Ultimate Sales Manager: Pump Up Your Profits by Running a Better Sales Organization by Chet Holmes

I've discovered the magic secret to getting companies to perform like a champion racehorse. It took me my entire career to really figure it out, but boy do I have it down and boy does it work. The following is a chronicle of exactly what I learned and how I learned it. You will learn a great deal about running your sales organization with much greater results.

The secret to having a fantastic sales team is in getting every one in your office to perform like a top producer might perform. When I was a top producing sales rep, selling advertising, I instinctively did all the things you'd want every rep to do. I went after only the biggest possible clients. I wrote effective sales letters. I followed up with a vengeance. I sent constant promotional pieces depicting more and more sales points.

I offered fantastic and stimulating insights about how to succeed in my market and never, ever, ever let rejection even slow me down. In fact, when rejected, I became even more aggressive, more determined that they understand why they had to have my product.

Then I had the good fortune of working for billionaire businessman, Charlie Munger. I doubled the sales of the first company given to me in just 15 months and then doubled the sales of eight other divisions, most within that time frame or shorter.

The first company he gave me, I doubled three years in a row. How?

Remarkably simple, but 99.9% of companies don't do it: I put into place the policies and procedures that made every single person perform like a top producer and I worked on the business at least one hour per week, without fail.

You can get profound results in your business if you work on it (rather than just in it) only one hour per week. As long as that one hour is designed to be proactive and you're committed to improving the process incrementally. If today, you started working on how you get appointments, for example, and you looked to, once per week, make that skill just a little better, within ten sessions (ten weeks) you can have a profound improvement.

In most sales organizations, the sales are ad-hoc, with everyone running around doing what they think is best and the management setting very little or no minimum standards of performance.

For example, what is your standard for what type of account your salespeople should go after? Have you worked “on” this aspect of proper targeting? What are they going to present? What are the top five strategic objectives you want to achieve from every interaction with every buyer (seriously, have you sat down and talked about that, planned that out? Practiced it, role-played it and polished it to a fine luster?) It goes on, I just kept setting higher and higher standards – raising the bar on what I now call: “the minimum acceptable level of performance.”

Let's take “getting appointments.” I have a client that was getting maybe one or two appointments per week, even though they have four salespeople. Every week, the sales reps would work on their activity level, who were they targeting, what were they saying, what tools did they have, etc...

Each week the sales reps would go out and do the assignments I'd give and then come back the following week and report in, telling me of what went on, where they failed, where they were struggling. I would then tune-up each subtle nuance of getting around the gate keeper and how to use voicemail as a valuable weapon rather than a closed draw bridge.

Next, I meticulously worked on the exact telephone pitch. Exactly. What were the five to seven elements of what would make someone want to meet with them? When the person was trying to turn you down or get off the phone, what were the three to five ways to not let that happen? You wouldn't believe how much I had to work on “the close” of a telephone pitch. When do you shut up and what do you say to actually set that appointment.

Then I would role-play the heck out of the reps, constantly improving every little word, every sentence. Within about ten weeks, the meetings started to pop left and right. A client that was getting a few lousy appointments per week, were now getting 30 appointments per week with the exact same sales team.

And here's the kicker, ALL of the meetings are with “Dream” prospects. Where the sales reps once went after whatever company they thought of at the time, I had them only work on the “Dream” prospects. So the results have been staggering. Huge meetings with huge prospects, every deal a monster - as compared to the previous year where they got only a few monster prospects in play, now they're in play with 20 to 30 monster prospects every single week. In this case study I'm talking about, I doubled their sales over last year and I've only been helping them for five months, just one hour per week.

But it doesn't stop there. I got everyone so good at closing prospects for a meeting that many would cool off and cancel once they were out from under the white-hot heat I had perfected in the sales pitch. So then I put into place three separate steps to make sure that no one cancelled and that has worked really well. They went from a 25% cancellation rate to only one in 30 canceling.

What next? Now let's work on the client sale call itself. What's the first thing you do when you walk in? What's the second? What are the exact questions you're going to ask and why are you going to ask each one of them? What are you looking to do for every question you ask? Then the presentation. If you know my material, you know how devoted I am to a great presentation. “Set the buying criteria” in that meeting. Set it righteous, make yourself the absolute most logical choice and dis-empowered all of your competitors completely while you're at it.

What are all the strategic objectives you are looking to accomplish in every interaction with a possible client? How will they be met? What do you want the next move to be? What would be ideal and then what are the five layers of alternatives below if you can't get the “ideal” thing to happen?

The more you can systematize the sales process, the more you can rely on excellent selling going on in your organization.

The reason I was able to double sales because I was sure of what a top producer would do because I was one. I knew what systems and procedures to develop because my instincts in this area are all natural, all part of my innate psychological profile. A top producer responds perfectly to rejection by becoming more effective. A top producer becomes more aggressive when someone is brushing them off, more persuasive if someone isn't buying and always comes from the place of serving them. These “steps” can be honed into every aspect of your sales process and you can get regular salespeople operating more and more like top producers. You just have to drill down like a scientist into each and every aspect of the sales process.

Another important tip for you: Make your weekly meetings mandatory. That's how you get real progress. Since each session takes you deeper and incrementally builds upon the previous session, you must be on every session. Use teleseminars or conference calls so even if a rep is sick they can attend.

One more major benefit, CEO Training. Where do you get CEO training? Most CEO's don't know how to hold a highly effective meeting. They don't know how to structure their organizations or even themselves for maximum productivity.

They don't know how to change, adapt and re-organize for new stages of growth (yes, at $1 million there's a fundamental change or you'll never get to $5 million where there's yet another fundamental change in your organization; or $10 million and beyond.) Each phase of growth requires adjustments that most CEO's never notice or understand.

Chet Holmes has conducted training in more than 60 Fortune 500 and other prestigious companies. To learn more, visit www.howtodoublesales.com.