Who Should Read This Book?

The Assisted Purchase was written for anyone who wants to make more sales with less stress.  It is for new and experienced business owners as well as novice and world-weary salespeople. Regardless of your role and experience, this book will change your view of sales- permanently.

It does not matter what industry you are in, if you recognise any of the below issues, then this is the book for you.

• You feel bad about or hate selling
• You don’t like prospecting
• You are frustrated by a lack of leads despite working at it
• The idea of cold calling to make appointments makes your blood run cold
• You feel on the back foot at sales meetings
• You struggle to convert a good percentage of the prospects you meet into clients (a conversion rate of 1 in 3 is good but converting 1 in 2 is achievable if you follow this advice)
• You don’t understand why you unexpectedly hit dry patches
• Your prospects always want to drive your prices down.
• You have a sneaky suspicion that people don’t trust you.

If you recognises any of these issues, then you are far from alone. Thankfully, it does not have to be this way.

Let me start with the observation that most people make selling far more difficult and stressful than it needs to be for both themselves and their prospect. It should not be a stressful process. You have something of value to offer and presumably your prospect is interested in buying.  In some cases, they might not be, e.g. they just want some free advice or a quote to beat their current supplier up with, however there are ways to avoid ending up in this time-wasting type of conversation.

It is easy as the seller to feel inferior and beholden to the buyer. This can often make you feel the need to discount your prices or promise to deliver too much for too little money.  However, when you are the buyer for your business, do you feel you hold all the cards?

The old-fashioned sales process is dysfunctional.  If you want to change to something more modern than read on.

What Can I Expect to Achieve

What can you expect to get from this book?  Results… provided you apply what I am sharing with you.

Unfortunately, some people, and I’m sure you’re not one of them, read books, attend courses and absorb huge quantities of information but never get round to applying it.

Knowledge is potential.  Knowledge becomes power only when it is put into action. If you know the best sales process in the world (and you will by the end of this book), then you still need to apply it.  If you know how to make the best investments for people, you still have to do the investing.  If you have some dirt on someone, you still have to act and let them know, if you are to gain power over them.

Knowledge is only useful if you do something with it. The gaining of knowledge is not an end in itself. In some cases, you might be interested in things you can’t apply. Stephen Hawkin’s book, A Brief History of Time, is full of interesting knowledge that I am never going to use. However, my purpose in reading it was to satisfy my interest in the universe and, perhaps, to show off a bit.  So even in this sense, I am still doing something with it.

My advice is, whenever you are learning something, always think, how can I use this?

Remember: there is always something new to learn. People who reach the top of their game get there by dedicating themselves to lifelong learning.  They are always looking for new and better ways to do things and achieve the results they want. Business owners and MDs need to stay on top of a range of subjects from marketing through finance to HR.

Warren Buffet reads 500 pages of information every day. Most successful entrepreneurs set aside some time each day or week to learning something new and then applying it.  It is vital that you apply it.

You will get great results using this book.  If you apply it, you can expect to:

• Win more and better clients with less effort
• Grow your business in a predictable way by acquiring clients for life
• Boost your profits by reducing the costs of new client acquisition (the most expensive activity in most businesses is new client acquisition)
• Achieve independence- once you have new clients for life rolling in you can then spend less time looking for new ones and make more money so you can enjoy the lifestyle you want

The Dangers of Not Changing

Unfortunately, not everyone will follow this advice.  Some people will insist on making sales the hard way. The old-fashioned traditional sales techniques do work to some degree.  You can carry on getting clients the hard way.  However, how long do you want to waste your time?  Do you want to keep having to find new clients to replace lost ones?

In short, do you want life to be easier or do you want to keep battling? The biggest danger though is if your competitors start using the ideas I share here and tying in clients for life, then you may not be able to win enough new clients to keep your business growing or even afloat.

What Will I Discover

You are going to discover new concepts and idea which will help you to increase your sales from both new and existing clients.  You will learn how to become a fully fledged 3G advisor.  You will discover how to make the most of your expertise and make the biggest impact on your customers and clients.

You will also find out what you need to change in your approach to really grow your business and achieve your goals.

Why Did I Write The Assisted Purchase?

I am passionate about helping people to achieve their  business goals so they can achieve the independence they crave and live the lifestyle they want.

I am driven to help  business owners, MDs and salespeople reach their goals.  It is expanding small businesses that provide the employment and prosperity the UK needs.  In the UK, small and medium sized businesses (those with less than 249 employees) provide most of the jobs in the UK.

This book is aimed at all the business owners, MDs and salespeople whose job is to make great things happen for their business.

PART 1: HOW TO RISE FROM THE ASHES

Business owners and salespeople of the world, now is the time for you to rise from the ashes of the old, dysfunctional selling culture and move forward with your head held high.

There is a better way to do business. A way that is more fulfilling. A way that is more profitable.

A way that is more beneficial to you and your clients.

Listen closely to my tale.

Chapter 1. An Overview of RISES

I am enjoying a latte in my favourite spot at 200 Degrees- a very popular coffee house in Birmingham.  It’s a great place to watch the world go by and catch up with people.  It’s also the perfect place to start with an overview of the RISES approach.

The number of business people who meet here to network and make deals is quite amazing.  Unfortunately, most of them will leave empty handed.  They usually leave smiling as they think they have closed the deal but more often than not the prospect has not committed and has given them a “no” that is so polite, the seller heard it as a “yes”.  Has this ever happened to you?

It know it happened to me when I first started selling.  No-one likes rejection and people, fearing that they may offend us, often soften the blow.  Here’s the type of comment such as “That sounds great.”, “I think we’ll be moving ahead with your company”, “All looks good.  Let’s talk in a few weeks”.  As we want the sale and the meeting seemed to go so well, we interpret these comments as meaning “Yes”.

This ultimately leads to lots of chasing and wasted time for us to find out that they really did mean “no”.

Why does this happen so often?

Most salespeople and business owners still use old fashioned sales techniques.  They think these tried and tested methods work- logically they should do.  You contact someone who has the money and need for your product or service. You meet up and you start a conversation. It all seems to go well but then you can’t get hold of them and the chasing game starts.

Why? Sometimes this is because the person wanted some free advice. This does happen. The prospect has no intention of using you he just wants your ideas. Here’s a real-life example, a business owner was looking for someone to help hm with the PR for his new company. He met with four PR agencies and asked them for their ideas.  He then selected the cheapest agency and gave them the ideas he got from the other 3. Unfortunately, this type of thing does happen.

Then there is the meeting where the prospect simply wants a quote. The two variations of this are:

1. Your prospect is using another supplier and he has no intention of moving. He just wants to see if he is paying the right amount and if you quote him less than he is paying, then he’ll use this to beat up his current supplier.
2. She has already decided who she wants to use but company or organisation policy demands that she submits three quotes. This is very common with public bodies and larger companies.

In both cases, they are wasting your time- and in some cases it could be a considerable amount of your time.

Thankfully, it is easy to avoid these situations by taking a few precautions:

1. The best and easiest way to get new clients is through referrals and recommendations. In these cases, you rarely run into the above problems.
2. Most companies and organisations are transparent about their buying processes and you can find out if they need to get various quotes. It is then up to you to decide if you want to move forward on this basis.  It may or may not be a good idea.  Generally, most companies stick with their current supplier unless they have been let down or they find a considerably cheaper quote.
3. People just looking for your ideas are very transparent. They’ll spend a few minutes outlining their situation and then ask for your solution.  All you need to say is that it takes time to create the right solution for them and you need to collect more information and give it a lot more thought than you can do in a short meeting.  All you want to do today is find out more about them and explain how you might be able to help and that you’ll develop the perfect solution when they decide to go ahead.  You then ask them something about what they want to achieve and why and what difference it would make to them and their business.  If they insist on your ideas, I usually cut the meeting short which always surprises them.  Remember- it is your sales meeting and you are in control.  If you don’t think it is going to lead anywhere, then get out of their quick and find another prospect.
4. Trust your gut- it is usually right. If something does not feel right, then it’s usually a good idea to voice your feeling and see if you can sort it out.

Given the expense and time involved in finding and converting prospects, you want to develop clients for life so you can give them maximum value and maximise your profits.  This is truly a win-win situation.

So why does not everybody do this? When starting up, business owners and salespeople have to take the clients they can get.  These are rarely the clients you want they are just the ones you can get.  You have to prove yourself before you can do business with the high value clients you really want.

So everyone goes through a period of taking whatever they can get. They then start to grow their business and start attracting the clients they do want.  The problem is their approach and process does not change- even though they may now have clients who could be very valuable to them.

Let me explain.  When you first go to the market, you attract the people who want your service or product but don’t have the money to pay for one of the established companies in the field.  So, you develop a product or service that you can offer them at a price that suits them.  As these people don’t have much spare money, they tend to buy one or two of your low-cost products or services.  They are happy and you get by.

Actually, what most people miss is that you are doing phenomenally well in converting prospects into clients at this point.  The hardest people to sell to are small business owners.  The reason is that they have not yet separated the concept of their money from the business’s money.  They think that anything they pay for is coming directly out of their paycheck.  Once they have a few employees, then they start seeing paying you as an investment paid for by the business and not out of their pocket.

This struggle to get small business owners to pay “you out of their own pocket” gives you the idea that all anyone wants is small, one-off projects or products.  So you keep your offerings at the low end and are slightly surprised when you make a repeat sale.

Time goes on and you start growing and earn a good reputation.  You are now attracting clients that could spend more with you.  Clients that want you to help them on a regular basis.  Clients that want real value rather than the quick projects that the people who paid you out of their own pocket wanted.

You have worked to get to this point and now is the time to capitalise on it.  The first step is understanding  client lifetime value.

1.1 Understanding Client Lifetime Value

Client lifetime value indicates the total revenue you can reasonably expect to get from one client over the course of your business relationship.  Not all customers are created equal.  However, the longer a client continues to purchase from you, the greater their lifetime value becomes.

It is fairly straightforward to calculate it following the below steps:

1. Get your turnover, number of clients and number of deals done over the past 12 months.
2. Calculate your average purchase value by dividing your turnover by your number of clients.
3. Calculate average purchase frequency: Divide the number of deals done over the past year by your number of clients.
4. Calculate average client value over the year by multiplying 2 and 3.
5. Calculate average client lifetime. This is simply the average length of time someone stays with you as a client. You can do this mathematically- add together the length of time each client has stayed with you and divide by the total number of clients- but you probably have a gut feel for the figure.
6. Calculate your client lifetime value (CLV) by multiplying 4 and 5.

This will give you an estimate of how much you can expect to generate from a client over the course of your relationship.

Now I want you to take this a step further.  Most people say that PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click (i.e. the amount you pay for someone to click on your Google ad).  I think it is much more important that Client Lifetime Value- though this is an important measure and you should still do the above.

Profit-per-client is generally harder to calculate for services unless you follow these guidelines.

It is expensive to gain a new client and usually any profit on your first piece of work is usually swallowed up by the cost of acquisition.  So here is my rule- only count someone as a client after they have bought from you the second time.  If most of your clients only buy once, then we need to have a look at improving this unless you are doing something very specialist that most companies only ever buy once.

So now look at your profit over the past 12 months (turnover- delivery costs) and then go through the above steps using this instead of turnover and number of clients using the above definition.

This gives you an average but I would suggest you analyse this further.  Take your top 3 clients and work out the profit you made on each in detail.  You know exactly how much you have billed them but you need to look at the exact costs of the delivery.  How much did it cost  you to service or deliver to them?  Remember to count in phone calls, regular meetings, chasing up payments etc.  You need to include your hourly rate and that of your staff.

Now look at your bottom 3 clients and do the same.  You may well find that you are losing money if you factored in your hourly rate for all your meetings, travel etc.

The way forward is simple. You want to grow your top 3 clients and duplicate them and regularly fire your bottom 3 clients. This is the way to living the life of ease.

How do you grow your clients?  Easy- sell to them more often.  Games consoles and Apple have done phenomenally well with this very simple idea.  The product you buy makes the company some money.  Actually, when the Microsoft X-Box was released back in 2001, it was the cheapest computing power available on the market as the price tag just about covered its cost.  The money was in the games.  With Apple, the money is in you buying Apps from their App store.  The smart thing, in both cases, is that you are forced to buy their licensed products- you can’t go elsewhere.

You need to look at how you can make them keep coming back to buy from you again and again.  A membership program is a great way to do this and it gives you consistent revenue.  Also people like being part of a club- especially one with a velvet rope.  We’ll look into this more in the Services chapter.

But how do you go about duplicating your top clients (or finding them if you are just starting out) and how do you know what to offer as an upgrade?

You want to move your business up to the next level in this ways, then you need to follow the RISES formula which stands for:

• Reason
• Investigation
• Strategies
• Engage
• Service

I am going to quickly cover this and then fully explore each idea in its own dedicated chapter.

1.2 Start with Your Reason

This is the most important step in starting up or growing your business.  It is also the most overlooked.  The question is why are you running your own business or why do you want to get into sales?

It is stressful being a business owner, MD or salesperson.  It requires commitment and long hours. You often have to skip time with the family.  You may need to put your family home on the line or get into considerable debt to get your business going. I always say to people if it is just about the money there are far easier and less stressful ways to earn it.  Many people I know have good corporate jobs which are well paid and offer a final salary pension, paid holiday and sick leave which involve  much less stress and hassle than your average business owner, partner or MD of a small company.

In fact, I know one MD of a 180-person company who pays herself just £30,000.  Her management team make more than she does.  Why?

Well, that’s my point.  It comes down to your reason. In her case, she had taken over the company from her father and had received a very substantial inheritance.  So, she did not need the money.  She could have easily given up work.  However, it was vital to her that the company continued to provide employment to the local community.  The company was over 100 years old and her family was proud of the fact that it had always been there to provide jobs and prosperity to the local community.

You need to work out your reason. It must be something more than just making money.  You need to uncover your reason and find your passion.  This will keep you going through the tough times.

If you are a salesperson, then you have to find your reason for selling your product or service.

It is still important that you have monetary targets.  These should be expressed in terms of what you will do with the money.  For example, if I earn £x, I can buy the car I want, send the children to private school, have the holiday of a lifetime.  I am going to cover this more in-depth in the later chapter.  However, it is key that you know your reason and have financial target for you and your business.

1.3 Investigate

Once you have your reason, now is the time to investigate.  You need to investigate the marketplace and see what is out there.  This is definitely true for new companies but it also applies to existing ones and to their salespeople.

Existing companies may well say I know what I am selling and where I am in the marketplace.  Unfortunately, things change and they change very rapidly these days.  You always need to be on the lookout for what is going on.  It’s a good idea to take a snapshot of the market every 90 days.

What is happening in the market, what are your competitors doing, how can you maximise your profits and minimise your costs?  This can involve changing your business model due to disrupters in the marketplace.  Companies like AirBnB and Uber have changed their respective industries almost overnight.

We’ll go into a breakdown of what you need to look into in the chapter on investigation but I want to leave you with this thought.

There is a restaurant near to me.  It has opened and closed five times as an Italian restaurant.  Why do people keep wasting money by repeating the same mistake?  Clearly, the spot does not work.

Have the last 3 buyers thought that the previous owner just did not have the right spaghetti sauce?  Maybe the name wasn’t quite right?  Perhaps a re-brand and putting out a few more flyers would do the trick.  OK, anyone could argue that maybe the first owner had not got it quite right and maybe another one could fix it.  However, when the second owner couldn’t make it work either, then it should have been obvious it was never going to work.

This is an obvious example.  The tools I give you in the investigate chapter will make things equally as obvious even when you don’t have the sight of five failed restaurants telling you that it is a bad idea to go down that path.  They’ll also show you where you should be going.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll know what will work and what won’t before you invest your hard-earned money.  As a salesperson you’ll know how to better sell you products or services and how to position them in the marketplace.

1.4. Creating Your Strategy

OK, so now you have a reason and know what you want to offer.  Your next step is to develop a strategy.  Why do you need a strategy?  It is the only way that you are going to reach your goals.  However, few businesses ever get around to doing one or if they do, for funding purposes, then they rarely look at it.

Here’s the thing.  Sales is not an activity.  There are plenty of activities involved in selling from prospecting through to sales meetings and post sell follow-up.  However, selling itself is not an activity.  This is why many business owners, MDs and even salespeople find it frustrating.

What do I mean by saying sales is not an activity? Here is the business dictionary definition of activity:

A measurable amount of work performed to convert inputs into outputs.

This seems a good definition.  Sales, you could say, is about converting inputs into outputs, e.g. leads into clients, and so fits into this definition.  However, this is not as predictable as say other activities, such as building a web site or doing a set of accountants or running a workshop.  You know the amount of work these things will take pretty well.

The thing is with sales you don’t know.  How many people will you need to call to make an appointment?  How many meetings do you need to close a deal?  In short, how much work do you have to put in to turn a lead into a client?  You can talk about averages but it is not easy.  This is because sales is a game, not an activity.

A game has prizes (great clients), rules of engagement and competitors.  It is the last factor which makes things so unpredictable.  When you are building a web site, you are not competing against someone else.

Think of it like this.  You are playing a game of chess with your biggest competitor and the winner gets the client.  Who do you think will win?

The answer is the one with the best strategy and tactics. As your competitor improves his game, so must you if you want to win.  This is why nothing in sales stays the same.  This is why there is no such thing as a quick fix.  If there was, everyone would be doing it and no-one would get a lead on the competition.  You win good clients by doing things better than your competitors.

You must do something different in terms of sales and marketing if you are to pick up good clients.  However, I am always surprised at the number of people who think that sales and marketing is the easy part.  The truth is that the delivery is the easy part.  If you do it right, sales and marketing should be the fun part.

As a simple example, you’re an accountant and have attended a monthly networking event for the past year.  You seem to be well liked but have not won any work.  Why?  Well, how do you out-do the accountant who has been attending for a decade, is well-liked and has a good reputation within the group?  You do this by having a better sales and marketing strategy than he does- just showing up is not going to cut it.  This is the same for any marketing and sales approach- a standard approach is not going to work well.  You need to do something different.

The great news is that most companies do not have a startegy.  By having one, you put yourself light years ahead.  If you review your competitors, you will find that most of them are not doing anything that is very smart.

I’ll show you how to produce a winning strategy in the Strategise chapter.

1.5 Engage Your Target Market

This is where you put your strategy into action and engage your target market.  Unfortunately, most people go straight to this step having completely bypassed the earlier 3 steps.  If you don’t have a reason, done your research and created a strategy, you are going to find it next to impossible to engage.  Why? Without doing the above, the chances are:

• You don’t have the passion to make the sales you want
• Your product or service is either not really needed and wanted or you are playing in an over-crowded marketplace
• You have no way to differentiate yourself from vanilla competitors and no strategy to attract the clients you want

It is notable that 80% of companies fail within their first five years.  This is usually because they fail to engage due to one or more of the above factors. The most common is offering something that is not really needed and wanted or you are in an over-crowded marketplace. There is a huge number of would-be business owners who look at someone doing well and think “They’re making good money; I’ll do the same thing but charge slightly less or offer a bit better experience etc.”  They then invest their time and money replicating an existing business and then fail to engage as they are offering nothing new and do not have a strategy to win more clients.

Engagement requires a strategy and a proven system to convert prospects into good clients.  You don’t want a system that converts poor prospects as they will become bad clients.  Remember it is you that opens the door and lets in new clients.  You should avoid engaging with bad clients.  These are not always easy to spot.  A certain giveaway though is when you have a sales meeting with them and they seem to be working hard to persuade you to take on the job.

In the engage section, I am going to show you how to make the most of your energy, time and focus in engaging with your target market and turning prospects into clients.

1.6 Service Them Well

Great- you’ve turned a prospect into a client.  You now need to really look after them.  This is only truly possible if they are paying you well and you don’t have too many under-paying clients.  I’ve seen many struggling businesses continue to struggle because they do not have time to offer truly great customer service as they are looking after too many low-paying clients.  If your clients pay you at the lower end, then you have to service lots of them which means you don’t have the time to offer superior service.

However, it is superior service which keeps them coming back.  It is superior service that enables them to refer.  It is superior service which grows your reputation.

Superior service makes your business easier to run and much more profitable.  Poor service will kill your business faster than anything else.  Fail to deliver or under-deliver to your customers and you will be unable to win repeat sales or referrals and your reputation will go down the tubes making it harder (if not impossible) for you to sell in future.  This is truly a lose-lose situation.

Here’s the key point, the easiest people and companies to sell to in order are:

1. Current clients
2. Referrals
3. Lost clients (clients who were happy but have not come back to you within the expected timeframe).
4. New clients

Only superior service will allow you to sell again to your currently clients and ask them for referrals. It is also the best way to recover lost clients and it will build your reputation to make acquiring new clients much easier.

So how do you keep them coming back?  Superior service is going above and beyond what they expect from you.  If you just do the job you are expected to do well, then that is not superior service.  It is what you do beyond the expected that counts. 

All clients expect you to do a good job and be respectful and friendly when you do it.  Hell, this is the bare minimum anyone expects whether it is from their accountant or their window cleaner. This may sound funny but I’ve met accountants who feel that being competent and friendly is their Unique Selling Proposition. Perhaps they thought that all their competitors were either incompetent, hostile or both.

Superior service requires doing the unexpected but you must make it standard to your company.  If you have a superior service programme, then you and your teams know what they should do and when to delight your clients.

I am going to share with you a fool-proof way to go above and beyond the expected and become known for superior service.  I am not going to talk about what you do and deliver (as you’re reading this book, I know that you have that down cold).  I am going to show you some of the actions and processes that I use to delight my clients and how you can use these to create your own first-class client journey.

Remember- this makes your life and your future sales much easier while delighting your clients.  This is a great win-win relationship…

Don’t Stop There! Get Your Copy of The Assisted Purchase for all the Secrets you Need to Know!