Books Unwound

Posts Tagged ‘Sales’

This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  This should not be considered a replacement for the actual book, which will usually have a lot more in depth information as well as stories, which are an important way to communicate the essentials.  If you find the information in these posts helpful, I recommend buying the book or borrowing it from your library.

Chapter Eleven: Follow-up and Client Bonding Skills

Follow-up to Build Solid Relationships

If there is one thing that wins or loses more sales, it is follow-up. Good follow up can increase your sales quite a lot. Bad follow-up leaves a trail of “could-have-beens” behind you. Follow-up isn’t just for those sales you haven’t closed yet either. Good follow-up with a customer can get that customer to buy more, buy again, and to tell other people about your business. You should really build a follow-up procedure into your business.

Follow-up is all about staying on the front burner with a prospect or a client. If they don’t keep hearing from you, they will very quickly forget about you. So you need to keep on reminding them. Don’t worry about being annoying. If you are a nice person with a true intent to help, you won’t be. If you are a bad person, you probably don’t care if you annoy people anyway.

A prospect is never closer to the sale as when you are right there talking to him or her. The moment you leave, she begins to cool off. Mostly because she has a lot on her plate. If you want to keep the prospect warmed up to your product or service, you need to work hard to keep it in front of them.

Its not just putting them on a mailing list either. A salesperson makes a personal connection with each customer and prospect. So the follow-up should be personal as well. Some of it should be driven by the salesperson. Keep the relationship going.

Of course, good follow-up happens best after a good sales effort. Throughout the rest of The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes talks about how you can change your business and how you can communicate real value to prospects. Your follow-up procedure should spring from that, so that you are continuing a value-based conversation that you have already started through your marketing and sales process.

Holmes gives 10 steps to great follow-up in this chapter. These can be used whether you are still trying to close the sale, or if you have won the customer already.

10 Steps to Great Follow-up

Step One: Send the First Follow-Up Letter

Sending a personal letter immediately after your meeting with the client can help solidify your bond or drive home the importance that the client choose your company. Holmes advises not to make the letter about you and your product. Here are four parts to a good follow-up letter:

1. Include a personal anecdote that you remember from the meeting.
2. Include a compliment.
3. Focus on their stated needs and the benefits of your product or service as they apply to these needs.
4. Be personal in your close.

The letter should focus on the customer, not the sale. Remember, it is about building the relationship. It is okay, even recommended, to add personal touches to the letter.

Step Two: Make the First Follow-up Call

Make this call right after you send the first letter. Think of this as a personal call. You have already done the selling recently at the meeting. You may want to offer something of value, like a piece of advice or something else you thought of that might help the client. The goal here is to increase the bond. If you make this call after the sales pitch and have a somewhat personal conversation, it will be easier in the future for you to connect with this prospect/customer.

Step Three: Share Something

It is a nice gesture to send something along that is humorous or useful. No, don’t forward the latest internet email prank. But if you find an article that may be of interest to the client, cut it out and send it along. If you found out that the client loves bass fishing, and you come across a fishing joke or cartoon, send that along. This is about bonding and letting the client know that you are thinking about him or her.

Step Four: Party

Through a client party and invite everyone to attend. This could be a great time to bond. On a more personal level, invite the client out for lunch. Maybe you will even have something new or interesting to share with them.

Step Five: Send Another Letter

One of the major goals of follow-up is to just keep doing it. Follow-up any additional meetings you have with another letter. Keep it short, interesting, and personal. Sending a follow-up letter shows that you care and that you enjoyed spending time with the client.

Step Six: Plan a Family Event

This usually works best for bigger businesses and big clients. If you are in that position, you can do something extravagant, like a hot air balloon ride. For smaller businesses, you can do something like a picnic and invite the client and his or her family. When the family is involved, it shows a higher level of trust and respect.

Step Seven: Offer Some Help

Can you offer any value, or are you just about getting the sale? Commit to being helpful to your clients. This includes sending them useful information, but it may also include helping them find the people they need for a certain job. You can also help bring two of your clients together so that they can collaborate and both benefit.

There is really no end to the ammount of help you can be if you get your mind around the concept that you are not just a salesperson, but an adviser and friend.

Step Eight: Send Another Letter

Yes, you need to keep this up. It doesn’t have to be a letter in the mail. It could be a fax or an email. But you need to make it personal. This is above and beyond any company newsletter or marketing efforts.

Step Nine: Offer Even More Help

If you can help your client succeed, both through the use of your product or service, and through your advice, you will be establishing a long-lasting and beneficial relationship.  Provide educational opportunities for your client. Send along a book that you know will help them. Always be on the look out for things you can do that will help your client be a success, even if they do not directly relate to your product or service.

Step Ten: Invite Them Over

Having a client to your home, or getting invited to theirs, is the ultimate sign that you have built a relationship that goes beyond sales. This is not a step you will get to, or need to get to, with every client. But when you do get there, it will be because of the relationship you have built, which is turning into a friendship. This is good for both of your businesses, as well as being personally rewarding.

Become a Friend

Your ultimate goal should be that your best clients also become your best friends. Become involved in their personal and business success, and you will succeed along with them. If you do your follow-up with friendship in mind, you will have stunning results. You won’t always become friends, but your follow-up will always be friendly, personal, and helpful.

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Coming next: Chapter 12 – All Systems Go

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog at www.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.

This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  This should not be considered a replacement for the actual book, which will usually have a lot more in depth information as well as stories, which are an important way to communicate the essentials.  If you find the information in these posts helpful, I recommend buying the book or borrowing it from your library.

Chapter Nine: The Nitty-Gritty of Getting the Best Buyers

6 Steps to Land Your Dream Customers

Dream customers. Those are the ones that, if you are honest with yourself, you want more than any other kind. They are the big buyers or the consistent buyers. A few of these sprinkled in will help your business to soar. The only thing that is stopping you from getting them right now is … they are hard to land. Or at least you think so.

You need a plan to land these customers. A plan that you can stick with. One that you won’t abandon at the first no (or even the second, or twelfth). Chet Holmes presents just such a plan in Chapter Nine of the Ultimate Sales Machine. Here are his six steps to help you land your dream clients.

1. Choose Your Dream Customers

Holmes recommends that you pick around 100 prospects that you would really like to land. Don’t just pick them randomly, but come up with some kind of criteria. Perhaps they have a certain income level or live in a certain neighborhood if you are targeting consumers. If you are targeting businesses, maybe you are looking for a certain size or type. Taking a little time before you get started to write up the profile of an ideal customer can be helpful.

Once you have the criteria, start to build your database. It is an important step to create more than a list. A database, whether done on Excel or with your CRM solution, is a place for you to store ongoing information about these prospects. You need to track your every move in trying to win them, as well as their responses and whatever new information you learn about these dream customers. The more you know, the better you will be able to hone in on the customer.

For businesses, you not only need to determine which businesses to target, but who in that business to target. You really need to market to the person who has the authority to say yes. In many cases, this means appealing directly to the CEO. As difficult as that may seem to some of us, the rest of these steps show how it is achievable and worthwhile.

2. Pick the Gifts

Holmes advises that in order to get noticed by your dream customers, you should regularly send them gifts. Not gifts that are in the bribe category, ie. expensive gifts. Send inexpensive things that will get attention and maybe a laugh. Make them useful, things they will want to use or play with, or give to their kids. Tie the gift in to the message you want to relate, as well.

Giving a little something extra, like a squirt gun or a desk toy, helps you to stand out from the crowd. It will help you get your sales letter read and the name of your company remembered when you do your follow up call.

3. Craft a Letter

You need to include a letter with every gift that you send. It should be short, and it should be different each time. Make sure it ties in well with the gift in a clever way. For instance, if you send a magnifying glass, you can talk about the clues to greater success.

In the letter, you need to offer them something that they can easily say yes to. You need to do it in a very clear call to action, so that they will know exactly what you want them to do next. Don’t push for the sale too early. The short letter is not a good place to do that. Instead, try to get a meeting, or have them attend a webinar.

A note if you are selling directly to consumers. You will probably not be able to send out a gift to each consumer (unless you can). So make your marketing piece, or letter, stand out on its own. Also, be consistent.

4. Get It Scheduled

For a campaign like this to work, you need to have consistency. You need to continue to market to these dream customers every single month, until you get the sale. At least once a month.

Every thing you send does not need to include a gift, but that should be a regular calling card of your effort.

If you decide when you get started that you are going to stick it out, and plan each marketing piece ahead, you will be able to succeed. The more these dream customers become familiar with your business, the more likely they will make the jump to becoming your customers.

5. Follow Up on the Phone

Your mailing is just the opening salvo to soften up the customer. Holmes says that you must follow up every mailing with a phone call. At least if you are selling to a business.

The goal of the follow up phone call is the same as the goal of your letter. You want to move the prospect not to the close, but to a meeting or webinar where you can present them with your story.

One idea is to offer a free report about something that will be of interest to the prospect. This report should be delivered live by someone from your business. I say someone, but it will usually be the salesperson. Just don’t call a salesperson that. Come up with a new name, such as advisor or expert.

Following up via phone will increase your closing rate and will speed up the marketing process, thus saving you money while making you money. So don’t neglect this important step.

6. Do the Presentation

Once you do get a presentation with one of your dream customers, you don’t want to blow it by just giving an average sales pitch. Instead, you should present a report, or briefing, that will be riveting and educational to your prospect.

Here is how to do that:

• Use data that is relevant to the customer (and avoid listing product benefits)
• Tell a story or educate in a way that encourages a buying attitude (ie. show them why they need to be worried about something, etc.)
• Find a “smoking gun,” the thing that will make you stand out from all the competition
• Focus on their pain points (and how to solve them)
• Make your pitch only after you have provided them great value (and keep it brief and at the end)

Always make education the goal of your presentation. With a little effort, you can put together a briefing that will be very valuable to your dream customers. Overdeliver on the educational component, and they will be very receptive to hear your short sales message at the end of the presentation.

If you follow these 6 steps thoroughly and consistently, you will be able to win the majority of your dream customers.

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Next: Chapter 10 – Sales Skills: 6 Steps to Closing the Sale

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog at www.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.

This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  This should not be considered a replacement for the actual book, which will usually have a lot more in depth information as well as stories, which are an important way to communicate the essentials.  If you find the information in these posts helpful, I recommend buying the book or borrowing it from your library.  

Chapter Six: The High Art of Getting the Best Buyers

Winning the Best Buyers

In this chapter, Chet Holmes discusses a very interesting and exciting strategy for winning the business of “best buyers.” The first thing you need to do is to determine who your best buyers are. You should be able to do this by looking at your current customer list. In general, the are the big purchasers. Perhaps in your case they are the buyers who repeat frequently. All in all, they are that small group at the top of the prospect chain that you tend to drool over. They are where the money is.

Holmes’s best buyer marketing strategy springs from a simple fact. While you may have a large market with lots of potential buyers, there is always a smaller group of best buyers. If you win these best buyers, they will add significant income to your business. 

Since there are fewer best buyers, marketing to them is less expensive then marketing to all buyers. It may be a difference of 100 to 100,000. You can spend more money per buyer on marketing to those 100, and still save substantially over marketing to the whole group.

Holmes challenges you to think about what would happen if put some intense focus on a small group of best buyers.

These buyers will buy more, in larger amounts, and more often than other buyers. These are the buyers whose sales equal 10, or 20, or even 100 smaller sales. They are your ideal customers. So why not focus some special marketing efforts directly on winning them? 

Dream 100

Holmes calls this strategy the “Dream 100 effort.” It is a strategy that peels a small group of best buyers away from the crowd and focuses more intense, more interesting, marketing on them. This is something to do above and beyond your standard marketing efforts. 

For this to work, you need to pick the right best buyers. Then, you need to target them with your marketing campaign using focus and consistency, and keep doing it until these buyers become your customers. 

Holmes has a great example in this chapter about a computer company. Its sales averaged from $10,000 to $28,000. Then Holmes discovered one sale that brought in $160,000. He asked what it was, and was told it was a big company. When he asked why there weren’t more of these sales, the answer was that the business did not actively go after big companies. They focused on smaller companies and took a big sale if it came along. What if that computer company had a focused marketing effort to go after 100 of those big companies? Do you think that would make a difference on bottom line? You bet!

You can keep going about your business as you normally would. But in addition, you should start a dedicated effort to go after those dream best buyers. 

Spice it Up

Since these best buyers are a much smaller segment, and since they will bring in much higher profits, you can afford to add a little pizzazz to your marketing efforts. Holmes suggests sending along a little gift as a tie-in to each marketing piece. This could be anything and it doesn’t have to be expensive. You could send them a puzzle along with a piece that asks if they are puzzled about how to increase profits. Or how about a box of mixed chocolates with a piece that asks if they are overwhelmed with the choices that are available. Tailor the gift and the marketing piece to your company. Don’t forget to use educational selling techniques.

Each time you send out one of these pieces, you should follow it up with a phone call. Keep doing this until the sale is booked. It may happen on that first call. It may be months or even years. Just keep at it. Remember, these are best buyers, so it is very worth it. 

There are lots of other ways you can stand out and attract the attention of your best buyers with your marketing. If they are really big buyers, why not take out a personalized billboard near their offices? Or how about have a marching band go by carrying your marketing message on a banner? For most of you, those are way out of reach, but apply that kind of big thinking to your best buyer efforts. Maybe you can create a custom website personalized for each best buyer. Maybe you can have a couple of employees stand on the corner with your banner as the boss of the company leaves for the day. 

One other option that I have found that you may want to incorporate is a personalized cartoon. These are available from cartoonlink.com. They even have an option for going after dream customers.

Even with these efforts, you have to be willing to stick with it. If you keep up your efforts, and make each one unique, your best buyers will know who you are. This alone can make things happen for you. Also, it doesn’t matter how hard it may seem to get a meeting with the key decision makers at your target businesses. This method will make it happen. You just need to do it and keep doing it until you get your desired results. In fact, you will win the majority of your best buyers with far less effort than you thought you needed. 

What About Consumers?

These efforts also work if you are selling directly to consumers. In this case, you may not be sending direct packages to individuals. Perhaps you will pick a best neighborhood, and send out regular fliers. You can also do some unique things, especially if those best buyers are grouped by geography. 

Grow Your Business By Focusing on the Few

With this kind of focus on the few best buyers, you could double your business. There are less of these best buyers, but they are bigger sales and more often. You will not only be growing, but you will be securing your future. Don’t ignore the many. Keep up your normal efforts. But build a plan geared especially toward your dream customers. Then execute it diligently and watch it pay off in spades.

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Coming next: Chapter Seven – The Seven Musts of Marketing

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog at www.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.