Sales Laundry

As a little boy I had a bicycle that looked like Evel Knievel’s motorcycle, at least to my young eyes. More than anything I wanted to go as fast as Evel did on his great jumps, but no matter how fast I peddled I could not achieve Evel speed. Heck, I could not even outrun the neighbor’s sheep dog with his perpetual desire to tear off my leg and eat my bicycle tire.

Then one day my brilliant friend Billy explained leverage to me with a single gesture. He pointed to a radio tower on top of a huge hill near our neighborhood.

Sitting atop the hill and looking down the road as it curved out of sight near the bottom, I still remember being very excited.  I was ready to swallow my fears and fly down that hill in a speedy white blur in my quest to be like Evel Knievel, a man I later discovered was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having 37 broken bones among other things.) I was so excited I never stopped to figure out how I was going to slow down once I achieved the Speed of Light before crashing through the dead end barriers at the bottom of the hill. My mother would have been horrified.

With a grin and a degree of terror I started peddling. Very shortly the leverage provided by the downhill slope pushed the speed of my bicycle beyond my ability to peddle any faster. I simply could not keep up. I was no longer the engine for my bicycle, I was merely a passenger experiencing a fantastic white knuckle ride.

I am not sure if it was the blazing speed or the sheer terror of the thrill ride, but somehow I failed to make the curve in the road half way down the hill and went zooming down a rocky cactus filled trail, straight through the trees, eating pine needles and small branches until I hit a very large rock which separated me from my bicycle seat and turned me into a rolling human boulder for the last 50 yards or so as my bicycle somehow managed to pass me, stay on two wheels and smash into the back of a house at the bottom of the hill.

Needless to say I lived. That was my first lesson in leverage. Lose focus for even a second and all that leverage you built will throw you in the bushes (scare a Chihuahua and smash a potted plant or two.)

My second lesson came later as I learned how to Sell Down Hill and multiply my own sales efforts to reach sales numbers I could not reach on ability alone.

What is “Sales Leverage” or “Selling Down Hill?”

Sales Leverage is art of making every subsequent sale easier than the last at an ever increasing rate of speed.

How do you “Sell Down Hill,” or use “Sales Leverage?”

Sales Leverage is accomplished by selling a product and using any or all “multipliers” like the buyer himself, his reputation, his influence in the market, his reference, publicity or message to sell the next product in that same market a little bit easier.

Sell a product into two different silos of customers and the two sales can’t help one another. Sell a product to two people in the same market with the same problem and you can leverage those sales to help you find the third. The recognition from the first two sales, used correctly, can act as a small multiplier for the third sale in the same group, solving a similar problem.

Simple Example of Leverage: Say you are selling paint. You sell a can of paint to a local portrait artist and a second artist, seeing the beautiful work of the artist that bought the paint, comes to you to buy a can of his own. You have established some leverage.

Example of a Sale with No Leverage: You sell a can of paint to a local portrait artist. Later you sell a can of paint to a house painter. You get no leverage because the reputations and opinions of the respective customers do not matter to one another.

Staying tightly focused in one niche will provide additional benefits that can also act as business multipliers in their own right. Achieve dominance in a niche and your margins improve and you establish an expertise gap between yourself and your competitors that do not share your focus.  Your expertise in one niche will allow you to expand organically into new markets as customers flock to your expertise, and eventually your name will become synonymous with your niche in your market.

It only makes sense to have your past sales helping you make new ones, especially at a time when sales can be hard to come by.

As always, I look forward to your own thoughts.

Image courtesy of gettyimages