The owner of one of the largest carpet cleaning companies in the country—Rug Renovating, which covers the tri-state metro area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—came to me for help. Here’s a company with 30,000 clients that was finding that efforts to get new clients were becoming less and less effective over the years. Any business owner reading this has probably noticed the same problem. Although he came to me looking to gain more clients, my first reaction was to find out whether he had maximized the clients he already had. I asked him how often his current clients buy. He answered: “They buy about once every three years. We send coupons and discounts frequently, but the numbers don’t change.” I asked, “How would you like it if we could get your clients buying twice a year instead of once every three years?” He was very excited at the idea, but no previous approach had worked.
Like nearly every company in the world that sells carpet cleaning, this company was using product data in its sales process. Product data is straightforward and has very little strategic value. This is product data: “We clean X square feet of carpeting for Y dollars.” But adding market data can make the product data much more powerful. As you will learn in Chapter Six, every company can dramatically strengthen its sales and marketing materials by adding market data.
Here’s what we found for this carpet cleaning company:
FACT: Your carpets act like a giant health filter, capturing dust, dirt, bacteria, pollen, dust mites, their waste, and the bacteria that feed on it.
Government studies have shown that when you remove carpets from buildings, people get sick four times more often. But, like any filter, your carpets become saturated and ineffective over time—creating a need for professional quality cleaning. And even vacuuming every day does not kill bacteria embedded in the carpet.
The EPA found that professional carpet cleaning actually gets carpets 1,500 percent cleaner than even vacuuming every day. The steaming hot water used by professionals kills germs and bacteria that build up in your home.
This is an example of how 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.
Here’s a company that has actually gone beyond product data to study every aspect of carpet cleaning, right down to the government studies about the cleanliness of your air quality within the home. From the EPA’s research, we created a concept called the Gold Service. The goal was to get customers on a schedule to have their carpets cleaned every six months.
The company owner was very excited about this concept. So was I. We could both do the math and understand how much this would mean for him if it worked. Here I was hired to find the big breakthrough, and I felt I had delivered! Victory was mine. Using the market data, I created a script for their top producer to test for a week. The following week I met with the entire staff over the telephone with the CEO listening. The dialogue went as follows:
CHET: So how did it go?
SALES REP: It didn’t work.
CHET: It didn’t work?
SALES REP: No. It didn’t work.
CHET: Well, how many people did you offer it to?
SALES REP: I offered it to 10 people.
CHET: And nobody bought it?
SALES REP: No, two people bought it.
To the sales rep, the perception was that eight no’s out of 10 pitches made the concept a failure. But do the math: if you have 30,000 clients buying once every three years, that’s about 10,000 sales per year. Now imagine an extra 6,000 of them (a mere 20 percent) buying twice per year. What does that do for this business? It’s an enormous increase in volume.
But if it were up to that sales rep, the idea would have died right then and there. This is where pigheaded discipline and determination make the difference between mediocrity and greatness. In fact, it took six months of pigheaded discipline and determination to get every salesperson offering that service to every prospect, every time. This is where most executives fail. Building a sales machine is not going to be about doing 4,000 things; it’s going to be about doing 12 things 4,000 times each.
Just one hour a week changed this CEO’s life. He made a commitment to spend this hour every week improving and integrating the Gold Service concept. It wasn’t easy—it took six disciplined months to integrate this into the fabric and fiber of the business. But, remember, it was six months of only one hour per week. Every Monday night at five o’clock without fail the whole company would gather and talk about how this concept could be made more effective, how we could make it easier for the salespeople to use, what ideas the salespeople had to make this more effective, and so on. The whole focus of that hour was to integrate this one concept fully and completely into every aspect of the business.
Not only did the implementation of the Gold Service improve sales, it also stabilized the business. Where the owner used to hope every month that customers would respond to his fliers, he now knows, going into each month, how many people are signed up for the Gold Service cleaning. It made the business more stable in every way and it transformed sales performance.
When I started working with the staff, the lowest sales rep was doing $13,000 a month and the average sales rep was doing $35,000. When I finished working with them, the lowest sales rep was doing $49,000 a month and the highest sales rep was doing $100,000 a month. Sales performance doubled. Initially, the sales staff fought me all the way…even though they were on commission.
This company refined its sales process to near perfection within the mentioned six months. Everyone reading this will be able to do the same. But sales is just one piece of the pie. In order to be the Ultimate Sales Machine, you actually have to be great at leading, managing, and marketing. This book lays it out in straightforward language with practical examples spelled out from every angle. And the best part is that you’re not going to work harder; you’re only going to work smarter.
You can profoundly improve your company or department if you absolutely commit to one hour per week in which you do nothing else but work on making the business much more effective. In the course of this book, you will learn exactly how to spend that hour.
It’s not going to be hard to apply the strategies in this book or to transform your business into the Ultimate Sales Machine. The key is learning and practicing the pigheaded discipline and determination you need to constantly address and readdress the 12 areas I’ll outline. In order to make this process easy, I’ve broken this book down into 12 chapters, each focusing on one of the 12 strategies with examples and exercises that will make your business great and grow your sales and profits like mad.
One of my clients is a great learner and is always buying the latest book or program. He heard my presentation at a seminar, liked what I had to say, and retained me to do an audit of his business. When I interviewed his employees, they were practically laughing at me. To them, I was just the latest flash in the pan. They told me that their boss had used 100 different training programs but never made any of them stick.
The missing ingredient for this client and nearly all of the 1,000-plus clients I have worked with directly to improve their businesses is pigheaded discipline and determination. We all get good ideas at seminars and from books, radio talk shows, and business-building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their businesses. Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.
This book is packed with excellent ideas developed on the front lines of capitalism, but more important, this book helps you learn the ways to see these ideas manifest throughout your organization, especially in your bottom line. Once you begin working on the strategies in each chapter, you will see that it’s not just about implementing the ideas in this book. Your ability to implement any idea you learn anywhere will benefit dramatically from the learning curve presented here.
For example, in Chapter One you’ll learn how to maximize productivity through time management at every level of your organization. How well you manage your time and the level of productivity and performance you require from your staff are specific competencies that few businesses ever fully capitalize upon. Let’s say you take a great time management course today. You go back to your office and apply the principles and see that they actually work. But when we check back with you three months later, we find you using very little, if any, of the information you learned from taking that one-time course. This is called “event training.” You go to an event. You get some training. You come back to your office. You may even try some of the concepts. You may even see them work, but you quickly abandon them because you are missing the pigheaded discipline and determination that make a truly great company or department.
Working Smarter, Not Harder
At seminars and lectures, I’ve asked my audience, “How many people in this room would like to grow their company or department 10 times larger than it is right now?” Typically, 99 percent of the audience raises their hands. Then I say, “Leave your hands up if you can work 10 times more hours or 10 times harder than you’re working now.” All the hands go down. The point is that there are companies and departments that are 10 times bigger than yours, and you know they aren’t working 10 times harder than you are. They’re just working smarter.
The Ultimate Sales Machine is all about working smarter, not harder. Doesn’t it seem smarter to take 12 proven strategies and perfect them, than to scramble about using hundreds of different ideas without any real traction on any of them? This book is for executives; CEOs; entrepreneurs; and professionals such as doctors, dentists, and lawyers. It’s for middle managers, salespeople, and customer service representatives. In short, it’s for every one who plays a role in operating, marketing, selling, and running a company or department. It offers the kind of information and strategies that are essential for every one in the trenches doing battle to grow and strengthen their business or department.
Backed by countless success stories of companies just like the carpet cleaner, the Ultimate Sales Machine mind-set is the culmination of my experiences in the trenches. I’ve run magazines, newspapers, and trade shows for billionaire Charlie Munger and have owned 14 businesses. I’ve studied karate and owned a karate school on Times Square. I’ve also personally sold my services to more than 60 Fortune 500 companies and nearly 1,000 other clients. Finally, I’ve taught millions of business owners and employees through seminars, articles, and my 65 training products, which now sell in more than 20 countries.
IMPORTANT: I set up this book the way you should set up your business. I begin by discussing how to structure your company to maximize everyone’s time. Then I move into training and its critical role in any organization from one-person armies to the world’s largest companies. As an author, I could have started with sexier and more potent material. But I believe that the right thing to do and the best way to serve you is to begin with the building blocks you must have if your company is going to be set up to succeed long term.
Meetings: another building block. I had a client that had terrible meetings, so they stopped having them altogether. No meetings, ever. Wow. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Where do you learn how to hold a great meeting? Nowhere. So here it is in this book. Meetings are great if you know how to have them, and in Chapter Three I show you how to become a meeting master. I give details on how to run dazzling meetings that will have a profound impact on your company.
After these three chapters, you’ve got your building blocks. Now you are ready to become a world-class strategist. Chapter Four will change your life. I would love to start with this as it’s the single strongest lesson any businessperson can learn, but I set the book up as your business should be set up. Get your building blocks in place and then erect your skyscraper.
From there the book takes off, teaching all the nuts and bolts of better selling, marketing, and hiring that you will find in 99.9 percent of businesses. The strategies, tips, and insights that I’ve used to help turn mediocre or ailing companies into bulletproof success stories are right here in this book. Let this be your guide to transforming your business into the Ultimate Sales Machine.