Graham McGregor: Using high POV to boost sales

How can you create high POV for your own business this month? Photo / iStock

One of the keys to repeat and referral sales is to get people talking positively about your business.

One strategy that you might want to consider using is POV.

Let me explain how POV works.

A few years ago I interviewed Dr Michael Hewitt Gleeson, best-selling author of 'WOMBAT Selling', for my Unfair Business Advantage Report.

Michael explained that the ideal goal in all selling is to create delighted clients who then help you to get more clients.

To do this, you need what Michael calls POV or Pass on Value.

In other words, you want to make it easy for someone to 'pass on the value' of what you offer to other people they know.

Here's a great example:
In one of his first jobs Michael sold a sales training programme called KISS - Keep it Simple Salesman.

Michael sold this programme to companies with a number of salespeople and found that he was getting three people saying 'yes' for every five sales presentations that he made.

Michael would do about three appointments a day. He hated cold calling so he would phone people, qualify them and make an appointment to show them the programme.

Then Michael fell in love with a brand new Mercedes 280SL sports car and knew that he had to own one. He quickly realised he needed to make at least ten sales presentations a day to get his sales target and buy the Mercedes.

The only way this was possible was if Michael cold called on a lot of businesses in the same area.

But he hated cold calling.

So Michael tried a lot of ideas and finally came up with one that had high POV and worked brilliantly.

Michel printed a little book called How to Sell without Working.

Michael would then walk into the sales manager and say 'Hi, my name is Michael and I've brought you a little gift to add to your sales library, it's a book called How to Sell without Working.' and he'd hand him the book.

Now when the person opened the book, all the pages in it were blank.

There are no words because there's no such thing as selling without working. (In other words it was a joke book.)

A lot of the time the person he was talking to would open the book, laugh loudly when saw it was blank, pick up the phone and say 'hey Jack come and have a look at this'.

And Michael has already got the POV effect working right at the beginning of his sales call.

The prospect is then happy and smiling and when he asks what the call was about, Michael would begin his sales presentation.

Once Michael realised he'd found something that got a terrific reaction when he handed over the book he was happy to work all day long making cold calls.

And the use of that simple POV idea enabled Michael to quickly buy his Mercedes 280 SL sports cars.

I saw another example of POV recently when I received an ezine from a business called Auckland Security Cameras.

The e-zine talked about an interesting piece of technology called ProfitCam and how it could be used by a large number of retailers to quickly improve their profit results.

ProfitCam is a very special 360 degree camera that does 3 really useful things to help.

First it counts how many customers you actually get.

Second it emails you a report broken down by weeks, days and even hours.

And third it automatically generates a 'heat map' showing exactly here people actually go in your shop.

A nice bonus about ProfitCam is it's also the world's best security camera.

So as well as measuring key numbers for your retail store it also protects against theft and shop lifting.

You can read details about Profit Cam here.

When I read about this clever piece of technology I was very impressed with what it did.

So I emailed the link to the ezine to several accounting firms that I knew.

I suggested to each accounting firm that this technology might be of interest to any retail clients that they had.

Each accounting firm that I emailed details of ProfitCam to were also very impressed with it did.

So ProfitCam now has high POV (pass on value) working well for it.

My suggestion to you this week is to take a look at your business and the various products and services that you offer.

Look for ways to create high POV (Pass on Value) for what you do.

High POV is a great way to get positive publicity for many businesses and is surprisingly easy to do.

"Be interesting or be invisible" - Andy Servonitz

Action Exercise:

• How can you create high POV for your own business this month?

Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. You can download his 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage' Ebook at no charge from www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com.