The Four-Box System of Selling

Imagine for a moment you got to speak to one of the world's top salespeople and understand how it all works. And they said, everything I know is inside of these 4 boxes. And if you were to take care of these 4 boxes appropriately, you don't have to worry about trying to hire the right salesperson. You don't have to worry about trying to get the right salesperson. Truly, you could be or create the right salesperson using box number 1, number 2, number 3, and number 4. How much would you pay for those 4 boxes. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. So excited to be able to have you here. This episode, we get to listen to Dan Kennedy, and Dan Kennedy himself is going to be talking about the 4 Boxes approach to improve your success inside of selling. And these are not like, go and find a salesperson. This is literally like how to cultivate the best sales opportunity as your business exists today, leading with one of the least talked about and one of the most important pieces of the entire sales process. So So let's go ahead and jump in as he talks about what is this least talked about and most important question that no one ever really talks about. And we'll get into each box one step at a time from the master of sales himself, Mr. Dan Kennedy.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this month's Diamond Call. As you undoubtedly know, I have no guests this month. My intent is to respond to some questions that were sent in and make some comments about the 4-Boxes Approach to Improve Success in Selling, which was depicted and discussed in your March Diamond Letter, and go through some of those comments and again some responses to some questions that were sent in in advance. And we'll start in box number 1 with prospect appropriateness. Now it's interesting that of the questions that came in ahead of time, I got the fewest questions about this.. And it is generally the thing that people want to spend time talking about the least. When I sit with clients, they're much more interested in talking about message and media than they are talking about market. Yet, I think it's probably, in this case, more important than the other 3 boxes. And it— what's important is that it warrants money being spent disproportionately to get the most appropriate prospects for you into your sales situation. And there's reluctance to spend money disproportionately. I had a conversation earlier today with a client and adjusting their normal methodology that ultimately leads to prospects in front of people for sales presentations, they're finding that the raw numbers, X number of people in a room generate Y number of appointments, get quote, quote, worse, and the cost per appointment goes up. Actually, I had a variation of this conversation with 3 different people so far today. Goes up.. And that doesn't feel good, but the real math is what matters, particularly if it's you doing the selling or you have a limited number of capable humans to do the selling. Then the greatest bargain of the century may well be buying more of the appointments with more appropriate prospects. I did get a host of questions about this from Mike Brunel who is in New Zealand, and I'll get to those in just a second. I just want to beat the drum a little for why this is so important. And so we know, I'll give you a couple of examples, all other things being equal, in the hearing aid business where I did a lot of work for several years. For a client, you have a difference of a man age 60-plus versus a man age 60-plus 3 to 4 months after the death of his wife. And it is an all-important difference in how that person responds. In the business of long cruises, 10 to 15-day cruises, you've got a married couple 60-plus affluent versus a married couple 60-plus affluent and both retired. I think the reason why the second group is a more appropriate prospect is sort of obvious. On the life insurance business, married 25 to 45 versus married 25 to 45 with young children. And look, of course we can drill down further and often as far as we can. There are things called list overlays if you're doing direct mail, so— real estate investing for dentists, for example, if that's the proposition, we know we want dentists 40 years plus. We may want dentists in certain geographic areas and not dentists in other geographic areas, but the overlay is opportunity seeker lists over top of the dentist lists or Entrepreneur Magazine subscribers over top of the dentist lists. And again, the reason why that produces a more appropriate prospect should be obvious. Thee Convery, who's a financial advisor, money manager, et cetera, she in advance of the call asked about attracting appropriate prospects by storytelling to affinity versus stories about them. Mentioning sort of the sales basic of the radio station WII FM standing for what's in it for me. Well, one of these approaches doesn't really neuter the other. They should work in concert because— and here's the thing a lot of people miss— the most important WII FM issue is an appropriate relationship. The person that Charlie Brown is going to have as his financial advisor, as his doctor, as his home remodeler, etc., is at least as important, if not in most cases more important, than the product, the service, the features, the benefits, and the prices.. And everybody tends to default to talking about those things rather than talking about the appropriate relationship and having that back all the way into working real hard at and investing to be in front of the most appropriate prospects. Mike Brunell set this long list. I'll hit most of them. Selling to the right person. Is my client who I want to buy my product appropriate? So his list, number 1, are they the right fit? Can you explain that? What questions do I use to figure that out? What tools do I use to figure that out? Are there 7 to 9 common questions that I need to ask to find out who my ideal customer is? Could I ask a prospect those questions. Price appropriateness, explain that in deal. What other tools could I use based on Dan Kennedy ideas to build a prospect appropriateness tools? So what I would say about that is, is that first of all, you can have, and in most cases should have, a prospect appropriateness tool— not called that in front of the prospect— or perhaps more than one. Some threshold or series of thresholds that prospects have to get over before they get your time or some other expensive human time, uh, before they get to an actual selling event. These things and this info— so yeah, there are 7 to 9, it might be 6, it might be 11, it might be 4, but yeah, there are questions. They are not common, but there are questions that each seller's prospects should answer before they get into a selling environment. Now, that can be as simple as a financial requirement. There's a very big self-financing used car company here in my area, and so all of their commercials feature of the statement that we guarantee you we will finance you even with a credit score as low as 600. Now what they are really saying is if you somehow manage to have a credit score worse than 600, which is something of an achievement by the way, but if you somehow manage to have a credit score of 600, We don't guarantee we can finance you. In fact, we probably can't. And it would really be better if you didn't darken our door at all. This is no different than the wealth advisor who says this information is exclusively for, only for, or best for somebody with $750,000 of investable assets. So it can be that simple. It can be more complicated. It can be psychographic rather than demographic. But yeah, there is a handful, give or take, of questions, threshold questions that somebody should be able to answer yes to en route to your selling environment. All of this should be reverse engineered from your existing clients, probably your existing best clients, your avatar clients.. And the process, I mean, you sometimes just can outright ask. There's a survey. There's an information request form. There's a scheduling form. There's a pre-call with a non-salesperson who just triages them. You sometimes do it with language. So language that specifically attracts and specifically repels. That qualifies, and you can best achieve it usually through targeted referrals because, as the cliché says, birds of a feather do often tend to flock together. And as a quick commercial note, if you haven't gotten your hands on the newest book in the No BS series that Shawn Block and I did, the Maximum Referrals book, it has application to this. Our second box then is the attitude of the salesperson. And I think what's important here is we want salespeople to earn their keep. And salespeople will always lean on us for doing their heavy lifting for them. So that all they have to be is order takers, and we don't want them to be that. On the other hand, um, we want to do as much as we can in front of them and around them and with them to make them as productive as possible, if in fact we have them. And so I think there's There's 3 things about that that really matter. So one is that expectations do define possibilities. So the salesperson or salespeople's attitude, belief system about whether they are being asked to sell something that can't be sold to most of the prospects or that is obscenely overpriced for those prospects, for which there will be an enormous amount of price resistance, or they're being asked to use a process that doesn't work, or they're being fed poor quality prospects, whatever their set of beliefs and expectations are about the people they are appearing in front of, will have a great deal of impact on the behavior of the people who do actually appear in front of them. And so if you have salespeople and you are not controlling, at least influencing those expectations, then you actually are not influencing the results. The second thing I would say is that confidence matters and competence supports confidence. So it seems horribly obvious, but salespeople who aren't very competent, who aren't really knowledgeable, trained, and skilled in the psychology and the mechanics of selling are not gonna be very confident about what they do and are not gonna get great results. And so if you are gonna have humans, and gee, today I've had this conversation, variables of it, with several people. If you are gonna have humans, and especially if you're gonna have humans in critical positions, like converting all the leads you pay a lot of money to create into customers, clients, or patients, then you have to be prepared to invest time and money in not only training up those people but in keeping them running, uh, at peak condition. Um, they need oil changes and tune-ups and tires reinflated and washing and waxing and care. They can't just be left to their own devices. And if you wait until their performance indicates that there's a problem, in many cases you've waited too long to pay attention to them. And the third thing I would say is that The attitude of the salesperson. And so for decades, there's been this whole industry of basically blowing breath and resuscitating depressed salespeople. And so there's a big part of the seminar industry that is this. In the years that I was on the Success Events, a lot of sales managers bought 6 tickets and brought their 6 salespeople to the event, really with the purpose of just having somebody else pinch their nose, blow breath into their mouth, reinflate them, and send them back out for a few days full of air. Motivational tapes, CDs, all of this is often sort of misused in an effort to get people to think positive and be motivated. And where really the best results, the best salesperson attitude you're going to create is with a salesperson who has real reasons to think positive and be motivated.. And that directly loops to the appropriateness of the prospect you put in front of him. Salespeople who realize, who understand what's being invested and who realize that they are being put into situations where they have a high probability of winning will have a pretty good attitude about selling. Salespeople who decide that they are not being put in that position will wind up with a pretty bad attitude about selling. In the Diamond Letter, I give you the 6 questions about salespeople in your situation that bear consideration. Our third box is the selling environment. And this is about the conditions in which selling occurs. And I'll get to it, but I got questions about, well, what happens if we don't have a physical environment? And I'll get there. Environment is environment, but another way to think about environment is as the conditions in which selling occurs. So in a physical environment, Some of that is obvious. Some of it's not so obvious. But if you've ever sold in the home to mom and dad in the evening, you learned, if you have a brain, to bring cartoon videos, a game, something to keep the kids in the living room and engaged with while you met with the parents at the kitchen table. That was a way to control the conditions under which you were selling. So this is about deciding what you need or what your salespeople need to sell effectively. There's some common ingredients. Generally, you need attention. You need an absence of distraction. You need a certain mood on the part of the prospect. And then there's specifics from business to business to business. But you ought to know what the ideal conditions are for making your sale and then be very, very reluctant to make it in other conditions. I learned very early in my business that being on foreign soil, um, was not conducive to me making my project work sale, my consulting and copywriting sale. So me getting on an airplane and going to the client's corporate offices on Long Island in New York, or worse, meeting with the client at an airport or at a hotel was really not— did not give me the conditions I needed to be both effective and efficient, did not give me the fee elasticity I wanted, et cetera, et cetera. And so I determined that I would make, I would create a situation whereby all prospective and new clients came to me onto my soil and into my environment. And so we have this, you know, this conversation all the time, not just about physical, but about non-physical. So if you need 25 minutes to make a decent sales presentation online and you surrender to the idea that it can only be 3.3 minutes. Um, you've accepted selling in conditions that are not conducive to you making your sale. By the way, I just saw last night that, uh, 800,000 people have gone and viewed a video on YouTube of people making watermelons explode by putting rubber bands around them, one after another after another after another. The 800,000 number is interesting. The thing that 800,000 people are fascinated with viewing is sort of depressing, but the instructive point is that the video is 28 minutes long, and the overwhelming majority of the 800,000 have watched it from beginning to end. So anytime somebody tells you that you can't get people to sit still and watch anything longer than 3.3 minutes on their mobile device, they're full of crap. Because 800,000 people have been willing to watch 28 minutes of watermelons having rubber bands put around them. So this idea of surrender rather than exercising control is really extremely important. And something important about it is that the customer is not always right. The prospect certainly is not always right. What they would like, what they would tell you they would like, what they expect as normal and customary, if that is not the conditions in which you can sell most effectively and most efficiently, then you have to figure out a way not to surrender. Connor Heaney, who sent some stuff in before the call, most of you will know who he is if you haven't met him. It's Jones and Company, the styling opticians from the UK. He's in the affluent book. I'm just going to read you a quick one of his comments. Why I like environment so much. I found by removing frames from display, in his optical store. It forced a more productive conversation with browsers. Browsers could no longer say, I'm just looking, because there was nothing to just be looking at. That one thing forced me to figure out what really works in box number 4, like scripts, questions, choreography. And as the owner, I realized I couldn't control every word that comes out of my team's mouths, but I can control the environment. What is on display or not on display, whether the selling is done standing up or sitting down, in this room or not, with props or not. And I'll come back to Connor when we get to box number 4. So T. Tanvri asks, how can we have the office emote authority, credibility, and expertise? And I'd add affinity. Sometimes you want it mitigating sticker shock, et cetera. And so the answer to that is the design of every detail has to be based on what you want it to do and what the time the person is going to spend in it should accomplish. So for many years, for example, I railed against chiropractors in their reception room having CNN on the television and magazines on the table, because to what purpose? I don't see any benefit to the chiropractor for their patient to be up to date on the news of the day, nor up to date by reading People on, uh, what's going on with the Kardashians. So since there's no profitable purpose for either one of those things being in the reception room, guess what? They shouldn't be there. And other things that serve our purpose should be taking their place and commanding the time of the people who are in that reception room. So we have to think through how the environment works for us or doesn't work for us. I'm currently working with Dr. Burleson creating new pre-consultation video to be viewed by every patient that comes in every orthodontic office, all of his coaching members' orthodontic offices, before, they get into a live selling situation with the doctor and also giving them some conveyed authority through the entity of the video, Excellence in Orthodontics. So when people come for the first time to the orthodontic office, they probably don't expect to be led into a room and made to watch a video. They might not even like being led into a room but being made to watch a video, but by God, they're going to be led into a room and made to watch a video because that's what's going to create the best overall selling environment. So from Dominic— I imagine you say Cassoni. Dominic, if I've butchered the last name, I apologize. Um, he, he raises the elephant in the room question. I understand the importance of the selling environment, as in your example of having a dedicated closing room in a chiropractor's office, but my business is different. He didn't actually say that, I inserted it. How do you create a selling environment when you sell remotely and never meet with your client in person? We communicate via email, phone, and Skype? Well, again, I think there's a whole host of questions that beg consideration that are about the conditions under which you and/or your salespeople sell. Uh, just quickly, uh, should calls be inbound or should they be outbound? Should they be random, meaning prospect reads whatever he reads, uh, gets whatever email he gets, uh, and calls in and can talk to somebody and proceed into a selling situation? Or should that occur only by appointment? Should the length of the call be disclosed and planned for or not? So I have a client where we very recently changed this. The average length of the diagnostic-to-sales phone call requires an hour and 15 minutes. They were not telling them that and basically fighting to hold them. We are now telling them, book your telephone appointment when you know you can give it 1 hour and 15 minutes of undivided attention, and here's what's going to happen on the call? Should there be preparation required? Should they be outright told to be at home or in their office, not in the car? Again, we do the same thing with the client I just mentioned because they're going to look at things on their computer. So should they see and talk simultaneously or just talk? So I think you go through questions like these. If they see you, in what setting? How are you dressed? Is there a set? What about hard goods sent before the call, after the call? And how do they buy? You know, we sell physically. There's something to sign, and every salesperson is taught in Sales 101 about handing the pen across the table. This is not happening remotely. So how the sale happens is really pretty important. Kind of as an aside, a lot of people don't pay any attention to it, particularly guys. The viewership is 85% women. So if you haven't or haven't in a while and you sell at a distance, particularly if you sell by webcast or a salesperson on a phone,, and both people are dealing with a PowerPoint presentation or a website of some kind, I suggest you block out a couple of hours and watch QVC. They are selling more stuff remotely than anybody on the planet. They're really running a Tupperware party at a distance with replacements for everything that normally occurs in the actual living room. And that's really what we have to address if we're going to sell remotely is what are the replacements that need to occur if we were selling in a physical environment. Last, number 4, the skills of the salesperson. So I made the point in the letter visually. I mean, most grossly over-rely on number 4 and are therefore constantly frustrated with their failure to find and hire and keep quote, quote, good salespeople. And the cure for this frustration is candidly not available in finding and hiring and even in training quote, quote, good salespeople. Doing that well helps, but it has profound limits and flaws. And so the less you rely on this, for acceptable results, the better. It brings 4 major problems. One is management. So the more you're relying on good salespeople, the more you have to do to keep them— to make them and keep them good. And that keeping them good is not an easy proposition. You sacrifice interchangeability. Um, you know, the beauty of owning McDonald's and having a McDonald's franchise is if a kid, uh, falls in the french fry deep fryer and fries himself, um, you don't need to miss a beat because he's entirely interchangeable. If you shoot them, you just got to haul them out the back door and bring in a new kid. The further away from that we get with humans, the worse off we are. And salespeople are pretty far away from that. So you sacrifice interchangeability. You usually sacrifice scalability. The cloning problem from the Michael Keaton movie, as you try and clone yourself, Each successive clone is less and less capable, and soon the last one is drooling and can't feed himself. And last, you sacrifice equity, because the most valuable businesses are systems-driven with interchangeable humans. The least valuable businesses rely on exceptional humans. So for those key reasons, the less you rely on the skills of the salesperson, the better off you are. And so I'll go back to Connor Heaney again. I'll read just briefly. I found that getting my team to follow new scripts was difficult. There's the understatement of the century. But by simultaneously changing the environment, they succeed in spite of themselves. Then they see that it works and are becoming more willing. They take pride in their selling skill and success, whether or not they realize how much the environment and prospect appropriateness is helping them, and even their attitude improves. I just want to give you his success report. On that note, My longest-serving member of my team who has been with me from the start and has endured many bumbling, awkward, frustrating conversations while we figured all this out last week sold a $9,000 pair of glasses without breaking a sweat. Actually, that's pounds, so I don't know what it is in dollars, but I'm going to say dollars. The client who purchased the $9,000 eyewear has also been with us a long time. His first pair of glasses from us 6 years ago. Before I made all these changes to the practice was $300. So we now have a client that used to spend $300 who is spending $9,000. And we have a salesperson, a dispensing optician, who used to struggle with making a $750 sale, now doing $9,000 sales with confidence and ease. I also recently hired 2 new dispensing opticians. One came from Specsavers, the big chain with a Walmart approach, where the average sale is around $150. The other had only ever worked in his parents' store in a small village with lower value products. Both of them within their first week were making sales over 5 times what they were able to achieve in their previous environment. So with relatively low skill levels, and not time invested in making the salespeople better by training their brains out, but by making the environment and the appropriateness of the prospect better, he automatically makes his salespeople better as well.

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