Grant Cardone - If You're Not First, You're Last - Sales Strategies to Dominate Your Market and Beat Your Competition

Regardless of your position, you must effectively market yourself as an individual to make yourself more valuable to your company, its clients, and the marketplace. You want to be invulnerable to the downturn. When markets contract, jobs do too, and those who appear the least valuable to the business are the ones who are let go first. Even good, loyal workers lose jobs during tough times—not because they didn’t do a good job or weren’t loyal to the organization. It is usually due to the fact that they did not do a good enough job of marketing themselves as too valuable to be terminated. So make sure that you present yourself as one of the irreplaceable members of your company.

Increase your value to the business and its clients and in the marketplace and you will never lose your job, no matter how significant economic problems become.

It is certainly not my intention to offend anyone in regard to this very sensitive issue. However, when I hear that someone has lost his or her job of 20 years with a company that didn’t close its doors, well, that person must realize that someone made a decision to let go of him or her instead of someone else. During my first job out of college, middle management attempted to fire me on at least six occasions because—as they so eloquently stated—“Grant is difficult to manage and causes problems.” Yet each time, upper management overturned middle management’s decision because I was doing such a good job of marketing to my customers and selling the company’s products. Executive management was not willing to risk losing the relationships I had created or the business I generated. On one occasion, upper management laid off my manager instead because the organization perceived me as being more valuable than him. In hindsight, I do agree that I was unnecessarily difficult to manage at that time, but my production levels were so high compared with those of others that it made me almost invincible. (I added almost in there to feign some humility.) Nothing will provide you with more protection than the ability to generate revenue—something that’s done by taking massive action, effectively marketing, staying in front of customers, and getting the job done!

Unless you or your family owns the business (and sometimes, even if your family does ), the only way you are going to ensure your own success is to outproduce everyone else. Your career’s future should never be left up to a manager, the company, or the economy; it must always depend on your ability to get into the marketplace, effectively promote yourself, establish and cultivate relationships, inform people of who you are and what you do, and then turn those contacts into contracts. Do that, and you will never be without work or money. You will advance and conquer accordingly. Remember: Effective marketing is about more than merely spending money to advertise. It’s about investing energy to make yourself known and valuable throughout the market.

Learn new ways to market yourself.Visit www.grantcardone.com/resources

When you’re cranking out business at record speeds, you miss opportunities with your products that become incredibly obvious during tough economic or competitive times. When budgets tighten up, some companies and/or individuals may no longer have the budgets to afford your products as they’re packaged—or the company size to justify purchasing them. It’s also likely that while they might still be able to afford your product, the hysteria that accompanies economic contractions has incited a fear of spending money. Since they are now much more selective about their purchases, they’re unlikely to buy your offering unless it is repackaged to accommodate their new financial parameters.

There are two things in which people lack confidence that are exaggerated during contractions: (1) the ability to make good decisions; and (2) the ability to create more money. While you can’t handle every fear and insecurity your buyer has, it may be worth your while to look for ways to repackage your merchandise when things slow down. This allows you to accommodate smaller clients and reduced budgets and increase your value proposition.

For instance, when competitors start moving in on my territory or a downturn occurs, I immediately assess my product line for ways to repackage and proactively accommodate the change in people’s thinking and budgets.

Despite new limits on my clients’ resources, I want to express that it still makes sense for them to continue to do business with me. Advance and conquer; don’t retreat and contract. Find creative ways to keep flowing with the changes in the market. For instance, I might rebundle a $500 product into ten $50 purchases or repackage the payment plan into three installments of $170 each. When you’re committed to introducing people to your products, maintaining your client base, making progress, and keeping people connected to what you do, you will come up with innovative solutions. Just keep creating, move forward, and keep your eyes open for all kinds of solutions. Your competitors are liable to surrender market to you if you continue to outwit them.

Another example: My company runs a school in Orlando to which clients send their management teams for four days of training. When I’m looking for ways to repackage our products, I think of clients who may be wary about the cost of flights and hotels. So before my clients can even verbalize concern, I consider ways to handle possible future objections. In this case, we were prompted to promote our school as an inclusion to our seminar and other products. We merely increased the price of our seminars, and included the cost of the school, flights, and hotel. Remember, during tight times it is not true that people invest money in the lowest-priced solution but are much more careful about what solutions they invest in. This form of bundling or repackaging introduced our school to people who might not have otherwise attended. These attendees then return to their companies and recommend our program to others in the organization and we experience a surge in business when others are crying.

We then tried to figure out how to present our product in a way that resolved all the cost issues in the customer’s mind and would actually provide them with greater solutions and increased value. We realize during times of economic contraction clients are much more selective in how they invest their resources in the new economic reality. This desire to address our customers’ current financial budget concerns prompted us to design an incredible and revolutionary never-before-used sales training virtual technology product that can be found at www.virtualsalestraining.com. This new virtual and interactive tool born out of the creative commitment to resolve customer budget concerns allows our existing customers and new customers to access me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With just the click of a button, I am able to run daily sales meetings for the company, provide complete training for the entire organization, provide full testing and certification, provide total accountability to management, and literally be a personal coach for every salesperson and manager in the organization no matter how big. And I am able to do that without anyone spending money on travel and hotels or more importantly never missing a client opportunity. The moment we introduced our virtual program it exploded into the market with incredible results. We not only reactivated our current clients with a whole new product offer but we have since attained clients that we were never able to attract in the past.