PDF Summary:The Ultimate Sales Machine, by Chet Holmes
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Ultimate Sales Machine
In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes argues that the secret to sales success is relentless discipline, determination, and above all, repetition of just a few steps. For Holmes, sales mastery is intensive, not extensive—it’s about being an expert in a relative handful of practices, not being adequate or average at many things.
But you and your entire team have to be fully committed to refining and perfecting every aspect of your new sales strategy. By implementing effective time management across your company, honing your sales team with interactive training, hiring people with the right personality traits, and relentless marketing that presents your company’s value to the customer, you can significantly boost your sales figures and put your team on the path to permanent success.
This guide takes you through Holmes’s key ideas about building a first-rate sales operation and supplements them with more up-to-date information and commentary (the book was published in 2008)—while also offering counterpoints to some of his more outdated or controversial suggestions.
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But, Holmes cautions, not just any training will do. It needs to be consistent, regular, interactive, and fun. One-off annual training events where employees are simply lectured to for a few hours isn’t going to have any lasting impact. Real skill-building, writes Holmes, comes when employees are engaged in the training and participating in shaping their experiences as they’re learning. Role-playing exercises can be great for this, helping your sales team direct their own education while working through thorny real-life scenarios.
(Shortform note: Some firms make role-play training a regular part of company life. In Peak, Anders Ericsson offers up the example of Blue Bunny Ice Cream. This company used its regular meetings between regional sales managers and the senior sales manager to stage role-playing exercises, in which the regional sales manager practices making their pitch to a customer and receives feedback on their approach. Ericsson writes that this not only helps refine the skills needed for the next call with a customer, but it also gets everyone in the company used to the idea of practicing and training itself—because it just becomes a normal part of the business day.)
Crowdsource Problem-Solving
Another tactic Holmes recommends is crowdsourcing problem-solving. At a training, the CEO or team leader identifies a common problem affecting the company’s performance. She can present the problem through a PowerPoint presentation and then solicit everyone across the company for their input on solutions. They can even separate into breakout groups to discuss and debate potential solutions. After the breakout sessions conclude, the leader then collects the ideas and presents them to the entire meeting.
Then, there is a public vote on the results, where participants select their favorite ideas. The winning ideas can then be implemented as part of a pilot program where they’re tested and refined to see what works best.
(Shortform note: This technique can be highly effective and scalable—indeed, it’s done by some of the best-known companies in the world. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull notes that Pixar uses crowdsourcing through its famed “Notes Day.” On Notes Day, Pixar shuts down regular operations and runs a variety of discussion forums based on a wide range of topics submitted by employees. Pixar leaders use this information to surface problems they may not have noticed and then crowdsource solutions to them.)
Market Like a Champ
Holmes writes that your entire marketing campaign needs to be synchronized and coordinated across every tactic—from print ads to online ads, roadshows, press releases, television and radio spots, and viral marketing.
Showcase Your Value With Instructional Marketing
Holmes writes that it’s important to showcase your value to the customer through instructional marketing. Rather than just pitching how prestigious your company is or how great your products are, instructional marketing teaches your customers the value your company can provide to them. For example, if you’re selling cybersecurity services, you wouldn’t just create advertisements that talk about how many graduates from elite universities are on your engineering team or the awards you’ve won.
To really distinguish yourself, your marketing campaign should focus on the value you provide, specifically how you can help your customers meet their needs. Thus, as a cybersecurity company, you’d want to focus on how your products can ensure that their online activities will be private and secure—giving customers the peace of mind that comes with not having to worry about stolen data or identity theft.
Holmes recommends using techniques like free educational seminars to make your customers aware of the need for your products or services without overtly selling to them. An example of such an educational seminar for a cybersecurity firm might be to host a free online webinar titled “The Seven Most Dangerous Cyber Attacks of 2020” and promote it to prospective customers in its target market. The presentation should include data that shows how vulnerable most individuals and businesses are to cyber attacks, the financial costs of such attacks, and the frequency with which they occur.
(Shortform note: Marketing experts emphasize that today’s customers don’t care about how prestigious or well-credentialed your company is. The most sophisticated marketers have adopted what they call the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) mentality, with customer-facing messages focused solely on how their products and services can improve their lives or solve their problems. These experts point to the examples of companies like Uber and Instacart, neither of which invented revolutionary services, but which both skillfully presented themselves as making ordinary life easier for their customers. Accordingly, you should avoid phrases like “best-in-class” or “#1 rated” in your ad copy, because potential customers simply don’t care.)
Make Your Presentations Pop
Holmes writes that it’s also important to include eye-catching visuals and compelling stats in your instructional marketing presentations to keep your audience interested and teach them things about their own industry that they may not have known. For example, the cybersecurity company might throw out a stat like “⅓ of small businesses will experience a cyber attack in the next year,” which conveys need and urgency.
And Holmes stresses that you need to make sure your sales staff is adept at giving presentations. That means being active and engaged with the audience, controlling the flow of the presentation, and not just reading the text of the slides.
(Shortform note: Giving presentations can be a highly nerve-wracking experience for many people because they feel anxious about suffering public humiliation. To overcome presentation anxiety, experts recommend focusing on the content and ideas rather than yourself; having comprehensive notes on hand to give yourself some guidance; having a clear sense of the main ideas you’re trying to convey so that you don’t seem too stilted or scripted; and speaking in a louder voice than you normally would to present authority and confidence. They also recommend not putting on too much of a “performance” and being comfortable in your own skin. Your audience will be more receptive to your ideas if they think that they’re being delivered by an authentic person rather than an invented character or persona.)
Earn Media Through Great Press Releases
Holmes writes that you can skillfully supplement your paid advertising with earned or “free” media from newspapers, magazines, and trade publications. In fact, having a favorable story written about your company in a media outlet can be the most effective way to market, since it doesn’t seem like advertising at all and comes to the reader via a third-party validator. According to Holmes, the way to get this kind of coverage is through writing compelling press releases with interesting data points and friendly quotes, staging press events and press conferences, and cultivating relationships with editors and journalists.
Once you land a story in your targeted media outlet, you can then piggyback on their coverage in your paid marketing materials by including your press clippings in brochures, posters, and web ads.
(Shortform note: Free earned media can indeed be highly valuable for businesses—and even presidential candidates. In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note that in the 2016 Republican primary, Donald Trump excelled at generating enormous quantities of free coverage in the mainstream media. They cite one study done after the election showing that Trump generated approximately $2 billion worth of free media coverage, far outstripping that earned by his rivals.)
Find Your Dream Customers
Once you have your all-star sales team in place and have honed and refined your sales and marketing processes, Holmes writes that it’s time to target your dream customers.
He says that dream customers are large, frequent, and quick buyers. It’s important to target your advertising and marketing at them because for most businesses, a relative handful of customers account for most of the revenue.
The Pareto Principle: Focus on the Big-Ticket Items
Some sales experts have even codified this principle into a rule known as the “80/20 Rule.” The 80/20 rule in sales says that 80% of your revenue comes from just 20% of your customers—therefore, you should focus most of your attention on serving and satisfying that subset of your customer base.
In fact, the 80/20 Rule for sales is just one application of a bigger idea known as the Pareto principle. In Factfulness, Hans Rosling defines the Pareto principle as the rule that, in most datasets, 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. This rule applies to a variety of datasets, including causes of death, line items in a budget, and energy sources. In short, a few big-ticket items are responsible for the vast majority of the effects. You can apply the Pareto principle anytime you’re using a dataset—look for the largest numbers to figure out which are the most important and deserving of attention.
Business-to-Business Selling: Get Past the Gatekeepers
With business-to-business selling (B2B), it’s important to make sure you’re talking to the right person at the company. Often, says Holmes, junior- or mid-level officers at a big company don’t have the authority to make big purchases on their own. And many receptionists and administrative staff members are specifically trained to prevent salespeople from speaking to the CEO. Part of training your staff is teaching your salespeople to get on the phone with high-level corporate officers like CEOs or CFOs who are actually empowered to make decisions.
Always Be Respectful to the Assistants
But just because you're trying to get past the administrative or executive assistants to speak to the CEO doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take those people seriously or treat them with respect. Even though they’re not the ultimate decision makers, one of their main functions is to act as the gatekeepers for the decision makers—deciding who does and doesn’t get to speak to them. That’s why it’s smart to get on the gatekeepers’ good side.
In New Sales Simplified, Mike Weinberg writes that it always pays to be gracious and courteous with receptionists, assistants, and other gatekeepers at a prospect’s company. Making a good impression on people in the company can only help your sales efforts. Further, when you actually get an appointment with the CEO and have the opportunity to meet an assistant in person, Weinberg recommends taking time to express appreciation to them for their help.
Project Confidence and Be Persistent
Holmes recommends calling them up and projecting confidence with the receptionist, speaking as if the CEO knows you and is expecting your call, and—most importantly—avoiding sounding like you’re a salesperson. For example, if you were looking to speak to Elon Musk at Tesla, you could say something like, “Hi, this is Johanna. I’d like to speak to Elon. Is he in?” If the admin doesn’t put you on right away or tells you the CEO doesn’t know who you are, you can further project confidence and persistence by saying something like, “Tell him again that it's Johanna from Devon Capital. That should jog his memory.” Holmes writes that it’s important to not include overt sales pitches like, “I want to tell Elon about an exciting investment opportunity.” That’s a surefire way to brand yourself as a salesperson and get the cold shoulder.
Again, the key is persistence. CEOs of major companies whose business you’re trying to get will respect your determination. No matter what you’re selling, if they hear your company’s name enough and you do a good job of educating them on the value it provides, they will eventually turn to you when they decide they need what you’re offering.
When Not to Fake It
Holmes’s advice to act as if you know the CEO when you don’t in order to get a meeting with her is a form of bluffing, or at least a variant of the “fake it ‘till you make it” adage. Yet some experts warn that this kind of bluffing can actually backfire. If your bluff turns into bravado or arrogance, you can sour your prospective clients or partners by coming off like you think you’re the most important or smartest person in the room.
More broadly, some psychologists write that “acting as if” can only be successful if done for the right reasons. If your motivations are intrinsic and based in a desire to change something about yourself that you feel is hindering your happiness or success, then acting “as if” you are the kind of person you wish to be can indeed be a successful approach. But if you’re faking it to project a certain image of yourself to others—as Holmes is recommending—you’re less likely to succeed. In fact, some research suggests that putting on a facade to impress others only makes you more conscious of your own shortcomings, reduces your confidence, and forces you to expend so much mental energy that your ability to make good decisions becomes impaired.
Business-to-Consumer Selling: Cast a Wide Net
For business-to-consumer (B2C) selling, where you’re directly selling to the end user, Holmes writes that the approach is a bit different. Since the biggest customers in your target market could consist of hundreds or even thousands of individuals, you simply won’t have the time to ring them all up on the phone and speak to them directly. Instead, you need to cast a wide net in your marketing efforts to reach lots of people at once.
One tactic Holmes recommends is to target neighborhoods or geographic areas that are likely to have the best buyers. For example, you might run a company that installs swimming pools. Since it’s expensive for someone to build an in-ground swimming pool in their backyard, the people who do it tend to be relatively affluent.
Therefore, you’d want to target your campaign to people living in zip codes with high per-capita income. You could even drill down further and use public records to specifically target households within those zip codes that have enough property to accommodate a pool.
Your Data and Experiences as Raw Material
Since The Ultimate Sales Machine was published in 2008, it has become vastly easier—and more profitable—for companies to target consumers using data from search engines, digitized purchase history, social media postings and sentiment analysis, and even predictive data pulled from the “real” world—our cars, homes, streets, neighborhoods, parks, even our bodies. Every time we use our phones, drive our cars, conduct a search query, check our digital watches, or swipe our credit cards, we are generating a trail of what the tech industry calls “data exhaust” that gives powerful insights not just into our commercial preferences, but also our innermost thoughts, desires, fears, and hopes—all of which are enormously valuable to marketers.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that this represents an entirely new form of private enterprise, defined by the use of digital technology to monetize human experience. Our experiences and thoughts, Zuboff writes, made visible by the iPhones, Facebook likes, Google searches, and Twitter posts through which we live so much of our lives, provide the raw material that the new breed of surveillance capitalists refine into marketable behavioral data.
Build the Relationship
Holmes writes that a big mistake a lot of companies make is thinking that their customers are simply vehicles for sales. A customer isn’t someone your company simply does a transaction with and never sees again. Instead, a customer is someone with whom you build a relationship that will yield many sales over its lifetime, as well as new customer leads through the recommendations they make to others.
That’s why Holmes emphasizes the importance of establishing lasting relationships, friendships, and emotional bonds with your customers. If they’re your most loyal and lucrative customers, you want them to feel a deep bond with you and your company that goes beyond a mere transactional relationship—even after the sale is over.
Holmes says things like client dinners, vacation getaways, and frequent friendly check-ins (without the express purpose of selling) are an essential component of after-sales marketing and are crucial to establishing these lasting bonds. This builds a loyalty between you and your best customers that makes it emotionally difficult for them to do business with a competitor—because it feels almost like an emotional betrayal of your friendship.
The Liking Principle: Connections = Compliance
The importance of establishing close relationships with people to positively influence their future behavior—in this case, continuing to do business with your company—is closely related to what social psychologists call the Liking Principle.
In Influence, psychologist Robert Cialdini defines the Liking Principle as the idea that we’re more likely to comply with requests from people that we know and like. Thus, we are more amenable to the persuasion efforts of neighbors, friends, and family. This is why salespeople are trained to be friendly, personable, and engaging, because these attributes will make it easier for customers to form an emotional bond with them. Simply put, if you like the seller, you’ll probably like what she’s selling. Understanding the Liking Principle gives us greater insight into Holmes’s ideas about building a sense of trust and loyalty with customers. Once you’ve made your customers like you, the social costs of saying “no” to you are much higher.
Anticipate Barriers to Buying
Whether you’re selling to businesses or consumers, Holmes stresses that your entire sales staff needs to anticipate your dream customers’ barriers to buying. With every potential big sale, they need to be thinking, “What could stop me from closing this deal? What would make them say ‘no?’”
Holmes writes that the best way to do this is often to simply ask the customer what their red lines are, or what would be a dealbreaker for them. You can even design role-playing exercises in your company’s staff training to help your sales force overcome these barriers to buying.
Making Them Say “No”
Although it can seem counterintuitive in a sale or a negotiation to draw negative responses from your counterpart, some negotiation experts advise that before you can get a firm “yes” commitment from someone, you first need to get them to say “no.”
In Never Split the Difference, former FBI hostage negotiator (and current negotiation expert) Chris Voss writes that there is great psychological power in getting a negotiating partner or prospective sale to say “no,” because it speaks to their basic need for autonomy. When we say “no” to something, it is a powerful assertion of control. We are setting boundaries and demonstrating our independence in the most fundamental way. We are saying, “I am in control, and I will not let external forces dictate what I do.”
Like Holmes, Voss recommends asking questions that are designed to prompt negative answers. You can do this by deliberately mislabeling their emotions or desires, forcing them to correct you. For example, if you’re dealing with a customer who you think really wants to buy but is just hesitant to pull the trigger, you could say something like “It seems like you’re not actually interested in making a purchase today. Is that what’s going on?”
Alternatively, Voss writes, you can pointedly ask your customer what they don’t want, giving them a free hand to draw their boundaries and establish their comfort zone. For example, you could say something like “Before we get into the specifics, are there any absolute red line, dealbreaker scenarios for you? What are some hypothetical things in this sale that you’d absolutely refuse to accept?”
Measure Your Success
Holmes writes that once you’ve put in place all the steps for sales success—recruiting and hiring the right talent, developing your team through interactive training, showcasing your value through instructional marketing, and acquiring your dream customers—you need to measure your success.
It’s important, Holmes says, to establish metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that enable you to quantify and track your progress. The most obvious metric is total sales figures and revenue, but there are other measurable data that help to drive sales, including:
- Calls made to prospective customers
- Emails sent
- Direct mail delivered
- Instructional marketing events held (and attendance at each event)
- New leads generated
Holmes writes that tracking every metric will help you build a database that will enable you to continue to hone and refine your sales operation. As you delve into the numbers, you’ll get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t and the ratios for success (for example, how many calls or emails it takes to close a sale), and you’ll be better able to identify star performers on your team.
Having this data will give you the tools to optimize your sales team and build your roadmap for success.
Use the OKR System to Track Your Company’s Goals
In Measure What Matters, John Doerr argues that the key to developing useful metrics is to identify your company’s OKR—objectives and key results. The objective is the ultimate goal, what you and your team exist to achieve. If you’re a sales team, then your objective might be defined as total sales or possibly net revenue. Doerr emphasizes that whatever your objectives are, they must be measurable, concrete, and action-oriented: If they’re intangible or not something that individuals can actually do things to work towards, then they’re not truly objectives.
The key results are the rungs on the ladder toward your objective. These are the sub-goals that facilitate the achievement of your ultimate objective. For a sales team, these might be total calls or emails made to customers, new inbound leads, or conversion rate. To implement the OKR system, Doerr advises that you need to start by identifying the most important tasks your company needs to accomplish within a set timeframe. Once you’ve identified your company’s objectives, you then direct departments, teams, and individuals to identify their own objectives. Every objective, regardless of whether it’s an individual or department objective, should align with the company’s top objectives.
From there, Doerr writes, you must identify the necessary steps to complete each objective and have each department, team, and individual do the same. Crucially every objective and key results in the OKR system must be made public—this promotes transparency and accountability for the achievement of stated goals.
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