Be Loud – Mastering The Sell 6

Be Loud – Mastering The Sell 6

How-To-Be-The-Most-Sought-After-MSP-In-Your-Area-Large

This is part 6 covering one step to Mastering The Sell, an ongoing series that explores how to transform the process of selling to achieve champion level results. Make sure to go back to the original article titled the Sale Vs The Sell. Each of the articles in the series can be found there.

How To Be The Most Sought After MSP In Your Area

Be loud! Teach, help, communicate. Provide massive value to your community with no strings and watch your bottom line explode.

With every business I have sold for, where I always start is with CHE: Communicate, Help, Educate. This becomes my guiding brand building, marketing, sales strategy.

Whatever vertical I operated in, I started by asking these questions:

Communication

How I can effectively communicate directly to my customers? Where are they? How can I get access to them so I can instantly communicate to them at will?

Help

What do they need help with? What do their partners and other stakeholders need help with? What can I do to help them solve major problems or concerns?

Not by buying from me. But by alleviating a problem they have. And doing it for the selfless good of doing it… not for my own immediate financial reward.

Educate

Though the proper communication channels I would create educational opportunities that alleviate their problems that I had discovered. I did this by asking questions and listening to them.

Case study

Here’s how I did it for my martial arts school I owned over 20 years ago now. This was before anyone was on social media and even using Google or watching videos on YouTube.

Once YouTube, search and social media proliferated, this job became immensely easier and many times more powerful. And today, not just businesses should be doing this on social media. If you’re selling anything, you absolutely must do this to brand yourself. This is almost as automatic today as getting a business card.

Who I would be communicating with

Our members were children for the most part. Kids between the ages of 6 and 8 represented our ideal new members.

The most ideal way to communicate with them was in their classrooms. They were there all day just waiting for us to come in. To get into a classroom was like hitting the jackpot for us. This became the goal.

Identifying how we can help

Identifying how we can help means not just thinking of their problems. But of all the stakeholder’s problems. This meant considering what the kids want, what the parents want and what the schools want.

At first, we thought the biggest problem we could solve for schools was anti bullying. But through conversations and research, we discovered it really was building focus in the kids.

The parents and teachers just wanted kids to pay better attention. If they improved their focus, they’d get better grades, get into a great college, get better jobs, make more money and be happier in life. This is what we learned when we listened carefully.

For the kids, they were easy… they just want to laugh and have fun. And we were really good at teaching fun lessons while installing great life skills like focus.

It’s not going to be easy

It took a bit of work to build relationships with the schools. There’s a lot of hurdles to jump there.

The last thing the public schools and parents want is some for profit business coming in and selling to their students. And our local school had been burned before. So, they were almost impossible to get an appointment with.

We did a lot of grassroots work to win them over. It took a year. But eventually, they trusted me so much I could walk into any classroom, anytime.

Here’s how we did it

At first, I couldn’t get an appointment with any school officials. The principal and vice principal didn’t want us anywhere near their school thanks to some underhanded stuff another local competitor did.

We started a grassroots outreach program to win them over. To start, we hosted a teacher appreciation day at our facility. Every student was sent home with a personal invitation to give to their teacher to come as a guest of honor.

On the day, we did a presentation where their student awarded them a special certificate or appreciation. We also gave them a gift bag with a couple hundred dollars of donations we arranged from local businesses. They got gift cards to restaurants, massages, movie tickets, etc.

We then ran a special educational class to show them how we didn’t just teach kicking and punching. We showed them how we teach focus which helps kids pay more attention in their class and get better grades.

At the end, we set appointments with teachers to talk with them about how we could improve how we teach their students. We wanted their professional opinions on how we can help them to help shape these young minds. This was our foot in the door appointment.

At that appointment, if timing was right, I’d close the teachers on us coming into their classroom to do our educational presentation. At first, I only set a handful of presentations with renegade teachers who were not interested in having to ask the principal permission. But it was enough to get the ball rolling. Word spread fast of our good and selfless work.

Eventually, I won over the principal and even the superintendent. After a year, I was running assemblies for the entire school.

Here’s what happened

We would go from class to class teaching fun activity-based lessons the kids loved. And the teachers and parents loved them as well because we were solving a major problem for them.

We also did it without selling anything. They knew who we were and where we were. And parents were told we’d be coming in to do a lesson for the kids one day.

This created such amazing trust and goodwill with our community, we were rewarded with an endless and steady flow of business. But we did this without an agenda. We did it with commitment to our community, persistence and patients. It was free and helped solve problems through education.

The internet makes this profoundly easier

As the internet grew in popularity, we took these to video as well. We wrote blogs. We held webinars. We were loud and proud with our CHE strategy.

And in our community, we were everywhere. We were the leader. Everyone knew our names. And we were rewarded with all the business we could ask for.

I’ve repeated this strategy every time I have sold anything. I am doing it now right here on this blog. I do it every day, every chance I can get. And you can too.

Bottom line

This example was back in the early days of this venture where we had no money. We had no choice but to do high time and low to no money investment type work.

When I’ve had dollars to spend, I’ve also paid my way into sponsoring these kinds of opportunities. But the overall philosophy is always the same:

Communicate, help and educate. Be loud!