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We were just about to board the dive boat when I noticed the sign: “NIKONUS 35mm w/strobes, $75/day.” You mean I can rent a pro-grade underwater camera for only $75 bucks? Sign me up! While we motored out to the reef, the dive master gave me a crash course in underwater photography, and when we returned from Nassau and developed the film, I was in for a shock.
Earl Nightingale had it right when he wrote The Strangest Secret. “You become what you think about.” A friend gave me this cassette when I was a sophomore in college, and it changed my life. It made me aware of the internal chatter in my head, and all of the negative, discouraging things I had been saying to myself. That’s because I grew up in an abusive, dysfunctional family where I was told I’d never amount to nuthin’. My mother mocked me for wanting to go to college, and she was shocked when I won a scholarship.
My dorm roommate thought I was nuts. I started reading affirmations from a deck of 3×5 cards. Out loud. After nearly flunking out my freshman year, The Power of Positive Thinking turned me into a deans-list scholar. Then one day the psychology professor was lecturing about a study that suggested that most of our thinking takes the form of pictures, and that memories are stored and retrieved as pictures. That got me thinking.
A speed reading course had already taught a technique for remembering lists by turning them into pictures. For example, let’s say I needed to go to the store and buy toothpaste, beans, rice, coffee, sugar, bread, cereal, and bananas, I could conjure up a picture of a chimp with bad teeth, wearing a baker’s hat and eating a banana, while holding a mug full of corn flakes heaped with sugar, sitting on two burlap bags stenciled “RICE” and “BEANS.” You get the picture.
Our debate coach taught a variation of this technique, called the “loci method,” to organize important facts by visualizing a walk through the rooms of a house. This trick was popular in ancient Greece for memorizing long speeches and texts. It worked for Aristotle.
One afternoon, Denise, my wife-to-be, was working on a collage for an art class, and it occurred to me that I could put pictures together to represent my affirmations, and this might even be more effective than just words. So we each started building a scrapbook of things we’d like to have, places we’d like to go, and things we wanted to achieve in our lives. The format was simple: a cheep ring binder filled with plastic sleeves where you can slide in the pages. We cut photos from magazines and pasted them together into pages that represented our dreams and goals. We were too poor to afford a television, so we jokingly called our project “TomorrowVision.” We kept these books on the night table, and we’d review them together just before going to sleep when our subconscious mind would be most impressionable.
Years passed, and after a time we fell out of the picture-book-on-the-night-table habit. So much for applied psychology. We both had busy professional lives, then a son, and then another. We still followed the discipline of writing down our goals each month, and keeping a To-Do list in a DayTimer. But I completely forgot about TomorrowVision until I developed the film from Nassau.
One of those early life goals was to learn to scuba dive. This was represented in my scrapbook by a half-page underwater shot, torn from a magazine, of a diver with a big colorful fish on a reef.
When a client asked me to teach a series of seminars in Hawaii, we seized the opportunity and registered for pool classes, and finished our open-water certification in Kona. It was many trips, and many, many dives later that I rented that underwater camera on a whim.
As I was flipping through the dive pictures, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was the fish, the SAME fish (which I now recognized as Holocanthus ciliarus, the Queen Angel). I called out to Denise, “Darling, do you know whatever happened to those old visualization notebooks we used to have?”
“Look in the pile of books under the bed.”
There it was. The picture in the TomorrowVision book looked as if it had been shot on the same roll of film.
Shock and surprise faded into deep satisfaction as I flipped through these pages. These images that had once represented life-long goals had already been realized: our home in the mountains in Colorado; writing a book; sailing the tropics; skiing with our boys; kayaking in Alaska; teaching at the University; cycling around Ireland; speaking in Mexico, Europe and Australia. I held in my hands a virtual scrapbook of the past ten years of our lives. The music from “Twilight Zone” started playing in my head.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz taught us that, “Your subconscious mind can not tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.” By looking into our future through our TomorrowVision, we were programming our brains to seek out and recognize opportunities, large and small, that would bring us closer to those goals. Looking back, it seems as if those events were inevitable, because even our most incidental daily decisions were informed by deep, subconscious intent.
Over the past 30 years, leading experts like Louise Hay, Anthony Robbins and Depak Chopra have spoken passionately about the power of creative visualization. It’s no longer viewed as a mystical phenomenon. Today you can even buy an affirmation app for your iPhone. Psychologists and neuroscientists are looking deep into the brain, and can explain in scientific terms exactly how this seemingly magical process works.
I recently read how competitors in the World Memory Championships use variations on these same visual imagery tricks to perform mind-boggling feats, recanting long strings of numbers, like the mathematical constant pi (the record now stands at more than 80,000 digits) or memorizing the sequence of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than a minute (30 seconds is the new Four-Minute-Mile). MRI scans of the brains of these mental heavyweights shows them lighting up areas normally used for visual recall and spatial navigation. The evolutionary explanation is simple. Presumably our ancestors found it particularly useful to recall where they found their last meal, or the way back to the cave.
The same mechanism allows us to remember our future, and then automatically steer around life’s obstacles until we arrive. The life we’ve lead has been extraordinary beyond my wildest dreams. I have only one regret; what if I had kept up the discipline by changing out my TomorrowVision pages as each goal was realized, replacing them with new images and loftier goals? What more might I have done?
Today that old ring binder is sitting on my desk, awaiting a new set of pages, and I’ve included these two extraordinary photographs for your review. This simple technique can help you achieve your goals and live your dreams as well. Here’s proof that when we give our lives a roadmap, our deep intellect will eventually navigate a course to it, even if it’s hidden away on a reef, deep beneath some distant sea.
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How to Manage and Motivate Your Sales Team
Any behavior which gets rewarded will tend to be repeated. So we advocate paying close attention to how employees are rewarded for performing (or not performing) the various aspects of their jobs.
Performance-based compensation is nothing new. Commission plans for salespeople are common because their productivity is so easy to measure. But small business tends to eschew these compensation plans thinking that “we’re just a mom & pop store. We’re different.” In the competitive environment you’re faced with today, you have no choice. You must use every management tool available to maximize your marketing firepower.
Guerrillas are not only intolerant of non-performers, they lavishly reward their stars, setting ever-higher standards for the whole organization. The problem is how to reward your people appropriately, particularly if they’re not directly responsible for easy-to-measure activities like sales revenue. Some simple guidelines can put this powerful management tool to work for you.
The foundation of an effective performance-based compensation plan is a set of clear and specific goals for your organization as a whole, for each functional department, and for each individual employee. These goals must be objective and quantifiable. For example, “Increase walk-in traffic by ten percent, or to 650 shoppers per month, by the end of the year” or “achieve an average rating of 4.5 of 5 on monthly customer satisfaction surveys.” Subjective factors, like attitude or good work habits might be included in review criteria, but if you can’t measure them statistically, you can’t use them as a standard for performance-based compensation. Then devise methods for gathering data to measure progress (or lack of it) toward these goals. What you measure is what you get, so inspect what you expect.
Salary
The advantage is that it’s easy to calculate: punch in, punch out, so much per hour. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t motivate.
Commission
Commissions can be computed on the gross sale price (good), or the gross profit margin (better). One important factor to consider when designing a compensation plan is that it must be simple. Paying commissions on straight gross sales is easy, and if you put the table below up on the wall in the break room, everyone can quickly estimate what they’re earning if they know the overall gross margin of the store.
Do not pay commission on any gross margins below 13%. If they’re selling at less than 13% margin, they’re giving away the stock and putting you out of business.
Generally, the lower the gross margin, the easier the product is to sell. So guerrillas recommend paying commissions based on gross margin, to reward your sales people for working harder to maintain higher profits, not just sales.
Commission Based on Gross Sales:
| Overall Gross Margin | % of Gross Sales |
| on Sales for the Month | Paid as Commission |
All above 27%…………………………………………… 2.8%
26.0 – 26.99……………………………………………… 2.6
25.0 – 25.99……………………………………………… 2.4
24.0 – 24.99……………………………………………… 2.2
23.0 – 23.99……………………………………………… 2.0
22.0 – 22.99……………………………………………… 1.9
21.0 – 21.99……………………………………………… 1.8
20.0 – 20.99……………………………………………… 1.7
19.0 – 19.99……………………………………………… 1.6
18.0 – 18.99……………………………………………… 1.5
17.0 – 17.99……………………………………………… 1.4
16.0 – 16.99……………………………………………… 1.3
15.0 – 15.99……………………………………………… 1.2
14.0 – 14.99……………………………………………… 1.1
13.0 – 13.99……………………………………………… 1.0
Less than 13.0%………………………………………… none
Basing commissions on gross margin rather than gross sales is harder to track, but it motivates salespeople to sell higher-priced and higher-profit items, accessories and extended service contracts, as well as to follow up with prospects and customers for referrals.
Commission based on gross profit discourages discounting. It can also produce competitive rivalries between salespeople, (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Commission based on Gross Margin:
| Overall Gross Margin | % of Gross Profit |
| on Sales for the Month | Paid as Commission |
All above 27%…………………………………………… 15.5%
26.0 – 26.99……………………………………………… 15.0
25.0 – 25.99……………………………………………… 14.5
24.0 – 24.99……………………………………………… 14.0
23.0 – 23.99……………………………………………… 13.5
22.0 – 22.99……………………………………………… 13.0
21.0 – 21.99……………………………………………… 12.5
20.0 – 20.99……………………………………………… 12.0
19.0 – 19.99……………………………………………… 11.5
18.0 – 18.99……………………………………………… 11.0
17.0 – 17.99……………………………………………… 10.5
16.0 – 16.99……………………………………………… 10.0
Less than 16.0%…………………………………………… none
Of course, you have to adjust these percentages to your business and your market.
Bonus
Bonuses can be paid on a monthly sales quota, or on reaching a target profit margin. The whole sales team can qualify for a bonus for reaching a collective goal. Managers often receive a bonus for exceeding key performance targets. Some retailers offer year-end bonuses, but these are not really very motivating. Bonuses are more effective if they cover shorter cycles. People need to be able to envision their progress, either on a regular report, a reader board, or a United-Way-style thermometer.
Spiffs
An acronym for “sales promotional incentive funds,” spiffs are paid for specific sales events. Some spiffs are funded by manufacturers to move specific SKUs. Or they can be paid by the store for selling an unwanted, obsolete or damaged item.
Guerrillas never allow the manufacturer to pay spiffs directly to their salespeople because you want the credit for paying the reward. Also, you don’t want the manufacturers to control what products sell on your floor. You need to manage that mix based on your niche, your identity and your business model.
Sales Contests
It’s important to include all the support people, the back office, the warehouse, cashiers and delivery.
You can run a sales contest on any number of metrics. First Sale of the day, Biggest Ticket of the day, Most Line Items in an order, Most Orders written in a day, Order with Highest Gross Margin.
You can also run contests on product knowledge. Devise a simple test and give a certain sum for every question they get right.
The best sales contests combine performance with an element of chance. For example, every qualifying sale wins a ticket dropped into the hat, then a weekly drawing determines the winner of a cash prize, a merchandise prize, or the trip for two to Hawaii. The more you sell, the better your odds of winning.
An effective variation is every qualifying sale gets to draw a playing card from a deck. The best poker hand at the end of the contest wins all.
Wiltshire TV, in Thousand Oaks, California, has developed an unusual variant of Bingo. Each month, each square on the bingo is assigned a different product. Instead of letters and numbers, their Bingo card is laid out with brands across the top and model numbers down the side. Sell a qualifying product and you mark that square on the card. Sell any five qualifying items in a row, and BINGO!
LOTS more Guerrilla Retailing strategies in our book, Guerrilla Retailing – How to Make Big Profits from your Retail Business. Order it today on Amazon.
Grand Hyatt Launches New Weapon in the Amenity Arms Race
Rapid Repair, a little company In Kalamazoo, Michigan, will install a 240 GB hard drive upgrade in your iPod. I can’t make this stuff up, folks. For about the price of a NEW iPod, you can expand your old iPod to 240 GIGS! For cryin’ out loud, the IBM laptop I’m using here only has 40 gigs. Two-Hundred-Forty GIGABYTES is enough disk space for 20 hours of MP3 video or 60,000 songs! What on EARTH would anyone DO with THAT much content? Whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want. That’s what.
In advance of Team Summit, I was doing Guerrilla sales training for DISH Network’s National Sales Meeting at the Grand Hyatt. A video billboard just outside the ballroom promoted the hotel’s newest room amenity. They have replaced the typical (and SO last millennium) bedside clock radio with a HI-FI iPod docking station. (And I’m old enough to remember when having a coffeemaker in the room was a big deal!) What do you do with a HI-FI iPod docking station? Well, you listen to your 60,000 songs. That’s what.
So now, you can take exactly the music you want, listen to it whenever you want, wherever you want And when you’re a guest at the Denver Grand Hyatt, you can play it right in your suite, and even wake up in the morning to your favorite (is this beginning to sound a lot like SLING?). No more annoying all-country stations to sift through. No more of those poor people at NPR of nagging you to donate a car. Hyatt has found yet another weapon to deploy in the room-amenities arms race.
Alvin Toffler predicted this kind of made-my-way-on-demand economy way back in 1970. Today’s consumers have more choices than ever, and they still demand more and more options. Ragu now offers 36 flavors of spaghetti sauce in 6 varieties. (Watch Malcom Gladwell’s short video on TED about this phenomenon!)
What this means is that guerrillas can create a competitive advantage by offering their customers hyper-customized versions of their product or service. These same customers will pay more, and they are more loyal.
How to Get Above Average Performance from Everyone
by Guerrilla Selling Speaker Orvel Ray Wilson, CSP
How would you like to see a 10% sales lift on a $10 investment? Start by making individual production public.
Go to the office supply and buy a white dry-erase marker board, a set of colored markers, and a couple of rolls of black border tape (that skinny, vinyl tape used for making lines on your whiteboard).
Use the border tape to divide the whiteboard into 9 columns.
The first column is NAME, then a column for each of the seven days of the week, and a column on the right for TOTAL. Now create a line for each salesperson.
Hang it on the wall in the warehouse, break-room or back office where everyone (except customers) will see it.
Each day, require each of your sales associates to write their sales figures for the day in the appropriate box before they go home. A blank indicates that they were not in the store that day. You may have to enforce the rule at first; if they skip (or just forget) fine them a dollar for the coffee kitty. But soon, everyone will be eager to play the game.
This works on several levels. First, your stars will set the pace for the rest of team, because salespeople are genetically competitive. That alone will increase their overall sales performance by the promised ten percent. Great sales trainers and coaches capitalize on that trait to help team members improve their skills.
It will also make everyone more consistent, because no one wants to post a zero for the day. And nobody wants to be consistently in last place, so they will work to improve their product knowledge and sales skills. And that one person you have on your team who you wish you hadn’t hired? After a few weeks he’ll get the message and leave on his own.
Raising the Bar
You can produce even more dramatic results by tracking all of the associates’ performance on three key performance indicators. At end of the month, calculate their total sales volume, their average ticket amount and their gross margin, then compute the overall averages for each variable across the store, and compare each associate’s performance to the average.
Post the results, or print them in a spreadsheet to hand out, for example:
| Associate |
Total Sales Volume
|
Number of Transactions
|
Gross Margin %
|
| Jeannie |
$16,550.00
|
25
|
31.1%
|
| Ted |
$20,196.00
|
26
|
30.2%
|
| Aaron |
$24,952.00
|
30
|
29.3%
|
| Chris |
$19,252.00
|
32
|
32.1%
|
| Pat |
$22,532.00
|
31
|
34.9%
|
| Michelle |
$21,036.00
|
25
|
26.0%
|
| Ryan |
$26,382.00
|
19
|
31.0%
|
| Average |
$21,557.14
|
26.9
|
30.7%
|
Table 1
Congratulate those who beat the norm, then meet individually with each associate to discuss his or her individual performance. “You’re doing a good job over all, and I noticed that last month, you were above average on (parameters) while your (parameter) was just a little bit below the average. Why do you think that was? How could we work together to help get you up to the average (on this parameter)?”
This is a highly motivating combination. Nobody wants to perform “below average,” but suggesting that you just expect them to work up to the norm will always be perceived as reasonable and achievable. It should be easy enough. After all, you’re not asking a low performer to shatter any records, just to improve in one specific area enough to make the middle ground.
In the example above, the average sales volume per associate for the month was $21,557.14. So you might take Ted aside and ask him to suggest ways that he might sell an additional $1,300 this month. After all, he only needs $1,300 to get up to the average.
You’d have the same conversation with Jeannie, Chris and Michelle, and suggest ways that they could increase their overall sales. Maybe they just need to put in more hours, or take a Sunday shift or two. Perhaps they need to pay closer attention to customers when they’re in the store, or be more proactive about suggesting companion products or accessories. Perhaps you can coach them on effectively handling more than one customer at a time.
In the same example, the average number of sales per associate was 26.9, but Jeannie, Ted, Michelle and Ryan all fell below that average. You can talk to them about qualifying customers more carefully, or help them improve their closing skills. They only need to close a few more sales next month to move into “above average” territory.
Similarly, while the average gross margin was 30.7%, Ryan, Pat, Chris and Jeannie made above-average profits, while Ted, Aaron, Linda and Ryan were below the bar. Perhaps they’re over-emphasizing sale merchandise. You might coach them on up-selling to full-feature products, or adding high-margin accessories. Or show the best first. After all, they only need to cross-sell or up-sell every now and then to be above the average.
From time to time, you can change the parameters to help associates improve in other areas such as closing ratios, total accessories sold or extended warranty penetration.
Very quickly, you’ll find that the averages start to climb, as each associate gets exactly the coaching they need from month to month to improve their most critical skills.
To learn how we can help you built a top-performing guerrilla sales team, or to order your own copy of Guerrilla Retailing, call us toll-free 800-247-9145.
What Makes a Great Book Title
With 47 titles in the Guerrilla Marketing series, in 60 languages, and more than 20 million books sold worldwide, we’ve learned a few things about how to name books.
Publishers love a series. So do readers. String your titles together around a moniker, “Guerrilla Selling,” “Guerrilla Negotiating”, “Guerrilla Retailing.”
Try to shorten your title to two words. Two Words. “Emotional Intelligence.” Three if you count the article (“Made to Stick,” “Good to Great”).
Keep the sub-title 7 words or less, and make it stand on it’s own as an elevator pitch.
Training Doesn’t Cost – It Pays
We have this argument with our clients all the time:
“Oh, we can’t afford to spend money on training.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, what if we train them and they leave?”
“What if you DON’T train them and they STAY?”
Savvy Guerrillas know that marketing is an investment, not an expense. Skills training, and particularly sales training, is one of the most conservative guerrilla marketing investments you can make.
At a “Guerrilla Selling” seminar I was conducting recently, we were discussing creative ways to get through to reluctant prospects, especially C-level executives. One of the participants got up and walked out. He returned a few minutes later to announce, “I didn’t think it would work, so I stepped out in the hall to prove you wrong. Not only did I get through; I got the order!”
Later I learned that the profit from that single transaction was more than enough to cover my fee for the day. We can only guess that the return on investment for this client was hundreds of times their investment in guerilla training.
Is it ethical to give a cash/gift or commission for referrals?
Fellow guerrilla Vince Golder posted a question on the Guerrilla Marketing Tips for Small Business forum on LinkedIn, asking:
“I’ve had a couple of debates over the years with people who were quite firm in their belief that any form of cash/gift commission given in return for a successful referral was a bribe!! I would rather pay one of my own clients or contacts a just reward for promoting my business, than an expensive agency or media company.” What do you think?
Let me start by saying that cash, gifts and commissions are three very different things. Each may be appropriate or not, depending on the circumstances. Guerrillas ALWAYS look for appropriate ways to REWARD customers for their business.
As I’ve said before in this forum, the best way to get referrals is to ASK for them. (See my recent blog on the topic, March 4, 2009, below) And only reward referrals if you want to KEEP getting them.
No, it is not a bribe. And no, it is not enough to simply express your appreciation.
A nice Thank You card is a good start, but don’t be tempted to send it by e-mail. Personally, I use Hallmark, because I care enough to ____________________ .
Cash is awkward, so enclose a gift card instead. Coffee at Starbucks, free fries at McDonald’s. Better still, relate to their interests: something from Amazon or Borders for bookworms, or office supplies from Staples to reward the whole office.
If the referral is unsolicited, keep the amount something under $100. For bigger referrals, consider bigger rewards: a bottle (or case) of nice wine, a magazine subscription, dinner for two somewhere special, or the fruit-of-the-month club from Harry & David. You can always take them out, for coffee, for lunch, for a round of golf. We’ve given clients pairs of plane tickets. We once took a dozen people from United Airlines to a Rockies game.
There are two guerrilla gifts you can give to people who can’t accept gifts: flowers and food. For women, send a simple bouquet with a business card, delivered to their office by FTD. A variation is to send a large bouquet (something everyone can enjoy) to the Reception desk, with a “Thanks Everyone” note. And if you send flowers on a holiday, like Easter or Halloween, all the better. If you customer is a man, send roses. Red ones. You send me a dozen red roses with a “Thank You” note, and my wife is going to love me, and I’m going to REMEMBER you.
Food works if you send enough to share. Send Domino’s, KFC, or a monster Subway at lunchtime. Or a big birthday cake decorated with your logo and a big “Thank You” in icing across the top.
A professional speaker routinely pays bureaus 25% commission, but the agent who recommended you sees only a fraction of those funds. So I send the rep a very large box of Godiva chocolates. (Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said, “I never met a chocolate I didn’t like.”)
In another example, Wendy Kruger, with Speakers Platform in San Francisco, booked me for a string of several seminars. I knew that she was a fan of Cirque du Soleil, and a bit of browsing revealed that there was an engagement running in San Jose. So I used the Internet to book a pair of VIP back-stage tickets in her name at Will-Call. She took her boyfriend out for a surprise date, and nobody’s the wiser. (That is just SO California!)
If you’re closing a big contract with a new customer, buy a nice pen. A RILLY nice pen; a Cross or Mt. Blanc. After you’ve signed the paperwork, “accidentally” leave the pen behind. They’ll quietly put in their desk and remember your generosity every time they use it.
If you’re concerned about ethics, give them an award, a brass plaque or silver trophy engraved with your appreciations. It will be given a place of honor on their desk or bookshelf.
Here’s guerrilla work-around; send an age-appropriate toy for their kid. Who would begrudge a child a new toy?
Another loophole: if the item has your logo on it, it’s a tchotchke, not a gift. It’s not a bribe; it’s ADVERTISING. So you can send them a coffee mug or a golf towel or a $200 down parka, or any useful item for that matter, imprinted with your advertising, and they will wear it with pride. And they’ll tell all their friends.
Still not sure what to do? I once received a birthday card that read, “People who say you’re hard to shop for obviously don’t know where to buy beer.”
Exclusive Whitepaper
How to Select the Right Speaker for Your Next Sales Meeting, Conference or Convention
