The Ultimate Sales Machine

The Ultimate Sales Machine

by Chet Holmes

"When people feel they’re being “sold,” they automatically resist you. When people are being educated, they have no resistance— especially if the information is good."

Chet Holmes was considered by Charles Munger to be "America's greatest sales and marketing executive".  In this book, Holmes lists the 12 key strategies to transform your organization into a sales machine. By machine, he refers to an automatic, reliable, predictable, effortless way of running a business so that the entire organization works in synergy with the sales initiatives. 

It reads as a Getting Things Done type of book. It has very practical advice on how to approach all interactions with clients, how to train salesmen, how to develop the correct sales pitch, how to organize meetings, etc... 

The book is organized in a way that each chapter elaborates on one of the 12 key strategies he claims will turbocharge your business. The 12 key strategies are:

1. How to Maximize Your Productivity and Help Your People Do the Same 
2. Instituting Higher Standards and Regular Training
3. Executing Effective Meetings
4. How to Get Up to Nine Times More Impact from Every Move You Make 
5. Hiring Superstars
6. The High Art of Getting the Best Buyers
7. Turbocharge Every Aspect of Your Primary Marketing Efforts
8. Attract and Close More Buyers by Using More Compelling Visuals
9. Step-by-Step, Day-by-Day Tactics to Land Your Dream Clients
10. The Deeper You Go, the More You Will Sell 
11. Follow-up and Client Bonding Skills
12. Setting Goals, Measuring Effectiveness, and Activating Your Master Plan

This book is full of great lessons. Some of the key lessons I learned and have implemented in my business include the following:

• "Do you function mostly in a reactive or a proactive mode? In my experience, most businesspeople don’t take the time to plan and take action because all of their time is consumed by reacting to the business they’ve already built. To build your business into the Ultimate Sales Machine, you need to be in a primarily proactive mode. Time management is crucial.”
• Establish a “learning mindset” —> take time to sharpen your saw
• “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”
• Who is in your stadium, when you are about to give your stadium pitch?
• There’s always a very small percentage of folks “buying now.”
• The fastest way to grow any company is to focus a special and dedicated effort on your dream clients.
• Most companies leave far too much of the sales process up to individual salespeople.
• It costs six times more to get a new client than to sell something additional to a current client.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link