High POV means easy sales...

In one of his first jobs many years ago Michael was involved in selling sales training programmes. It was actually an American training programme by Fred Herman, who developed a programme called KISS – Keep it Simple Salesman. It was a cassette tape programme and this is around 30 years ago.

Now Michael used to sell this to various sales organisations and groups of sales people. It might be a local insurance branch in a suburb, or a real estate branch or a car dealer.

At that time, Michael wanted to buy himself a Mercedes sports car, in those days it was the 280SL with the pagoda roof and he’d fallen in love with it like a lot of young sales people who want a trophy car.

Michael found that he was getting three Yes’s out of five presentations after his numbers stabilised. (So for every five presentations he’d make to the local sales managers, three of them would take his offer.)

And, he could do about three appointments a day by the time he made appointments and got in the car and travelled to the appointment. (Michael didn’t like cold calling so he made appointments by phone and would go to visit each prospect.)

Michael realised he had a good income but it wasn’t enough to get him the sports car. He actually needed to do at least ten sales presentations a day to get his sales target and buy the Mercedes roadster.

To do that he’d have to start at the end of a street in a suburb and literally go down and visit all the businesses and do cold calling.

But he didn’t like cold calling so this was the idea he came up with. Well, he tried a number of ideas but this is the one that ended up working.

Michel printed a little book called

How to Sell without Working

Michael would then walk into the sales manager and before he could say to me ‘do you have an appointment?’ he’d just introduce himself and say

‘Look my name is Michael and I’ve brought you a little gift to add to your sales library, it’s a book called How to Sell without Working and he’d hand him the book.

Michael would usually get one of two reactions from the person he gave the book to.

The prospect would say ‘gee that’s good I wish I had that, we could really use that’ or, the other reaction was ‘what a ridiculous thing, I tell my men they’ve got to work, work, work, there’s no such thing as selling without work’ and he’d go off into a tirade. (That reaction was a lot less common.)

Anyway when he’d open the book the pages in the book are all blank. There’s no printing because there’s no such thing as selling without working.

It was a joke book and it didn’t cost Michael very much to produce.

What had already happened by now, of course, is that it had already gone from a cold call into a warm call because they were laughing, Michael was having a chat and very often the person he was talking to would pick up the phone and say ‘hey Jack come and have a look at this’ … and now Michael has already got the WOMBAT effect right at the beginning of the sales call!

A prospect is picking up the phone, he’s calling other people and he asks Michael ‘could you give me some more of these, I want to give one to each of my sales people at the next sales meeting’ or something like that and now Michael is having a whole discussion about selling.

So now he has quickly gone past the issue of whether it was a cold call.

The prospect then asked Michael ‘so what’s this all about?’

Michael would then begin his sales presentation.

Now the use of that little POV idea enabled Michael to get his Mercedes 280 SL sports cars. Royal blue with tan trim leather.

Once Michael realised he’d found something that every time he knocked on the door and handed over that book he got a terrific reaction he couldn’t make enough calls in a day.

You couldn’t stop him because he’d just go from one to the other because he was full of energy and excitement.

Every call re-energised him instead of having him being kicked out and rejected.

Michael read this story in the Harvard Business Review. It’s about a guy who’s got a company called Blendtec which you can Google or YouTube.

He’s a businessman in Utah in America. He’s got a company and he just makes blenders. We all know blenders and he obviously thinks his are the best blenders and they look pretty good.

Mr Blendtec is very clever; he makes little 1 to 2 to 3 minute videos which are all up on YouTube.

In each one of these short and powerful demo videos he puts something shocking like golf balls, or an iPad or a broom into his Blendtec blender.

He puts this mask on, he’s a funny kind of nerdy guy, with respect, and he says ‘will it blend?’ and he flicks the switch.

Over 15 million people have already seen these videos.

Check out Blendtec and you’ll probably watch several of them because they are highly addictive.

Resource Box:

I love Michael’s strategy of WOMBAT selling and creating massive Pass on Value or POV.  Here’s what I recommend you do right now.

Go to this link on Michael’s website

http://www.schoolofthinking.org/why/newsell-coaching/

Here you can get a free copy of his excellent book WOMBAT selling: How to Sell by Word of Mouth.  (You will also see a link to watch a Blendtec video demo.)

And if you go to this link you will see one of my recent marketing articles in the New Zealand Herald.  (These have had great POV.)

http://bit.ly/hiddenmarkets