The Marketing Viking

Over the last few years, I’ve talked to over 200 business owners and, although their problems have differed greatly there’s an underlying theme that needs to be addressed.

And that theme is, to put it bluntly … Most of You Guys Are Making Things A Lot Harder Than They Need To Be!

Let me explain …

One of my “rules” of business is that: “if you can’t get repeat business and/or referrals, you’re in trouble.”

Why? … because you’ll have to make every sale cold to a stranger that doesn’t know you.

And, anyone who’s ever been in sales will tell you that’s “HARD WORK“!

… But I see a lot of you doing this - you go after strangers instead of spending more time on your existing clients and warm prospects.

So, I’m going to give you a basic rule of thumb: if your time is limited (and whose isn’t?), here’s the sales hierarchy:

1. Enquiries
2. Existing customers
3. Solicited referrals
4. People who enquired, but didn’t buy
5. Brand new cold prospects

Rather than giving you the “how to” myself, I’m going to let you learn from the very best.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, car salesman Joe Girard was the “World’s Greatest Salesman”. But it wasn’t selling that made his the best, it was his marketing.

He was a master at getting huge volumes of people through the door with the minimum effort, and he did it by targeting his existing customers, referrals and people who had enquired, but didn’t buy.

(do these three categories sound familiar?)

If you read his book “How To Sell Anything To Anybody”, he talks in detail about the systems he developed to constantly pick this “low hanging fruit”.

And, that’s my advice for this month: get Joe’s book.

You can buy it from Amazon.co.uk here:  How To Sell Anything To Anybody and it’ll cost you about £6. Or, you can find it second hand for even less.

(Chapter 11, where he gives away the details of a referral system that sold 550 cars in a single year, is just gold … if you apply it)

So, please, get the book. And, once you’ve read it and applied some of Joe’s techniques, drop me an email to let me know how you got on.

Best wishes

Steve Gibson

PS This post is based on a newsletter I sent to my subscribers. If you’d like to receive my newsletter for free, you can sign up here. 

In the interview I posted recently (Strategic Marketing Interview), I mentioned a book by Joe Girard:

There’s a great book by Joe Girard … Joe is or was in the Guinness book of records as the world’s greatest salesman … he sold cars … and he had all these systems … it’s a great book … and part of it was just keeping in touch with his customers.

 I’ve been asked which book it is.

The book is  How To Sell Anything To Anybody and is available from Amazon for around £6.

Joe Girard was in the “Guinness Book of World Records” as ‘the world’s greatest salesman’ for twelve consecutive years, but his real genius was for prospecting.

What separated him from his competitors was his marketing systems that brought a constant stream of prospects through his door.

He talks about these systems in great detail in the book and anyone who applies a few of Joe’s ideas to their business should receive a huge return for their £5.99 investment.  

Happy reading,

Steve 

 Most business people seem to think that all they have to do is an excellent job and the referrals will come flooding in.

What they don’t realise is that:

(1) clients are often unable to recognise when you’ve done an outstanding job for them.

and

(2) clients often don’t know who your ideal prospects are.

So, most business are saying:

“Why don’t you, the client, who has no experience in this field, go and do a market analysis to see how the job I’ve done for you compares to the work my competitors do.

“And then, if you are able to conclude I’ve done a good job, work out what my target market is and find people who match that and send them to me….”

Which makes no sense.

If you take the time to educate the client - to show him how you’ve served him well and then tell him the sort of people he should be sending to you - you make it easy for him to send you referrals and you will almost always dramatically increase the number of referrals you get compared to the traditional “Mr Client, please go and knock your head in to find me some business” method.

Steve Gibson