Here's a good example:
One of my favourite books on selling is "How champions sell" by Michael Baber.
(It is out of print, but you can sometimes get second hand copies from places like Amazon.) The book is about the top 1 per cent of sales people in a wide range of industries and the specific strategies they use to do so well.
One of the sales people in this book is an insurance agent called Joe Gandolpho. At a time when a good insurance agent would sell three or four million dollars of insurance in a year, Joe Gandolfo would regularly sell over seven hundred million dollars of insurance in a year!
The reason Joe did this, was because he changed 'what' he sold.
The average life insurance agent will sell insurance.
The "good" insurance agent will usually sell security and peace of mind. (They sell insurance of course but they emphasise these two important benefits of life insurance.)
Joe Gandolfo initially became a "good" insurance agent by selling security and peace of mind too. But then he decided to do something different that put him way ahead of his competitors.
He decided to sell "Tax Shelters" to higher income clients. He packaged insurance as a component in these tax shelters but the main emphasis of what he talked about was how to legally reduce your income tax with tax shelters.
This was totally different from what most insurance sales people were doing and was responsible for him selling over seven hundred million dollars of life insurance a year for seven years in a row.
In one year Joe personally sold over a billion dollars of life insurance by this method of changing 'what' he sold and packaging it as a great idea that appealed to his target market.
Another way to leap frog over your competitors is to change 'how' you do business.
Here's a good example...
The prompt email reply:
I regularly purchase a number of services on marketing from a consultant called Bob Serling.
One of the things I love about doing business with Bob is that he always replies promptly and personally to any email I send him.
Now Bob is involved in dozens of projects with a large number of people. Yet he still finds the time to respond quickly to all my emails.
I really appreciate this, as at least half the people I email never reply promptly. And a surprising number often don't respond at all.
Because I value Bob's promptness doing this, I have made it a habit of responding quickly when someone emails me as well. And a lot of people have commented on how they like the way that I do this. (This costs me nothing to do but is one way that I have leap frogged ahead of many of my competitors.)
Action Exercise:
What can you do this week to leap frog over your competitors?
The quickest way to the top is not by fighting your way through the pack; the quickest way is to leapfrog over the pack. All you need is the ability and knowledge necessary to play the game on a higher level, plus the courage to stake your claim to your rightful place on the ladder."
Robert J. Ringer
Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 11 countries.) You can email Graham on graham@twomac.co.nz
