Sales Laundry

Posts Tagged ‘Sales Leverage’

Last night I saw a small business owner hitch her business to a much larger cause and pull off an absolute rock star marketing strategy.

Forget how Kellogg’s tied breakfast cereal to our kid’s education, pardon the pun, but that is kid stuff by comparison.

I was watching America’s Got Talent (you can slap me later) with my two little girls when Pam Martin’s Top Dog act began.  The act was just as you would imagine; a routine with owner and dog doing tricks to music trying their best to be one of five acts out of twelve on the show to make it to the next round.

In real life Pam Martin runs a small pet obedience training business called Top Dog in what might as well be Dallas, Texas.  Pam branded her act on America’s Got Talent with the same name as her business, so every time Pam is on television her business gets a plug because at the bottom of the screen is “Pam Martin’s Top Dog.”

Now for the Rock Star Marketing Genius part.

By going on the show with her act, appropriately called “Pam Martin’s Top Dog” and showing off her training skills, Pam has successfully created and aired two commercials almost two minutes in length each showcasing her business to a national audience on prime time network television.

If Pam were paying for commercials on America’s Got Talent she would have paid $800,000+/- for that same air time, plus the cost of making the clips, not counting the 30 second human interest pieces that endear the performer (or business woman, in this case) to the audience. No matter the outcome,  Pam has already won $1,000,000 from America’s Got Talent and spent all of it advertising her business.

Consciously or not, Pam has tied her business to the number one television show on network television in its time slot, with 11.2 Million viewers that Tuesday night alone.  Pam has also benefited from NBC’s own marketing spend in all forms of media promoting America’s Got Talent for the price of a couple of costumes and stage props.

That beats the pants off of the marketing strategy and budget of every other pet obedience school in Dallas, TX.

Pam will also get to carry forward a little bit of celebrity to add to her business raising her exposure in her market and raising obedience training as a priority in the minds of her prospects.

Where else are you going to get to spend six weeks with a minor TV star for $100?  Call Pam.

I would bet Pam’s business is booming from the national exposure boosting her efforts to earn her next million on the back of that million+ advertising budget, regardless of what happens to the million the TV show is giving away.

Genius.

Pam tied her small business to a bigger business that could raise her exposure, add celebrity and other elements making her services a higher purchasing priority in her customers minds and managed to squeeze a million+ in free advertising out of the deal.

What can you do to think outside the box to become a top priority in your customers mind and start to work on your own million?

Image courtesy of http://topdogdallas.com

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

When sales are difficult to come by, there is, I believe, a natural gut instinct to nudge a company toward broadening its services in hopes of reaching a wider swath of potential customers.  You typically have to look no further than the existing Sales Managers and Account Executives to find the source of this internal “Scope Creep.”

 While this idea may sound good bouncing around your head, in practical application this seemingly small leap in logic can very well destroy a company.

In electing to follow this strategy you are in essence trading some of your market depth for market breadth, and your competitors will love you for it. 

 Lose some focus on what you are best at and you run the risk of alienating some of your current customer base.  Experience any reduction in quality or service while your eye is off the ball and you just make it that much more difficult for a prospective customer to differentiate between you and a close competitor.

 Lacking depth and experience in you new expanded area of focus, you risk never establishing a customer base.

Lacking a specialization or something to hang your hat on, it is very easy for a company to succumb to “death by being average.”  Look no further than the recent death of Circuit City.

This is not to say a company cannot expand successfully.  They can and do every day with planning and new infrastructure to support the growth.

 In most instances, the better answer is to narrow your focus to what you are absolutely best at and where you hold the maximum competitive advantage.  Mine existing sales, established relationships and references to build sales leverage, making each new sale easier than the last.

If you are not known for something you will be known for nothing.