The Ultimate Sales Machine

The Ultimate Sales Machine is the legacy Chet Holmes left to help sales staff all over the world, by giving them 12 key strategies to relentlessly focus and execute on, in order to at least double their sales.

Train your sales staff, and train them often.

A lot of companies have sales trainings, but they’re annual events. What’s more, the topic often changes from year to year.

But how can you possibly master the pitch for the upsell from one hour of training?

You can’t.

Chet Holmes uses a great metaphor to makes it clear why training your sales staff on a regular basis is so important.

He says a lumberjack has two ways of chopping more wood:

Spend a few extra hours each day. Take one hour once a week to sharpen the saw.

Both will lead to the same result, but spending a little more time preparing up front will save you hours later.

It’s the same with sales training. Imagine you had a weekly, recurring workshop to teach the basics, and then would switch to a more advanced topic after 6 months.

Everyone would have plenty of opportunities to sign up and could just go to another workshop in case they forgot something.

This not only gives your sales staff less excuses to underperform, it also makes people feel treated well and taken care of.

No, I don’t mean you should sell your business to the next investor. Think back to the last time you came home and said “Honey, you have to check out this store. It’s fantastic!” (long time eh?). Why did you send your sweetie or friends there? For their awesome chairs? Probably not. Most likely, it was for the story. When you’re trying to sell gardening equipment, it’s not your job to just sell 50 feet of hose to the next guy who walks in, it’s your job to sell them the whole brand, story, yourself, store and everything in it. Tell them about how you build the store from a 1-person army into a proper company. Show them the live turtles that you take great care of in the pond section. Give them advice on how to make sure the hose they buy doesn’t get clogged. This is called education-based marketing, and it works so well, because it establishes a real connection between you and your customers. Note: This is the equivalent of content marketing online. Teach everything you know and people will view you as an expert with a great story. This is what makes the difference between catching the attention of 10% of people (3% who are ready to buy instantly, 7% who are ready to buy eventually), or 50%…