therefore, you can afford to share generously with them.
The Seven Musts of Marketing
- 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
- Internet: Web sites, email efforts, and affiliate marketing
While the average person speaks at only 125 words per minute, the brain can take in information at an average rate of 400 to 500 words per minute as we listen
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.
There are three modes of communication operating simultaneously as you present: your words, the tone of your voice, and your body language. Your prospect’s subconscious is processing all of these cues at once.
Create Desire
Your buyers will be a lot more motivated if their current situation becomes unacceptable. To create desire, you must motivate your buyers using a combination of problems and solutions, even if you are the one pointing out the problems that they haven’t really considered. Market data and your core story can do this well.
Market data can show your prospects that their market is fierce with competition and can spotlight the high failure rate of businesses. Do the research to find out this information.
Features tell, benefits sell. Don’t tell them what it is, but rather why they need it.
If your prospects are comfortable with the current situation, they are not motivated to change. So make them feel uncomfortable. People will act faster to solve a problem “than they will to gain an unrealized benefit. People naturally move away from problems and discomfort to solutions.
Once you have shown them the problems, paint the picture of their wonderful future with your products or ser vice and you will create desire. Just be sure you are painting a picture of their future and not just your products.
The real success formula for selling:
Trust and respect = Influence = Potential for control = More market share at every mutually beneficial opportunity
Know your customers
Successful companies know every aspect of a client’s criteria for making a purchase. The deeper your understanding of your clients, the better the opportunity to help them and the more market share you will acquire. Your goal is to become such a bright spot in your clients’ day that they actually look forward to your calls, letters, and emails. Keep things exciting and interesting. You must become part of your clients’ lives in order to stay in their top-of-mind awareness. This requires massive, diligent, and entertaining follow-up.
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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