Reduce the sales process to five essential requirements that a realways present when a sale is made. I know of no one else who has distilled sales and marketing to such a small number of fundamentals. These go hand in hand with the Power Triangle, because these five things define the who of the traffic that you’re trying to buy.
- Do they have the money? Some markets consist of people who have no money. Sometimes the very market itself is defined as a herd of money less people. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a buck selling rent-to-own furniture, but know ahead of time it’s going to be tricky to get blood out of them stones. People who do have the money are way easier to sell to!
- Do they have a bleeding neck? A bleeding neck is a dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved. Right. Now. If you want to make the big bucks, your product has to deal with something that involve some or both of the following:
- Pain and great inconvenience, loss of money, threat of loss, and/or some craving for pleasure that borders on the irrational. Big pain, big pleasure. Stuff that hits really close to the jugular or pocket book. Serious money is always found in those places. If you want the check tomorrow, the problem today needs to be u-r-g-e-n-t. And before you ease the pain, you gotta intensify it. The guy says to you, “It hurts really bad, right here.” You point to his elbow and say “You mean here?” and you smack his elbow with a hammer, hard. He yelps and sees stars for a moment. He nods and takes a big gulp, choking back tears. Yup. Good market for you to go into. What’s the biggest, nastiest problem you’ve ever solved in your life? That’s a real good start, right there.
- Do they buy into your unique selling proposition? If you’re just going into a market, the question is, what bigbenefit will they buy into? What kind of deal would theysnatch up in a hot second? What benefit do they wantthat the other guys are not promising? A unique selling proposition (USP) is your unique answer to these questions:
- What does your product do that nobody else’sproduct does?
- Why should I buy from you instead of anybody else?
- What guarantee can you make that nobody else can make?
- Your unique selling proposition is hugely important, and I will focus on it in much more detail in the next chapter. But fornow, know that one of your most important jobs as asalesperson or marketer is to not only know the answers tothese questions but constantly improve the USP of whatever you sell.
- Do they have the ability to say YES? I’ve got a friend who lost a big bundle trying to sell a seminar to doctors. They had the money, they bought into his USP, they had a bleeding neck—most doctors were expressing grave dissatisfaction about financial matters that the seminar directly addressed—but it was almost impossible to get a piece of mail into any doctor’s hands. Docs have their staff sort all their mail, and what Helga their assistant thinks is a bleeding-neck issue and what actually makesthe doc’s neck bleed? Two different things. Helga the receptionist can say no , but she can’t say yes. This is a huge problem when you’re selling anything. Are you selling to an engineer who’s going to have to get approval from his boss? Are you applying for a job through the human resources department—knowing that HR can only say no and only the VP can say yes? (Hint: Never send resumes to HR. Find out who thehiring manager is, and send it to that person. Preferablyin a hand-addressed #10 envelope with a stamp. I’veincluded a special report on job hunting for salespeoplein the online supplement,www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplement/. )
- Does what you sell fit in with their overall plans? If your service requires major brain surgery on the part of the customer, he ain’t gonna take your offer unless brain surgery is literally a lot less painful than the alternative(e.g., dying). Whatever you sell needs to harmonize with natural, existing forces—both on the inside and outside of your prospect’s world.
Bit by Bit 