Archive for the 'Better Sales' Category
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Suggestive selling is a powerful tool that can increase your revenuesand your bottom linesignificantly. We are all used to the order taker at a fast food place asking if we want fries with our burgers, or if we would like to “Jumbo-Size” our orders, but suggestive selling can work in any business.
Shoe stores suggest socks or polish to go with your new sneakers, hair salons recommend styling products, and stores selling electronics offer an extended warranty on the gadget you just bought. In each case, the business encourages the customer to add on to the purchase they are making.
Upselling can be done in person, on the phone or over the Internet. Many online shopping carts allow you to set up a product-specific upselling page. That means that when someone orders Product A, they get the suggestion that goes with that product. Someone who orders another product receives a recommendation appropriate to that product.
Here are some tips to make suggestive selling work for you:
Make the suggestion after the customer has made a commitment to buy. Don’t try to add on to the sale before the customer has made a firm decision and is in the process of buying.
Upsells should be related to the original purchase. An upgrade, a warranty, accessories, or something else that adds on to what the customer is buying can be effective. The customer is more likely to see such a suggestion as helpful than as simply a sales ploy.
Consider making the upsell a “two-fer” offer. Because the customer bought one item at regular price, they are able to get a second at half price.
The add-on product should have a lesser cost than the base purchase. Suggesting batteries to go with a radio works. Recommending a radio to go with a battery purchase doesn’t.
Don’t hit customers with a lot of upsells. One (or possibly two) is enough. Badgering them to buy more can backfire and maybe even kill the sale completely.
Make sure employees and order takers are making upsell offers to customers. Remind them of the importance of doing so, and consider rewarding them for great results, or even when you “catch” them upselling. Give telephone order takers a script that includes a suggestive sales offer.
Done properly, an upsell is helpful to the customer and builds your profits as well.
Copyright Cathy Stucker. As the Idea Lady, Cathy Stucker can help you attract customers and make yourself famous with inexpensive and free marketing ideas. Get free marketing tips, articles and more at http://www.IdeaLady.com/.
Cathy is also the author of The Mystery Shopper’s Manual.
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Monday, March 9th, 2009
It’s lonely at the top, and this applies to salespeople, especially.
Selling isn’t a team sport. It is a task that resists collaboration, like writing.
And those of us who sell for a major part of our livings know that our greatest challenge is getting up for the game, making sure we’re motivated, excited about the challenges before us.
If we don’t make ourselves sell, nobody else will pick up the slack, or hand us their “extra” orders, unless we’re still so fresh at it that the manager is nursing us along by feeding us “house” accounts.
But even that doesn’t last forever, and you have to question the wisdom in it.
So, how can you stay up, emotionally, and psyched, especially if you’re hitting a tough patch and the sales are few and far between? Here are some tips that have worked for me:
(1) Treat each setback as good news, as an opportunity. Henry Ford said failure is an opportunity to try again, more intelligently. There is a silver lining, if only the fact that your will is being forged in the molten furnace of disappointment, and you’ll emerge tougher and stronger than before.
(2) When sales are rolling in for you on a schedule celebrate, briefly, and then forget about them, quickly. They’re temporary, so see them as such. Don’t con yourself into thinking that you’re getting so good at selling that you can cut back your commitment to working hard.
(3) When you start seeing some customers as more valuable than others, based on order size, or profit margins, you’re getting too analytical. Leave the numbers crunching to management, or forget about it, altogether. Inevitably, in my experience, when I start thinking that some of my clients aren’t as cool as others, suddenly I have to work especially hard to get any new ones aboard.
(4) Build into your schedule relaxation breaks, but make them short, yet thorough. If you can afford it, get away for the weekend. Look into one of the cheap internet travel packages and fly somewhere, or just pack a bag and take the car somewhere without any idea of where you’re heading. I assure you that you’ll feel you got away, and you’ll be refreshed.
(5) Realize that we’re creatures of habit. We shape habits, and then they shape us. What kinds of habits are you forming right now? When you feel stuck in any rut, that’s the time to change your routine. Eat in new places, drive a different route to work, go to bed or get up two hours earlier. All of these things will help you to see that your behavior patterns are your choice, and you can change them at any time.
These are some things that work for me. They help me to maintain the “ecology” of motivation, so I don’t get too high or too low for my own good!
Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.
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Friday, January 9th, 2009
You’ve probably heard the expression: Keep It Simple, Stupid!
This is known as the “KISS Method” of selling, but it’s really not a method, a systematic way to get something done.
In a way, it’s an anti-method. Methods tend to consist of technicalities, lots of do’s and don’ts, carefully deployed.
KISS warns us against selling like robots, like techies, delivering talk-a-thons about endless features and benefits that engineers might relish, but that make everyday buyers hit the snooze button.
KISS is very wise. You’ve heard kindred expressions, such as “Don’t outsmart yourself,” and “You can be too smart for your own good.”
Becoming too complicated in our selling style is an occupational hazard that afflicts the experienced pro much more than the novice.
When we’re fresh out of training, we tend to stick to the essentials that we’ve been taught, which have been pared down to basics. By being concise and to the point, we start to experience success, but then we add more and more details to our presentations because we have more stories to tell.
And what was streamlined, economical, and quite effective, becomes cumbersome, and mysteriouslyat least to usour sales results slip.
There is a story told about a harmonica salesman who had a phenomenal first day on the job, setting new records. He was so excited that he was bursting and had to discover more about his product, so he asked a veteran what he knew. The vet said, “All I can tell you that you don’t already know is that the harmonica can only play in one key.”
Legend has it that from that date forward, the new guy never came close to breaking the record he set on his first day. This tale cautions us that we can have too much product knowledge, and this can actually diminish our fervor, our enthusiasm. Once we have such irrelevant details, for some odd reason we feel duty-bound to sandwich them into every presentation we make.
The only problem with KISS is that it sounds insulting, especially to contemporary, well-educated salespeople and trainees.
Our schooling reveres detail, tiny distinctions, and cognitive complexity. As one of my professors said, the life of an academic is about “learning more and more, about less and less.”
This earns tenure in a university, but it shortens your tenure as a salesperson.
So, be smart and give yourself a nice, big KISS.
“Dumb down” your sales talk. It may be the brainiest and most lucrative thing you’ll ever do.
Dr. Gary S. Goodman © 2005
Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service. A frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide, Gary’s programs are offered by UCLA Extension and by numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. Gary is headquartered in Glendale, California. He can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com
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Monday, December 29th, 2008
In sales, you can train your customers by building a relationship that will ultimately yield tremendous rewards. If you don’t train them, your customers may forget you’re out there and go instead to your competition, even if they were happy with you and the service you provided. They simply won’t even think of talking to you about their current needs. That’s why you need to develop a level of familiarity and presence that makes you unforgettable, even indispensable.
Generate more sales by using this plan to train your customers to always think of you first.
First, Build a Relationship
Animal trainers spend two to three hours a day building the relationship with the animal they’re training. This time is essential to building trust. Trainers make contact of some sort that the animal especially loves, from playing fetch with a dog to rubbing the belly of an affection-loving monkey. They determine as the relationship grows how best to give each animal the attention he or she needs.
Though it’s probably best if you don’t rub your customers’ bellies every day, you can rather easily make yourself a more valuable resource to all of your customers by determining what will give added value to each. Find a way to build your relationship with each of them, such as regularly passing along information via e-mail, even on a daily basis, that will benefit the customer. Relationship-building activities keep you in the forefront of customers’ minds, and while these activities won’t necessarily be immediately income-producing, they will have a positive impact down the road when the customer thinks of you and the value you added to routine service.
Second, Impress with Consistency
Animals, like children and many adults, need routine to feel secure and trusting. Trainers behave predictably so as not to frighten, confuse, or upset the animal. From a sales standpoint, you need to be consistent with your customers, so they know what to expect from you and how much they can depend on you. For example, you should always return their calls within an hour or two of their leaving a message, not sometimes call back an hour later and sometimes call back three days later.
If you have this professional approach, and you consistently deliver what your customers want without being asked, you’ll be the first one they think of because you have made yourself indispensable. In other words, they’ll use you consistently if you behave consistently and consistently produce good results for them, even if they’re not officially your customer.
Third, Recognize and Meet Individual Needs
Part of building a relationship with an animal involves knowing what its needs are. For example, one primate may love vegetables and despise fruit, while another won’t touch his veggies but can’t get enough bananas and apples. Customers also have needs, and they do business with you because you can meet, anticipate, and predictably fulfill those needs. The human equivalents of those picky primates might be those customers who insist on being able to place their orders on-line, while others want nothing to do with computers and need to be able to pick up the phone, day or night, to order what they want.
To meet your customers’ needs, you must take the time to get to know each individual. Your familiarity with them will help you discern what their particular needs are, thus allowing you to better meet them.
Don’t limit the lengths to which you’re willing to go to accommodate your customers. If it’s not illegal, immoral, or unethical, do it. If anyone in your organization complains that you’re favoring a client for whom you’re going a bit out of your way, explain that you’re not giving preferential treatment so much as you’re meeting one particular customer’s different needs, and that you’re committed to meeting all needs equally.
Fourth, Learn From Your Lions
Lions are solitary and territorial animals. They don’t want to be around each other, so getting two to lie down side by side in a circus act, for example, can be a huge feat. Trainers have to learn which ones are more likely to remain friendly to another tiger by learning their individual preferences.
As you learn your customers’ needs, learn as much as you can about the intricacies of their business, the individuals on their staff, and their roles and relationships within the organization. Especially if you’re selling to different industries, be willing to go into their businesses and learn the idiosyncrasies of the industrial manufacturer, the habits of the healthcare facility, and the quirks of the cleaning supply company. Pick up every detail you possibly can that will help you build that relationship and show you how to better serve those customers. The payoff is that you begin to look like one of them, and they perceive you as being a part of their internal team, which is what you really want, as opposed to being perceived as a salesperson who just comes in to make a sale.
Fifth, Become a Resource
When trainers have developed a relationship with the animals they train, the animals become completely dependent on them for everything; the trainer is the animal’s sole resource for most primary and secondary needs, such as food, shelter, and even companionship.
To train your customers to think of you first, every time, you must seek to become a full-service resource, as hands-on as you can manage to be. At that point, you’ll achieve the coveted top of the mind status that will bring them to you again and again. If you can demonstrate that you are able to meet all of their needs, you’ll be the first person they think of when they have a new need that you can either meet or give them a referral to someone who can.
If you’re in real estate sales, for example, don’t limit your client contact to just selling them property. Extend yourself to meet all of their real estate needs by sending someone from your office to make a presentation to the planning commission, or to track down permits. A simple rule of thumb is to always go above and beyond what your competition is doing to provide services for the customer. Do more and you’ll find you’ll obtain coveted word-of-mouth advertising, the very best kind, as your happy clients send their friends and colleagues directly to you.
Sixth, Build Your Menagerie With Your Competition’s Clients, Too!
If you train your customers to think of you first, they won’t give a thought to your competitors. Now consider how you could use this training strategy to steal business away from your competition. If the competition isn’t giving this personal level of service, if they’re just filling orders and aren’t familiar with their customers and their needs, they are vulnerable. Use your excellent animal training skills to go in there and make the competitors’ business your own. When you do, you may find yourself turning even tough old lions into happy pussycats!
The Fox Realtor is experienced in commercial real estate in Minnesota. Working with developers, investors, and institutions to realize their investment objectives using real estate. He can be contacted at mo@foxreg.com, and more information is available at www.foxreg.com.
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Thursday, November 27th, 2008
Are you wasting your money by brining visitors to a sales offer that just doesn’t convert? Here’s how to pull more sales and put more money in your pocket by using these simple secrets for hard-hitting copy.
1) SELL THE BENEFITS: Forget about trying to explain your product. Instead, give the customer what they want to hear. When selling a computer monitor, you could say, “Big 19 inch screen”.
But that’s explaining your product. Try something that gives the reader its strongest benefit, like “19 inch screen reduces eye strain and provides a comfortable working environment for you”.
2) DEFINE YOUR LETTERS PURPOSE: Are you writing to entertain or sale. Are you looking to pull a response or do you want people to enter their credit card information. Define your specific goal before you get started, and work hard to lead your customers along your chosen path.
3) WRITE IN “EASY” WORDS: Hey, we’re not looking to win awards here. We want to make some money, right? Don’t try to wow readers with your use of vocabulary. Use words that even a child can grasp.
4) KNOW EVERY BENEFIT: Before you even start, right down every single benefit that a customer will receive with your offer. Later, you can use these benefits for some hard-hitting bullets.
5) MAKE IT SHORT: While your letter doesn’t need to be short, every sentence and paragraph should be tightly focused and broken up into small, easy to chew on pieces.
As an example, take a look at this article. Sentences are short and punchy. Some aren’t proper. But they get the point across and make it very easy to read.
6) USE HEADINGS: You need to have one that hooks your reader in the beginning to lead them in. Then, to keep them hooked, you should break up your copy with a few subheadings that set the hook even deeper to keep them reading.
7) UNDERLINE AND BOLD: Use this on words and phrases you want to jump out. But don’t overdo. The principal quickly becomes diluted with overuse and none of it will be read if it’s splattered everywhere.
EDUCATE YOUR CUSTOMER: If you can teach your readers something then they’ll believe you to be an expert. And if you can lead them to that, then chances are they’ll buy. We all want to learn from the experts.
9) GIVE THE READER AN ORDER: Don’t leave choices to the reader. If you do, they might choose to click away from your site. So, use phrases like “Click Here”, “Order Now”, or “Go Here”.
10) USE YOUR P.S.: Your P.S. will get read. Trust me. And the way to make it work for you is to restate your offer in a different light. That way, if your heading grabbed them, the restate and added benefits of your P.S. can tighten your hold and force them to read the rest of your sales letter.
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
Selling high-tech products and services is much more difficult than selling most other products and services: Truth, or just a popular myth?
Selling anything that is not a known commodity can be difficult. However, most of the difficulty is created by salespeople themselves. Here are some of the reasons why high-tech Sales seems so difficult – and how the typical selling process just reinforces that myth.
1. Most salespeople are unable to describe their product or service clearly and briefly enough.
Most people take 20 to 30 seconds to decide whether they want what the salesperson is selling. Prospects get frustrated and annoyed at the salesperson who doesn’t communicate with immediate clarity.
An effective prospecting offer should ideally be about 45 words. It takes many top salespeople about 2 hours to design an effective and concise prospecting offer. Most salespeople don’t even know where to start.
2. Pressing prospects for an appointment before they are ready to buy greatly reduces the probability of ever getting the sale.
Most salespeople believe that they should convince any prospect that has an apparent need for their products and services to buy. However, most prospects are not ready to buy the first time that the salesperson calls. Driven by the mistaken belief that they should be able to convince the prospect, the salesperson presses for an appointment.
The best route to ultimate success is to call each prospect every 3 to 4 weeks until they are ready to specify or buy your type of product or service – limiting each prospecting call to a maximum of 45 seconds.
3. Premature selling efforts leave a lasting negative impression, and dramatically reduce the odds of ever doing business with that prospect.
‘Forced’ appointments and communications result in closed sales less than 14 percent of the time. When feeling pressured, prospects who don’t commit to doing business on the first visit are even less likely to ever buy- then, the probability of ever getting the sale drops to 5 percent.
4. Most high-tech salespeople first approach a prospective customer at the end-user level in the organizations that they sell to.
Most line managers don’t have the authority to buy – they are ‘influencers’ who recommend. They usually don’t have access to the funds, either.
The top 1% of the salespeople we studied usually initiate their sales process at the Vice President level. That requires a specifically tailored approach.
5. High-Tech salespeople are fascinated with the features and benefits of their products and services.
Most prospects only want to know what your products and services can do for them. If they determine that what you have is what they want, they will want to know how your particular product works – the features. Most salespeople honestly – and mistakenly – believe that prospects need to be educated before they can make an intelligent decision.
6. Most high-tech salespeople focus on concrete product specifications and ignore their prospects’ two primary motivators – trust and respect.
In High-Tech sales, a common mistake is to deal with prospects on the basis of specifications, good presentations, logical arguments, convincing documentation, and factual economic justifications. Most prospects – including engineers and senior managers – have different motives. Their first priority is to deal with a salesperson that they fully trust and respect.
Only the top 1% of the salespeople know how to establish that kind of relationship in the first half hour of meeting their prospects – and to continuously reinforce it.
7. Most high-tech salespeople acknowledge that they are weak closers.
Salespeople assume that with enough education and information, prospects will logically determine that their product/service is valuable and worth buying. The top 1% of salespeople close a sale after the prospect has effectively closed himself. Starting with agreements made during the initial prospecting call, they arrive at dozens of mutual commitments throughout the sales process. The sum of those commitments is a closed sale – with absolutely no pressure on either party.
High-tech salespeople who are strong on product knowledge and weak on the 1-to-1 sales process help perpetuate the myth that high-tech Sales is Difficult. The truth is that selling high-tech products and services is easy, when an effective selling process is utilized with each and every individual involved in the buying decision.
High Probability Selling has trained salespeople in 76 different industries, including many types of high-tech products. I have personally managed sales staffs for several hardware and software companies. I have personally closed many millions of dollars in high-tech sales, including semiconductor production equipment, circuit board assembly equipment, electronic display hardware, technical information services, and manufacturing systems software.
©Jacques Werth, High Probability® Selling – All rights reserved.
Jacques Werth, author of “High Probability Selling,” is an internationally respected Sales Trainer and Sales Consultant. HPS graduates are excelling as Top Producers in over 70 industries. Visit http://www.highprobsell.com to read more articles, preview the book, and learn more about High Probability Selling.
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Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
What Works Best For Your Company?
Experience is a wonderful teacher, but only if you pay attention and draw the right lessons from your experience. It pays to document certain portions of your company’s sales processand the most successful practices that you and your fellow salespeople have found for handling common challenges. Salespeople who do this maximize the use of their time, shorten sell cycles, make more sales, and cash bigger paychecks.
To learn from what works, document what works.
What parts of your sales process should you document?
First, identify the milestones in your sales cycle. What are the necessary steps that lead from your initial contact with a prospect to a completed sale? What commitment must you gain from the customer at each milestone that will lead to the next step? For example, does your sales cycle usually require an initial meeting with several decision makers followed by another meeting at which you present a formal proposal? Both of those meetings are milestones.
Write down your 10 strongest sales featuresthe features of your products or services that have the strongest appeal to most customers. Include a benefits statement for each feature. Remember that benefits usually have dollar signs attached.
Next, write down the expected customer needs associated with those 10 features and benefits. Customers will only buy if a benefit represents a solution to a perceived need. So what needs must you look for? Write some open-ended questions that help you draw out needs for which your 10 strongest features offer solutions.
Write the best questions that you can use to determine what your sales strategy must be for a particular client. Your sales strategy is determined by the competition you face, the buyer’s time frame, and the buying influences that will play a role in the sale. What are the best questions with which to draw out information about those factors?
Document a crisp (30-second) and powerful company story that you can tell in all first-call selling situations.
Ask your peers about each of these topics, and compare their approaches with yours. If somebody else has a great question for drawing out needs, for example, by all means write it down and use it. Create reminder lists for yourself, and review them before every sales call. Then you can stop making the same expensive mistakes.
In The Field:
“Our region has jumped to No. 1 in the country,” says Leif Rowles, regional manager for Sears Commercial Division. Rowles moved his region from the middle of the pack to the top in sales while boosting profits by a whopping 111 percent with Action Selling Sales Training. His people learned and practiced “The Process” until it became part of their culture.
“Now we have a common sales language we can use to strategize before and after sales calls. We are a stronger team and better able to coach one another,” Rowles says. Action Selling sales training programs define the most effective practices for conducting the entire sales process. Then it provides a template to document exactly what the best salespeople do to gain business.
When you have a system that clearly shows everyone what the Best Practices are, you can achieve great gains in performance and productivity. Rowles puts it simply: “Action Selling is the reason we are closing more customers.”
Duane Sparks is chairman and founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based sales training company that has trained and certified more than 200,000 salespeople in the system and skills of Action Selling. He has personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions.
In a 30-year career as a salesperson and sales manager, Duane has sold products ranging from office equipment to insurance. He was the top salesperson at every company he ever worked for. He developed Action Selling Sales Training while owner of one of the largest computer marketers in the United States. Even in the roaring computer business of the 1980’s, his company grew six times faster than the industry norm, differentiating itself not by the products offered but by the way it sold them. Duane founded The Sales Board in 1990 to teach the skills of Action Selling to others.
Contact The Sales Board for more sales information or sales training that’s been documented and research-proven to help you sell more! 1-800-232-3485
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Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
In his classic book, “Think and Grow Rich”, Napoleon Hill discussed the eleven secrets of leadership. In reading this work, it appears that the attributes of strong leadership and effective selling have a tremendous amount in common. After all, to be really successful in sales, you need to be a leader, both within your own organization, as well as to your clients and customers.
To paraphrase management guru Peter Drucker, a leader is someone who not only does things right, but who also does the right things, while helping others do the same. The same holds true in sales: how better to serve your clients than to really know and understand what they do, and to truly help them do it better?
With that in mind, here are Mr. Hill’s eleven secrets to leadership, as they apply to leadership in selling:
1. “Unwavering Courage”: Selling successfully requires courage; taking a risk where the odds may seem stacked against you; courage to make that extra call, to deal with the tough client or prospect, and to not let anything deter you. As Hill says, courage is “based upon knowledge of self and one’s occupation.
2. “Self-Control”: The ability to set a course for yourself and take disciplined action each day is a key attribute of all successful salespeople.
3. “A keen sense of justice”: Knowing right from wrong – understanding what is fair and just – allows you to make, wise informed decisions.
4. “Definiteness of decision”: Deciding on what you want to achieve, and then doing whatever it takes to get there, even in the face of obstacles and setbacks, is crucial to your success. For those who don’t quite make it, failure can usually be traced back to a lack of decisiveness about what they really want.
5. “Definiteness of plans”: In Hill’s words, “the successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. Truer words were never spoken when it comes to selling. Plan your time, and then take action on your plan each and every day.
6. “The habit of doing more than paid for”: Want to sell more? Go the extra mile for your clients. Want to get the respect, admiration, and cooperation from your internal “clients” – the people you need to rely on to implement or help you close sales? Go the distance for them as well.
7. “A pleasing personality”: Is selling a popularity contest? No, but would you buy something from someone who was nasty and rude?
8. “Sympathy and understanding:” Selling is about understanding what people DO, and then helping them do it better. Plain and simple.
9. “Mastery of detail”: Ah, yes… The devil, as they say, is in the details. Ever work really hard to close a sale, only to have it fall apart because of some small detail that falls through the cracks? What may seem like a small detail to you can be a crucial one, maybe even a deal-breaker, to your prospect, customer, or client.
10. “Willingness to assume full responsibility”: No matter how much customer support your company provides, you are the prime representative of your organization. If you try to pass the buck to someone else, you lose respect and credibility. “But it really wasn’t my fault that the shipment was delayed in customs and then the delivery truck was attacked a pack of wild dogs…” Doesn’t matter; accept the responsibility for any problem and all details, and then do whatever needs to be done to make things right. Your clients need to know that you are their advocate.
11. “Cooperation”: You can’t do it alone. Sales is a collaborative effort. Your prospects need to collaborate with you; you need the cooperation and assistance of others both inside and outside your organization to make things happen. The best salespeople are those who can work well with others, and with whom other people want to work.
Think about these eleven areas of leadership, and ask yourself how you do on each of these items. Find areas where you can make improvements and chart your course to work on improving what you do each day; incremental improvements each day become exponential over time.
Mark Dembo and Thomas J. Baskind are Managing Partners in DEI/Lexien of Greater New York, a sales performance improvement and management consulting company. They invite you to visit their website, http://www.lexien.com/, and welcome your comments and inquiries.
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Monday, November 3rd, 2008
The Federal Trade Commission has rule that are supposedly in place to protect franchise buyers from fraud from franchisors who might attempt to mislead them into purchasing a franchise. Part of the franchise rules are addressing required disclosure paperwork. In this disclosure document, which is required to be given to franchisees 10 days before any purchase is made are the names, addresses, phone numbers of all franchisees in the system. For smaller home based franchises this means home numbers, addresses and personal information.
I am very concerned about our company, The Car Wash Guys and the possibility that International terrorists might use our mobile car wash trucks as tools to distribute biological weapons. We use trucks and trailer units that have capacities in excess of 600 gallons and low volume, high-pressure sprayers. Our team has washed cars at office buildings, military bases, mass transit districts, rent a car companies, airports, malls, QSRs, grocery stores, shipping and distribution yards, truck stops, parking structures, golf courses, media buildings, etc, etc. We wash things like shopping carts, wheelchairs, school buses, trucks, aircraft, boats, awnings, concrete, decks, playground equipment, etc, etc. In a single day our crews may be at 10-20 locations, in a week each truck/crew maybe as many as 120 locations, throughout a given city. And we have set up franchises in 23 states so far and that means in a lot of cities. What concerns me here is this:
In our UFOC (Uniform Franchise Offering Circular) there is a list of franchisees, with names, addresses, phones numbers, and areas. It contains the perfect information of everything an evil-doer needs, except a map of how to get to the franchisees location. Even of more concern. Many of our franchisees own multiple trucks (units) and many park such units at their homes. They are not guarded they are just parked there. Someone could easily walk up and put something inside of the tank and walk away and our franchisees would then be spraying chemicals of mass destruction all over the city the next day. That would be bad. Not only from a franchisor’s stand point and damage of brand name, but also from a stand point of what damage it could do to America. I am not alone in this problem. Think about TrueGreen ChemLawn, Pest control franchises, etc. We are all at risk, yet nobody is thinking there.
We have set up special precautions to protect our Water Supply Tanks, have other franchisors? I believe it is up to each franchise system to do a RISK EVALUTION of such things, put it in writing and protect ourselves and our franchises. The franchising community, together can do our part. Think about the idea of a direct mail franchise company, there are many like Money Mailer, Coupon Clipper, etc. Additionally; I propose a simple idea. Delete the section of the UFOC with listings of franchisees, names, areas and addresses. Until a more final phase of the sale and after the franchisor receives a ten-year background check from the prospect. Or perhaps only if it is asked for from the prospect in writing later. Putting out a list of everyone who owns a ChemLawn truck in the country is just stupid right now. How about the name brands which are American icons, like McDonalds. After all last time they went after AMERICAN AIRLINES and UNITED AIRLINES. I have already had competitors who pretended to be a prospect, later dump hydrofluoric acid in the tanks of one of my franchisees a couple of years ago to cause him to damage the paint on customers car so he could pick up an account from an auto dealer our franchisee washed for. We did not figure out what happened for quite a while and only learned of it after the damage and an employee of the competitor became disgruntled and told us. What if that were anthrax?
Even more scary is the fact that I had several former franchisees who were Muslim, who often discussed their despise of our government. Which I guess was probably them exercising their free speech, which is allowed of course, yet now it does not seem so innocent. There are so many franchises out their that have free access to facilities, such as; Shred It, AmeriSpec, American Leak Detector, Environmental Biotech, Merry Maids, Service Master, Terminex, ChemDry. I have personally seen the ease at which our company transverses through airport fencing, security gates, etc. They see the truck and the uniformed employee and wave us forward. Now think about this problem, our team without knowing it could deliver a bio weapon simply by an evil-doer dumping something in a tank. Very few lawn companies or termite pest control companies lock their tanks, I know this because our company washes these trucks, and rarely are their any locks on the tanks. The smaller the franchisee the more unaware they might be. Are all these companies sure they have trustworthy employees, and even if they are, do they secure and lock tanks and vehicles? Not just parked behind a fence, anyone can scale a fence. If an evil-doer is willing to die for his cause, I doubt if a fence will slow down or stop him/her. An evil-doer could also order services and hijack the truck or unit. Remember in San Francisco when Thieves would order a pizza from Dominos and then shoot and kill the delivery driver for the $50.00 in cash on him? There are so many ways to use a franchised unit to do these things. We must protect the franchise model, reputation of brand name and the American people. We should not make it easy by giving away all this information freely for no real reason. That would only hurt all franchisees of any system all over the country. The American Federation of Scientists announced that it deleted 500 pages of sensitive information on their initial review, and this is one of the most pro-freedom of speech supporters in the country.
These are our most brilliant minds. We are smart enough to follow their lead. With all this said, I wonder why we are putting these UFOCs on the Internet at FranData, why state agencies copy them for mere copy fees to anyone who asks and why anyone expresses an interest to buy a franchise can get one, with lists of all franchisees, addresses and phones numbers. Since franchisors cannot discriminate based on ethnic sympathies, we must give out this information freely. WHY? Some information is dangerous in times of such threats. We should make this a new policy today, not tomorrow, there is no time for committees, no time to talk about it. Just do it. If a franchisee wants to call on other franchisees they are certainly allowed to do so after things have checked out and after they submit a written request along with a background check.
“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/
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Friday, June 27th, 2008
There’s a new way to clean your toilet and you’ll never have to scrub it again. No matter if you are male or female no one likes cleaning the inside of that porcelain bowl, not even if it was already clean and shiny. Am I right? Cleaning toilets is a disgusting job, but now things got a whole lot more fun.
Kaboom has made a neverscrub toilet kit that will leave you happy and smiling once again. This kit comes with refillable cartridge that works for up to 5 months. You can easily snap this on the inside of your tank and never have to scrub the toilet again, well never as long as you replace the kit in five months. Basically it works like magic, you flush the toilet and it will clean it for you. Easy right? It even cleans the grim for those that forget to flush the toilet.
Oh and for those of you that get rust in your pipes and toilet you won’t have to worry, it takes care of that as well. The Kaboom neverscrub actually kicks the toilet’s butt when it comes to clean and makes life a whole lot easier for you.
Posted in Better Sales, Hall Of Shopping, The Zen Of Home Improvement | Comments Off