Posted by Kevin Lofgren

At the end of my sophomore year in college, I was approached by another student who told me he had made $20,000 the previous summer and that he was going to work for the same company that coming summer. He said that he was looking for other students to join him and asked if I wanted to come hear a presentation about it.

I was just naive enough not to ask any questions. That was good, because I wouldn't have gone out if I'd really understood what we would be doing. (Intrigue sells!) We would be selling books door-to-door on, I would come to find out, the opposite side of the country. We would be buying an inventory of books on credit, then go sell them until we were out and needed to order more books. And so it would go from week-to-week. And from door-to-door.

About halfway into the summer, after spending every night wishing I could give up and go home, I realized that I might as well quit if I wasn't willing to be the best at it I could be. So I picked myself up off of the ground, brushed myself off, and set out to determine how I could be great at door-to-door book selling.

First, I knew I hated rejection. So I needed to create a situation where it would be easy for me to get in the proverbial Mrs. Jones' door.

So, I decided to stop going door-to-door and instead ask for referrals from the people who bought the books. And I asked for a lot of them. But I had to find a way to qualify the referrals I was getting, so I made it a challenge to Mrs. Jones to tell me everything she could about the family's situation. Can they afford the books? Are their kids doing well in school? Does the mom have purchasing authority without her husband present? And so on. You wouldn't believe how much people were willing to tell me. But this was a huge step to get in the door for one obvious reason – a friend had sent me there. And also for one not-so-obvious reason: I knew the situation before I arrived. For example, if Mrs. Jones' kids were doing well in school and I didn't know it, I would get the "my kids are in the top of the class and don't need any books to help" objection. I was stopped cold in my tracks. But when I knew they were doing well in school, I would say, "these books are for kids who are doing really well in school and Jane said your kids were among the brightest" and get right in.

Second, I knew I would do a better job if I spent more time getting to know Mrs. Jones and her family – even if I had some info from the referral – before trying to close the deal. This meant I would have to decrease the number of homes I visited each day.

Now, because I was getting referrals all over town, I had to allow for more drive time between houses. In addition to that time killer, I also knew that I would have to take more time on the front-end of the sale learning about the kids' needs and on the back-end of the sale collecting referrals from Mrs. Jones. So I had to qualify people as being in or out very quickly. That's why I went and bought an Ironman watch with a timer on it. I set it for 5 minutes, and promised Mrs. Jones that when it went off I would close the books and ask her if she was interested in hearing more. If she wasn't, it wasn't a problem because I didn't want to waste her time (or mine) with something she didn't want. But if she was interested at that point, well, I knew she would eventually buy. So I got out of a house within 5-10 minutes if they weren't going to buy the books, allowing me to spend up to an hour sometimes if they bought the books and gave me referrals. This allowed my close ratio in comparison to time spent with a prospect to skyrocket.

Third, as a result of visiting fewer homes, I needed to increase my average sale per household to make up the difference.

To do this, I started taking all of the separate books and making them into "packages." Instead of selling a $100 set of 2 books, I was selling Mrs. Jones a $750 set of 14 books. My average sale went from $75 to $600 within a couple of weeks.

When I was going door-to-door, I would see 20 families a day and sell 6-7 of them for for a total gross revenue of $400 a day.

When I stopped going door-to-door, I would see 8 families a day and sell 5-6 of them for a total gross revenue of $3,000 a day.

I was selling to fewer families, seeing fewer families, working fewer hours, making more friends, and making more money than when I was doing it the "right way."

I'm telling this story for one reason. Farstar, it turns out, is playing the same game in both ways. You could say we're the automated equivalent of going door-to-door, and we are in the sense that we are inviting the world to come to our Lead Machines. But the trick is that once the prospect is in the Lead Machine, the second part kicks in. We know some things about our prospects before they arrive to the site because our clients have told us some things. This is just like when I was selling books. My customers gave me pre-qualification information about the prospect. But just as I had to further qualify the prospect myself, the Lead Machine takes that manual burden and automates much of it. Through some really cool technology, the Lead Machine takes the original information we know about the prospect, then combines it with the learnings it gleans from the prospect once he or she is on the site. Not just your typical web analytics information. It's super cool, and super private, so I won't go into it here. But trust me, it's better than a lot of inside sales reps and certainly good enough to give a senior sales executive an excellent starting point.

When we can identify our prospect, we can customize our pitch to that prospect. When we can customize our pitch to the prospect, the prospect hangs around longer. When the prospect hangs around longer, we learn more about him. That allows us to pass those learnings on to you and your team.

Stop telling Mrs. Jones you're selling books before she tells you her kids are smart. Customize your pitch to fit your prospect before they even know you're coming.

So, back to the beginning of this post. If those guys had told me I would be selling books door-to-door, I wouldn't have gone. And if I hadn't gone, I wouldn't have worked in the program another four years after that. And if I hadn't done that, I sincerely doubt I would be an entrepreneur, much less one with a successful company. And I certainly wouldn't have learned the importance in sales of knowing your customer before you open your mouth.

One more example of not playing by the rules as they were stated. This is how we work. The rules are only there to support the goal. If there is a better way to reach the goal, change the rules.

kl