The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

Summary

Chet Holmes provides a decent overview of sales and running a sales department, with examples and checklists. But I found nothing that wasn’t better said in other business books. And after reading this I reaffirmed my belief: sales is learnt by doing, not by reading.

Key Takeaways

• Mastery is a direct result of pigheaded discipline and determination.
• Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.
• “Education-based marketing”: 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.
• People will act faster to solve a problem than they will to gain an unrealized benefit.
• The better you qualify prospects, the fewer obstacles you’ll have as you come into the close.
• The best close of all is when the buyers make their own decision to buy because it’s the most logical conclusion they can draw from the information you’ve given them.

What I got out of it

Chet Holmes provides a decent overview of (1) sales and (2) how to run and grow a sales department, with a lot of examples and checklists.

Holmes’ favourite slogan “mastery is a direct result of pigheaded discipline and determination” perfectly summarizes this book: everything centers around following-up and constantly being in touch with your prospects and clients.

I found some merit in:

• “Education-based marketing” (aka consultative selling): focus on teaching something of value rather than trying to sell your product or service. Prospects will view you as an expert – over time – and gravitate toward you with enough exposure.
• Dream 100: be focused in your sales approach and have a list of your ideal clients.
• His various checklists and process to train salespeople and reduce variability in performance and results.

That said, I wonder how much of this applies to smaller organizations or one-person businesses. Much of what Holmes preaches seems to require a larger size team to pull off. I also felt the approach to be very “American” and don’t think it would work as well in other countries and cultures.

Finally, some of his approaches, especially his time management one, didn’t resonate with me and I know, from experience, that there are alternative approaches that can work as well, if not better…which Holmes happily ignores. 

Summary Notes

Preface

Mastery is a direct result of pigheaded discipline and determination.

Introduction 

Market data can motivate purchasing when people might not even feel they need the product. Product data like “We sell carpet cleaning” only appeals to people who think they need their carpets cleaned right now. The goal of most people when they get their carpets cleaned is to get them to look better. Little do people realize that it makes their home healthier. This puts cleaning your carpets on the same level of importance as taking the kids for their yearly checkup.

Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.

Time Management Secrets Of Billionaires 

Good time management shouldn’t take a lot of time.

Ask yourself: do you function mostly in a reactive or proactive mode?

Yes-to-do’s, tasks, and deadlines must be assigned after every meeting. But the key is not to ask for too much to be completed. Make the gains small but constant.

The six steps to great time management:

1. Touch it once. If you touch it, take action.
2. Make lists. List the six most important things and get those six things done each day.
3. Plan how much time to allocate to each task. 6 things should take about 6 hours.
4. Plan the day.
5. Prioritize the day: how much is proactive and how much is reactive?
   1. Every salesperson should have at least 2.5 hours of new prospecting.
6. Ask: “Will it hurt me to throw this away?” Could you get it again if you need it?

Instituting Higher Standards And Regular Training 

The most important thing you can do is to insist upon mandatory and regular skills training.

In a life-or-death situation, you’re in one of two categories:

• You have no training and you’re guessing.
• You’ve had training and have very specific ideas of what you can do.

Repetition is the key to preprogramming your company to run like a machine.

By rotating core material regularly, the same concepts are constantly reinforced and reiterated. Skills are impacted permanently with consistent repetition.

At the start of a training session say:

• What will be covered 
• How long it will take
• How the information will be covered 
• The objective of the session 
• The obtained skill or knowledge that you hope they will gain

To improve training and retention:

• Involve the participant (example: role playing)
• Use visual aids
• Use concrete examples and case studies in which the concept made a big difference
  • How someone did everything wrong and the situation worsened.
  • How someone did everything right and the situation improved.
• People remember stories

Executing Effective Meetings 

Attention to the 3 Ps is essential if you want to grow your business:

• Planning
• Procedures
• Policies

Ask yourself: 

• “What if I were hiring 50 people next week and I wanted all of them to enter the business and quickly be able to perform at peak levels?”
• “What kind of a training program do I need in place to do that?”
• “What are the things standing in way of this being a much better company?”

If you have a good staff, the only thing you need to bring to a meeting or workshop is your judgment.

A great workshop for everybody: what is something else you can offer the buyer at the point of sale? We have found that one out of three people will buy something else if offered at the point of sale.

10 steps to implement a new policy:

1. Get everyone to feel the pain
   1. Show them as intensely as possible why the current way isn’t working.
   2. Useful: ask them what challenges they are facing.
   3. Have everyone write down “What are the drawbacks of not changing or improving this behaviour? and list the drawbacks.
2. Hold a workshop to generate solutions
3. Develop a “conceptual solution or procedure”
4. Leader or top talent personally performs procedure or task
   1. Pick champions who are responsible to spreading the idea.
5. Set a deadline for testing the conceptual procedure
6. Document step-by-step procedure or process
   1. Write scripts, procedures, activities and the results you expect to achieve.
   2. Make it so 50 new hires could come in today and execute.
7. Have show-and-tell and role playing
8. Have another workshop on how to improve
   1. Get feedback, take advantage of the ideas and perfect (or ditch) the concept in practice before rolling it out.
9. Monitor the procedure directly and weekly/daily
10. Measure and reward the outcome.
    1. People respect what you inspect.
    2. Make a big deal out of the reward process.

Becoming A Brilliant Strategist 

The strategist looks at every challenge as an opportunity to outthink competitive approaches.

The purpose of buyer education is to create brand loyalty. Over time, this store builds a large and loyal following of customers who automatically come there first when they are interested in any type of furniture.

“Education-based marketing”: 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.

Strategic objectives accomplished by education-based marketing:

1. It made it a lot easier to get appointments.
2. It enabled you to get in to see just about anyone – including the 90 percent who were not buying now.
3. Since the information was so good, it established the sales person as an expert rather than merely a salesperson.
4. Added credibility.
5. When you begin any meeting with real data and hard facts, the sales material at the end of the meeting has a lot more credibility.
6. Because we have control over the material covered, it artfully unseats every type of competitor we have. 
7. It creates brand loyalty.
8. Reciprocity: if someone gives you something of value, you want to give back.
9. Part of the education taught the importance of consistency in your advertising.
10. The presentation made selling idiot-proof for the salespeople. 
11. The presentation says everything the top management would want every prospect to hear and know. 
12. It made the reps smarter and more consultative in their selling. 

Evenifit’s not practical for you to gooutand start doing educa-tional seminars for your prospects, you should build a stadium pitch that has every possible pieceofdata you canputin there.

Change – real change, dramatic improvement – in any company starts at the top and works its way down.

If you come from a place of truly wanting to serve your buyer, then be a market expert.

Ask your staff:

• “What would make us more respected?”
• “What would position us as an expert in the eye of our buyer?”

Hiring Superstars 

For SMEs:

1. List 3 initiatives for which you’d love to hire someone to execute.
2. Write next to each initiative what the impact on your business would be.
3. Write down how much you can pay such people if they really performed.
4. If (2) is higher than (3), get people who will share the reward. 

On a DiSC assessment: if your candidate’s personality combines high influence with high dominance, you’ve found your sales superstar. 

Questions to ask overachievers in interviews:

• Tell me about a time in your life when the odds were stacked against you but you overcame them and succeeded.
• Tel lme three or four things of which you are most proud.
• Have you ever practiced and reached a high level in any area beyond just getting by in life?

To test empathy and the candidate’s ability to bond with others, ask:

• How would your best friend describe you?
• Of everyone you know, who has the most faith in you? Why?
• What are your best memories?

Take out an ad in a newspaper or online that says: “Can earn as  high as [insert number 

here] if you are a star.”

The High Art Of Getting The Best Buyers 

Best strategy to improve your sales: focus on “best buyers” over “all buyers”. Create a list of your Dream 100 (number is arbitrary) and target them constantly and relentlessly. Your aim:

1. “I’ve never heard of this company”
2. “What is this company I keep hearing about?”
3. “I think I’ve heard of that company”
4. “Yes, I’ve heard of that company”
5. “Yes, I do business with that company”

Emphasize fear factors (e.g. “dangerous trends”) and social proof (“when others are doing it, it’s okay for me to do it, too”) in your presentations.

If you continue to market to someone with great vigor, they will absolutely get to know who you are. Persevere – a respectful manner – and they’ll come to respect you.

There is no market or company in the world that you can’t penetrate if you’re committed and willing to do something on a regular and consistent basis.

For B2C: instead of Dream 100, focus on Dream Neighbourhoods and target them with great consistency. Give something away and make an attractive offer to get them in the door.

Dream affiliates are another excellent growth strategy.

The Seven Musts Of Marketing 

The seven musts of marketing (if you want to be number 1 in your industry):

1. Advertising 
2. Direct mail 
3. Corporate literature: brochures and promotional pieces 
4. Public relations
5. Personal contact: salespeople and customer service
6. Market education: trade shows, speaking engagements, and education-based marketing
7. Internet: webites, newsletters and automated emails, and affiliate marketing

Four rules for creating high-response-generating advertising:

1. Be distinctive
2. Capture attention with a screaming headline
   1. Give a benefit
   2. Focus on the prospect by using “you” or “your”
   3. Invoke curiosity
   4. Communicate the message immediately
3. After your headline hooks them, your body copy has to keep them reading
   1. Write a story that keeps the prospect reading
   2. Focus on benefits
   3. Why it’s valuable
4. Include a call-to-action

Write down 5 to 10 major sales points for why a prospect would want to buy your product over another. Then create a series of one-page promotional pieces that take on each case.

There are only three rules to having a great trade show, but there are 100 ways to capitalize on those rules. In order of importance:

1. Get noticed.
2. Drive traffic.
3. Capture leads.

The secret to throwing a great party is to do it at a popular club.

A trade association with worthy objectives is effective. If you organize industry players around an important issue, you will rule your industry.

My five-pronged approach online:

1. Capture leads.
2. Build a relationship.
3. Interact as much as possible.
4. Offer a webinar.
5. Convert traffic to sales.

Here’s the pitch I’d do today: “How would you like to learn to make your advertising literally 10 times more effective? And you can do it right from the comfort of your favorite office chair.” It’s hard to resist such an offer.

The Eyes Have It 

Rules for effective presenting:

1. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
2. K.I.F.P. (Keep It Fast Paced)
3. Use “Wow” Facts and Statistics
4. Build in opportunities for stories
5. Your presentation should be curiosity driven
6. Think of each headline as valuable real estate
7. Be confident but not obnoxious
   1. Another way to bond: have them talk about their problems or the things that are not working for them in their business. 
8. Focus on them, not on you

8 common presentation mistakes:

1. Thanking prospects for their time or apologizing for taking it
2. Presenting with your hands in your pockets
3. Presenting from a sitting position
4. Being led around by your nose
5. Letting the materials upstage you or guide you
6. Keeping it totally serious
7. Failing to practice the presentation each and every time before you give it
8. Having no idea what comes next in the presentation

You should never just blatantly pitch your product. You should only use your product or service as an example. You can even have a section that says, “What to look for if you need to buy artwork.” And there you can lay out the “buying criteria” that will help them make a wise decision in their purchasing.

The Nitty-Gritty Of Getting The Best Buyers 

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
• Why they were turned down

Then roleplay possible responses to persuade a disinterested prospect.

6 steps to help you get your dream clients:

1. Choose your Dream 100.
2. Choose the gifts.
3. Create your Dream 100 letters.
4. Create your Dream 100 calendar.
5. Conduct Dream100 follow-up phone calls.
6. Present the executive briefing.

If you do B2B, you need to decide who at each dream company is your ideal prospect. The rule for choosing your target: approach the one who has the authority to say yes.

A key to gifts: they should be useful, things that they will want to keep or play with – or take home to a child. You never know when your gift is going to come in handy.

The goal is to stand out in the marketing crowd and to breed more brand awareness. Even if prospects do not take you up on the offers, the effort still raises your visibility and solidifies your brand.

A list of great gift ideas (purchased online from China):

• Magnifying glass, 100 for $60 •
• Calculator, 120 for $200 
• Miniature tool kit, 120 for $120 
• Paddleball, 120 for $50
• Glider, 1,000 for $70
• Rubik’s Cube, 120 for $40
• Metal whistle, 120 for $100 
• Plastic dinosaur, 100 for $26

You’re not going to get what you really want from a letter. Consider the letter to be like long-range bombing: it softens the prospect before you attack directly – before your salesperson calls.

To make sure you are not taken advantage of, set time limits on your offers. Otherwise someone can come in with 12 offers and want to collect all 12. The other thing you can do is remove folks from the free-offer list once they have taken advantage of one offer. Your offers are to get the initial contact. Once you have that, it’s up to you to have an outstanding offer to keep those clients.

Know that your tone of voice has five times more impact on their perception than the actual words that you use.

Building your core story:

• Use market data, not product data.
• Set the buying criteria in your favour.
• Find the “smoking gun”: the one thing that undeniably positions you over others.
• Hit their pain points.
• Pitch your product or service only after you have covered the education thoroughly.

To make a webinar successful, you need great follow-up pieces:

• If my salespeople talk to the prospect on a Monday and set up an appointment for two days later, the prospect will get three communication pieces from us.
  • One comes immediately to confirm the appointment and sell the heck out of the content that they’re going to see. 
  • The next day the prospect will get a brief one-page letter from another executive who has seen the material and is raving about how valuable it was. 
  • Then the day of the appointment, the prospect will get a second letter raving about how good the content is. 
  • Recently, we developed a worksheet that requires prospects to fill in the blanks. For example, our worksheet has “[blank] is the single most important trait shared by entrepreneurs who grow their company to $100 million per year and beyond.” The worksheet has two pages of teasers like that. When we started offering this worksheet, our show-up rate to the webinar increased by 20 percent.

The biggest weakness of companies utilizing this strategy:

• They are too inconsistent or 
• They give up too quickly.

Sales Skills 

Sales Step 1: Establish Rapport

If you are friends with your clients, it’s very hard for another salesperson to take them away from you. The more you create a sense of community and friendship with your clients, the stronger the grip you will have on your market.

To establish trust: make your prospects feel that they are working with an expert.

Some other ways to establish rapport:

• Ask great questions. Establish rapport-building questions that your sales team asks every prospect.
• Humor.
• Commiserate. If the client wants to complain, be a supportive ear. 
• Empathy
• Find the comnon ground.
• Mirror. If you match your body language and tonality to what your prospects are doing and sounding like, they’ll make the subconscious connection that you are like them.

Sales Step 2: Qualify the Buyer (Find the need)

Develop the 6 to 10 questions that you would like to know about every prospect.

When I sold advertising, I asked these:

1. How do your customers find out about you right now?
2. What’s the most effective way you have for gaining new clients?
3. What’s the amount of your average sale? (This enabled us to cost-justify) 
4. What are the three biggest problems you’re having in [your area ofbusiness]? (Get their pain and help solve it.) 
5. How long have you worked here?
6. How’d you get started?
7. What are your goals for your company?
8. What are your goals for yourself?
9. What are your criteria for making a decision about buying a product like ours?

The best method of selling: when you can guide your prospects through a series of questions and they sell themselves on your product or service. (Jim note: Alex Hormozi has a great step-by-step process for this.)

You need to have a “close,” but to speed this up a bit, here’s a series of questions to let prospects close themselves:

• What’s it costing if you’re not getting those dream clients? 
• Are you the type of person who likes to learn new things if they’re going to give you a breakthrough? 
• Let me explain a breakthrough. It’s when you find a method of doing something that dramatically accelerates your ability to accomplish your goals. 
• So let me ask again, are you the type ofperson who likes to learn breakthroughs?
• What if you could learn the breakthrough and then decide if itwas worth the money? Would that seem fair to you?
• (Here’s the close.) Let’s take a look at some dates for you to attend one of our webinars. Do you have your calendar handy?

Is there a way to guide your prospect through a series of questions in which your product or service becomes more and more valuable to her, from her perspective? What would those questions be and what could you do with that information to target that prospect better?

Sales step 3: Build value

How you introduce the education to your clients is as important as the education itself. You need to presell everything you are about to tell them.

Sales step 4: Create desire

Two powerful techniques:

1. Lead them through a series of questions in which you intensify their need from their perspective.
2. Present killer data that truly motivates your buyer to take action now.

Important point: Your buyers will be a lot more motivated if their current situation becomes unacceptable.

People will act faster to solve a problem than they will to gain an unrealized benefit.

• What are some pain points that would motivate your prospects to buy? 
• Write down four of them. 
• Then write down the four benefits of your product or service that directly address those pain points. 
• Check yourself: have you just written down features or benefits?

Sales step 5: Overcome objections

The better you qualify prospects, the fewer obstacles you’ll have as you come into the close.

The best close of all is when the buyers make their own decision to buy because it’s the most logical conclusion they can draw from the information you’ve given them.

My salespeople ask:

• What is your biggest marketing challenge?
• What would it be worth to you if this challenge could be fixed forever?
• What does it cost you to not fix this problem?

Always agree with an objection. The clients will drop their guard. then focus on “isolating the objection” by asking follow-up questions.

Sales step 6: Close the sale

Another tried-and-true sales method: assume the sale. “Do you want that today?” or ‘Where do we ship that?”

People don’t regret when they buy, unless they buy a lemon. Most people are thrilled when they buy. Your job is to help people make that decision to buy. That is the greatest weakness in folks – they’re not good at making decisions. 

If you truly believe that your prospect should benefit from your product or service, it’s your moral obligation to help them make a decision and get on with their lives.

Other ways to induce people to buy faster and with greater enthusiasm: 

• Include risk reversal
• Offer a free product or service with the sale

Sales step 7: Follow-up

Follow-Up And Client Bonding Skills

For B2C: have procedures in place that help your team establish relationships with clients and make them feel special.

The real success formula for selling:

Trust and respect = Influence = Potential for control = More market share at every mutually beneficial opportunity

Rule: Your follow-up is only as good as your first six steps and you should be considering your follow-up during every step of the sales process.

Goals and questions of the 6-step sales process:

1. Create rapport.
   • What professional goals did you note during the meeting? 
   • How can you help prospects achieve those goals? 
   • What personal tidbit, common interest, or funny story can you refer to later to remind them of your bond?
2. Qualify and establish need.
   • Do you understand prospects’ needs and objectives? 
   • What are their most pressing problems and how can you help solve them?
3. Build value.
   • What do they consider valuable? 
   • What benefits or add-ons would appeal to them and build the value around your product or service?
4. Create desire.
   • What are their hot buttons that can increase their desire? 
   • What is the pain point that you can use to remind them of why they bought and why they will want to keep buying from you? 
   • Remember that people naturally gravitate away from problems and toward solutions.
5. Overcome objections.
   • What are their objections and how can you put them to rest?
6. Close.
   • What closed them? 
   • The more effective you were and the more information you gathered in steps 1 through 6, the more penetrating your follow-up will be.

10 steps to great follow-up: 

1. Send the first follow-up letter
   1. A good structure:
      1. Start with something personal that you remember from the meeting.
      2. Include a compliment.
      3. Push their hot buttons and stay focused on the benefits your product or service offers to them.
      4. Use a personal close. Example: “Once again, it was great meeting you. I have a few ideas about some other productivity issues that I know you will like.”
   2. Never apologize for taking their time. You are bringing them important insights and solutions. If not, change your follow-up.
2. Make the first follow-up call
3. Share something amusing or of personal interest
4. Throw a party, share a meal, and bond like crazy
5. Send another fax/email/letter/card
6. Plan something fun that can include the family
7. Offer something to help their business
   1. Can you hook up two clients to form a referral network?
8. Send another fax/email/letter/card
9. Offer more help to succeed
10. The ultimate follow-up: invite them to your home or be invited to theirs
    1. What can you do at your home that sounds too irresistible to refuse?

All Systems Go 

How I raise my children: When either of them says anything like “I can’t” or ‘I’m no good at that,” I say, “What’s that called?” They moan, “Failure reinforcement.”

Phrase your goals and desires as if they already exist because then your brain will work on fulfilling them faster for you.

Thomas Edison: “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”

A few affirmations for anyone:

• I attract success.
• Success comes to me easily.
• Abundance and prosperity flow to me from every direction.
• It’s easy to be successful.
• I only think positive thoughts.
• I’m in perfect health.

Create performance worksheets, institute contests, and put the numbers up. Then see what happens in your company or department.

Our unique selling proposition was getting us nowhere, so I focused all of my efforts on establishing our other ultimate strategic position (USP).

1. We went totally generic and offered a presentation called “How to Succeed in the Legal Market” based on our core story research. So we didn’t try to sell our magazine, but educate companies why the legal market is of interest to them.
2. Then we gave a brilliant justification: it had to set the buying criteria. We had all this data on California as “the state that leads the nation.”
3. The data showed that to make it in the legal market, you must first have a stronger position in California than anywhere else and then you could test the legal market in one state before spending larger dollars to go national.

To break this down:

1. What is your best possible strategic position?
   1. In our case, we established our position as part of a market that was super worthy for them to go after.
2. Establish your position at the top of that market.
3. Make an “educational orientation” your first offer.
4. Dream 100
5. Rehearse the sales staff on that presentation again and again and again. 
6. Improve the time management procedures daily.
7. Train your team on the “Seven Steps to Every Sale”. Spot quizzes, workshops and hot-seat the reps.
8. Improve your follow-up procedures.
9. Work the trade shows and throw the best parties.
   1. Eventually, started your own trade show and design an award ceremony.
10. Offer additional services that improve your bond with your clients. 
11. Set goals for every area of performance.
12. Measure every activity and have regular contests and rewards for top performers.