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Building Unshakable Walls of Belief to Sell Your Business!IntroductionThis article is part of a series of articles designed to help businesses learn how to Build Unshakable Walls of Belief in themselves, their products, and their organizations. These Unshakable Walls are built upon recorded interviews with the organization's Raving Fans - the people who love what the organization does. Everyone knows that what your customers say about you is far more important than anything you can say about you. People have used endorsement letters and written case histories for centuries for this purpose. They have also relied on word-of-mouth "advertising" from their best customers - maybe even putting their prospects together with their best customers to help them close a sale. New technology now allows us to use low-cost tools to capture, produce, and share multimedia Raving Fan interviews in a powerful and cost-effective manner. In other words, you can give a face and voice to your Raving Fan endorsements. Bill Metcalf, the Nation's TechnoMotivator™, has refined this process to a fine art. In this series of articles, he shares how you can harness the power of your Raving Fans. Each article will cover 4 main points:
Additional information and many free resources can be found at Bill Metcalf's site www.TechnoShift.com. Company Profile: The Christman GroupPeter G. Christman, a 26 year veteran of the merger and acquisition field, is the CEO of The Christman Group. Throughout the years that The Christman Group helped privately held businesses sell their companies, Peter noticed that there was a right time and a wrong time to sell a company. Sometimes that timing was simply based on the economy. Sometimes it was a matter of estate and financial planning issues. In many cases, it was simply that the business was not really in the best shape to generate the best profit for the seller, or the best value for the buyer. The Christman Group created a new program never seen before in the M&A field - The Succession Planning Coach Program. This program is designed to help owners of businesses to prepare themselves, their family, their key employees, and their company to create the most successful sale possible - a sale in which everyone - including the buyer - came out winners. But how do you take this story to market? This is a program that has been needed for decades. The M&A field is rife with advisors whose major interest is in flipping the business - selling the business fast for the best buck they can so they can earn a commission. The Christman Group often closed new business the old fashioned way. When a prospect was close to making the decision to hire The Christman Group, Peter would have them call one of their many former clients. But Peter knew three things. First, The Christman Group could not continue to impose on these folks. Second, former The Christman Group's former clients were difficult to reach given that they had recently sold their businesses and we often enjoying a very active retirement. And third, if The Christman Group was to expand nationally, it needed a way to capture and share stories much more efficiently than through phone calls. We proceeded to capture the stories of 14 of The Christman Group's Raving Fans through telephone interviews which were recorded, edited, and produced using relatively low-cost readily available technology. (Visit www.TechnoShift.com for a description of technology used.) From these interviews, we learned a great deal about The Christman Group while also creating some wonderful marketing endorsements. Tips for Capturing Raving Fan Stories: Be Careful What You Ask For!Write this down! Commit it to memory! If I have learned one thing
in capturing all these Raving Fan endorsements it is this: When you approach a Raving Fan, do you say something like, "Hey Ralphie ole buddy. You always tell me how much you love our service, do you suppose you could help us out with a little marketing endorsement we could use to help us sell?" Of course, you most likely make your request in a much more effective manner but the underlying approach is the same - YOU are asking THEM to help you SELL. Why would they be motivated to do that? Sure they love you. But what's in this for them? I will tell you a much stronger way to ask. And when you ask for help in this way, you will get better interviews as well. Instead of appealing for "charity" (i.e. help me sell my stuff), you appeal to their ego and their desire to help others. Here is how I set up the interviews I did for The Christman Group. |
"Hey Joe I'm a colleague of Peter Christman's and he said that you just loved working with him." That usually elicited a very positive response. Then I would say, "Listen Peter tells me that you are a very sharp businessman and that you really learned a lot when you sold your business. I am wondering if you would be willing to help other business owners like yourself begin to understand the things they need to do to effectively sell their business." In EVERY CASE they said, "Yes, absolutely! I have a lot of advice to give!" Then as we went through the interviews, they did not just become "atta boy" hype about The Christman Group. Instead we focused upon the process of selling a business - what they learned and How The Christman Group helped them. In this manner, we got really specific stories that helped to illustrate the value Peter and his team provided. The Christman Group comes off as the consummate professionals they are who everybody would want to do business with - and deservedly so! This group walks their talk! But even more importantly, we created interviews that have very strong information value. If someone is thinking about selling their business and they listen to an interview, they will learn about things they must consider in this process. If you don't position your Raving Fan interviews in this manner, all you will end up with is unsubstantiated hype. People won't listen long to that. If you click on this link, www.technoshift.com/wob-real-fans.htm it will take you to a page of Real World Raving Fan stories. Look for the Christman Group's story and click on it. Actually you should click on BOTH interviews I included on that page. You see, we also learned another very important lesson about Raving Fan stories during this project with Pete. Don't hide from your failures or mistakes. Everyone expects marketing pieces to be full of praise. But we often learn more about the character of a man from his failures. The Christman Group's job is to help sell a company. If they don't, they don't make the big bucks! And they invest a great deal of time and effort in these sales. But in one case, The Christman Group advised one of its clients not to sell! This is heresy among many M&A pros. But Peter knew that this was not the right deal at the right time for this owner. No sale. No commission. You just have to click on the second interview on the site called "Learning from Failures - The Christman Group." www.technoshift.com/wob-real-fans.htm. What We Learned From The Christman Group's Raving Fans: The keys to selling yourself.Whenever we create a Walls of Belief program several things happen. First, we become our client's biggest Raving Fans. After all, we have had an opportunity to interview a large number of their clients one-on-one with no limitations on our questions. I have learned that the best interviews come when I push the envelope. I will say things like, "Hey this company charges more than anyone else for this service. Why would you pay so much?" Of course, I am pretty sure when I ask that question that I know the answer, but the Fan is often taken aback a bit. The result is that they become even stronger advocates for my client as they attack my "position." The second thing that happens is that our clients learn a great deal about themselves. Often the very thing we do the best - the very thing that customers love about us - is the very thing we take for granted when it comes to marketing. If you want to learn what Peter Christman learned from doing the Raving Fan interviews, just click on this link: www.technoshift.com/wob-metcalf_fans.htm It will take you to a page full of interviews that I had someone else conduct with my own clients. These then are MY Raving Fans.
Finally, your Fans, themselves, tell you what THEY think are the things that are most important to them about your business. This helps you continuously improve what you do and how you sell your products or services. Bill Metcalf Biography Bill Metcalf has been speaking professionally about technology for over 12 years. In the past couple of years he has discovered how to harness the power of new multimedia technology to capture the stories of the Raving Fans - the people who love what his clients do for them. He has turned these Raving Fan stories into a marketing program that helps people Build Unshakable Walls of Belief in themselves, their products & services, and their organizations. You can reach Bill at bill@technoshift.com, (708) 386-0536, or visit his web page at www.TechnoShift.com. |