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Book Summary – The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies

The Ultimate Sales Machine - Book summary

To succeed in business, you need to master 3 vital areas: management, marketing and sales. In this book, Chet Holmes breaks down exactly how to do that with 12 proven strategies which he himself used to build various businesses and to train business owners and employees. In this free version of The Ultimate Sales Machine summary, you’ll get a brief overview of the 12 management, marketing and sales strategies in 4 parts.

The Ultimate Sales Machine: An Overview

In our summary, we’ve organized the key insights into 4 parts: management, marketing, sales and operating your ultimate sales machine (USM). Anyone who’s involved in sales, marketing and/or running a business/team could use these ideas to improve their results.

The Ultimate Sales Machine Summary - overview of 12 strategies

Part 1: Management

Every company has finite resources. To build an effective organization, you must gain control of your time, maximize your productivity, and help your team to do the same. Holmes breaks this down into 4 key strategies:

The Ultimate Sales Machine summary_management

1. Improve Productivity

Leaders can save time and multiply their impact by focusing on key impact areas (areas that directly affect the bottomline) rather than try to manage every ad-hoc issue that comes up. Holmes also recommends 6 steps for great time management to apply in your whole organization to drastically improve your productivity. You can get more details in our full 17-page summary.

2. Reprogram your Organization with Effective Training

Most people won’t actively seek to improve themselves unless it’s a job requirement. To ensure your team performs well and constantly improves, make continuing education mandatory. Holmes shares a list of tips you can apply to make your training more effective.

3. Use “Workshop Meetings” to Improve your Company

To grow a large company, you must be able to hire 50 new people in a week and help them perform at their peak quickly. Structured workshop-style meetings—where you jointly work with your staff to develop ideas to improve your business—are one of the best ways to concurrently train people and improve your business.  In our complete, 17-page version of The Ultimate Sales Machine summary, we explain (i) what are workshops and how to run them effectively and (ii) the 10 steps to implement a new policy effectively.

4. Hiring and Managing Superstars

As an employer, you must be able to attract and manage top producers. As an employee, you must know how to be a top producer. Whether you are a 1-man team or a large corporation, it’s possible to attract superstars–the right people can turn around a bad situation, outperform all your staff and deliver results beyond all expectations. Our full summary breaks down the detailed steps and tips on (a) how to attract superstars (including how to advertise and pre-screen them), b) how to identify and select top producers (including the 3-step interview process and questions to filter out the right people and (c) how to manage and retain your top people.

Part 2: Marketing

Tactics are solutions for short-term gains while strategies are well-considered plans for long-term goals. To be a great strategist, you must see the big picture and implement the strategies at the tactical level.The Ultimate Sales Machine summary_marketing

Buyers Pyramid

One of the biggest challenges in business is to catch and retain the attention of your prospects. The “buyers pyramid” helps to look at your market strategically. In a nutshell, at any one time, for any product or service:
(i) 3% of the market are buying now;
(ii) 7% are open to the idea of buying; and
(iii) 90% are currently not interested in your product: 1/3 are simply not considering it, 1/3 are not interested, and 1/3 are strongly disinterested and want to stay with status quo.
Most businesses focus only on the first 2 categories when it’s more strategic to concurrently nurture the other 90%.  Our full 17-page version of The Ultimate Sales Machine summary, looks at how exactly to do that, including (a) why you should focus on market data instead of product data, (b) how to use education-based marketing to “reset” customers’ buying criteria, and (c) how to define your “core story” and find your “smoking gun”.

Master the 7 Marketing Essentials

In our complete summary, we elaborate on the 7 key marketing tools you’d need to build your Ultimate Sales Machine. Identify the ones that will give you the best returns on investment, run workshops with your team to master these tools and keep finding ways to incorporate your core story.

Part 3: Sales

Rather than leave your sales process to the whims and fancies of each salesperson, you can perfect your sales engine together with your team and build it into your organization’s DNA so it can run predictably even without you.

The Ultimate Sales Machine summary_sales

Getting your  Ideal Buyers

For any product/service, there’s always a small group of ideal clients who will buy more, and buy more frequently, than all other clients. Identify who these buyers are–this is the fastest and most cost-effective way to grow your business.

The 6-Step “Dream 100 Strategy”

Use these 6 steps to secure your ideal buyers. Our complete summary looks specifically at how you can find these buyers, catch their attention and get your core story in front of them.

Mastering your Presentations

Use the dos and don’ts in the book/summary to make sure your presentations are effective.

Perfecting your Sales Engine

Get your entire team to master the 7 steps of selling and 10 steps to great follow up. Use workshops to teach, practice and perfect the processes, and get your team to memorize and practice them until they are ingrained in their “subconscious competence”.

Part 4: Operating your Ultimate Sales Machine

While these ideas are powerful, you must actually implement them to see results. Holmes emphasizes that you’ll build a real sales machine only if you apply “pigheaded discipline” and persistence to master all 12 strategies. This means applying them and refining them over and over (and over and over) again until it becomes second-nature to you and your organization.

The last strategy involves putting the various strategies to use, identifying the measures of effectiveness for your key goals, tracking them and rewarding performance until these are part of your organization’s DNA.  You can use the same approach to train yourself to naturally focus on opportunities around you, by focusing your mind on success and keep demanding your brain to find solutions.

Getting the Most from The Ultimate Sales Machine

Ready to build your business and train your employees? Check out our complete book summary bundle which includes an infographic, a 17-page text summary, and a 29-minute audio summary for more details.The Ultimate Sales Machine summary - book summary bundle

This book is packed with resources and detailed examples to help you understand and apply the strategies outlined in this summary. These include:
• Examples, scripts and tips for workshop training, recruitment, interviews, advertising/marketing campaigns, pitches, letters and follow-up;
• Stories and anecdotes from a wide range of businesses, based on Holmes’ and his clients’ experiences; and
• Exercises (including reflections, assessments etc.) to help you apply and customize the tips for your business.

You can get the book here, or check out more resources at chetholmes.com.

About the Author of The Ultimate Sales Machine

The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies is authored by Chet Holmesan author, trainer, consultant, lecturer and film producer, and the founder of Chet Holmes International. He has helped hundreds of companies to grow their businesses, and designed hundreds of advertising campaigns and sales systems across many industries. His clients include 60 of the Fortune 600 companies and numerous small businesses.

The Ultimate Sales Machine Quotes

“Mastery is not about being special or more gifted…Mastery is a direct result of pigheaded discipline and determination.”

“Good time management shouldn’t take a lot of time.”

“No one gets good at anything without repetition.”

“People respect what you inspect.”

“(You can) grow any company or area faster if you’re wise enough to share the wealth.”

“When you sell, you break rapport. When you educate, you build it.”

“Often, a great education can make people realize they need your product.”

“Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.”

“Attitude is the only thing we can control in life, yet it’s also the most powerful.”

Click here to download The Ultimate Sales Machine book summary and infographic

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