How to Go from Zero to Maximum Credibility
If we wanted an example of an industry with near-zero credibility, we need look no further than the people and businesses behind the automobile sitting outside in the driveway. Automobile salespeople are distrusted by everybody.
My own informal—but I think fairly accurate—survey shows that, ranked at the very bottom of the credibility ladder by the public are medical doctors, then lawyers, then, still worse, politicians, then, worst of all, car salesmen.
And, quite frankly, in my opinion, they deserve this. If any other industry played the pricing games that the car dealers get away with, everybody would be in jail. Typically, people in the automobile business use artificial retail prices in order to create phony discounts, they advertise stripped models in order to play bait-and-switch, they use deceptive sales practices, they bully their customers, they sell grossly overpriced insurance add-ons, and they are notorious for lousy service after the sale. Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Attorney General of this country should be ashamed of themselves for permitting this stuff to continue.
However, there are good, honest, reputable exceptions to this rule.
The most honest and, I think, not coincidentally, the most successful automobile salesman I know is Bill Glazner at Sanderson Ford here in Phoenix. He has managed to attain maximum credibility in a business that, overall, has no credibility—a tough task, but a great marketing lesson.
When you go to buy a car from Bill, like most anywhere else, you go out on the lot and look at cars, kick tires, maybe test drive a couple.
Eventually you are led down the hall where the long row of salesmen's crummy little cubicles are placed. These are pretty much the same everywhere. You've been in more than one. The walls are ticky-tacky plywood partitions held in place with the little screw-doodads we had on pole lamps in the sixties. In each cubicle, there's a basic military-issue gray or green metal desk. On the wall behind the desk is one shelf with a bowling trophy, a photograph of the sales guy's wife and kids, and a couple of plaques. On the desk is nothing but a calculator and an ashtray stuck in a little rubber tire. There are two turquoise or orange plastic stackable chairs for the customers. And that is it.
Bill's crummy little cubicle is the same as the others you've seen— except for one little detail. Floor to ceiling, side to side, every square inch of wall space is covered with instant snapshots of Bill's customers, proudly posed next to their new cars, with their names and dates of purchase written on them. I have never counted the photos, but the quantity is overwhelming.
Then, look a little closer, and you'll pick up two patterns in the arrangement of the snapshots. First, the relationship pattern. For example, next to the picture of me with my Lincoln, you'll see the photo of my wife with her Taurus, my parents with their Mercury, my brother with his pick-up truck, my business partner with his Lincoln, his wife with her Probe, his sales manager with his Tempo, and one of his office managers with his Escort.
Also, you'll see a historical pattern. Not just me with my current Lincoln, but backwards chronologically to me with the Lincoln before that. In some cases, there will be five, even six such photos: the customer with his new 1990 car, the same customer with the car he bought in 1987, again with the car he bought in 1984, again with the car he bought in 1981.
Now I'm going to tell you something that is almost unbelievable. I've gone there with my wife, with business associates, and with friends while they bought cars from Bill and I have watched, in every case, as Bill figured up the price, wrote it on the contract, and quoted the price and payment amounts, and heard the customers say, "Fine." I've watched them sign on the dotted line without even once haggling over price.
In the car business!
In the weight-loss business, one very successful sales representative for diet products carries one sales tool with her everywhere she goes: a photo blown up into a life-size poster of herself, fifty-four pounds heavier than she is today. She unrolls the poster and stands next to it, and the sale is made.
Some years ago, I was at an Amway Rally, and the guest speakers were Charlie and Elsie Marsh, enormously successful distributors. You need to understand that Amway uses a multilevel marketing system, where distributors recruit others who recruit others, etc., and earn overrides on the performance of everybody "down line" from them and those they recruit. Distributors need to be convinced that the plan really works and that they can, in fact, build a large organization and income by recruiting.
Charlie pulled a half-dozen volunteers out of the audience up onto the auditorium's stage, and they started at one end of the stage and unfolded a huge, five-foot-high fifty-foot-wide hunk of posterboard with Charlie's immense distributor organization diagrammed out, with each distributor's name and home-city listed next to the little circle that represented them. The thousands and thousands of connected circles all emanated from about fifteen people Charlie had personally recruited into the business. He said, "If you know fifteen people, you can do this, too."
When you walk into my chiropractor's office, you'll see one wall almost entirely covered with instant snapshots of the practitioner standing next to each smiling, happy patient. You see, these pictures are instantly convincing.
ULTIMATE MARKETING SECRET WEAPON #7 PICTURES THAT PROVE YOUR CASE
Let me tell you something funny. Bill Glazner's been outperforming his sales colleagues at Sanderson Ford month after month, year after year—yet he's the only salesman there with photographs up on his cubicle walls.
In the diet products company the lady with the lifesize "before" poster sells for, there are over 15,000 representatives, but as far as I know only one has a poster of her fat former self.
The night I saw Charlie Marsh unroll his organizational chart, there were at least five hundred Amway distributors in the audience, many of whom I knew then and know today. To the best of my knowledge, nobody "stole" Charlie's idea.
I speak to chiropractic audiences several dozen times each year, my Practice-Building Secrets Letter goes to several thousand chiropractors, and, in one way or another, I've told all of these stories to at least 5,000 practitioners in the last four or five years. To the best of my knowledge, there's only one with a photo wall.
Continue reading here: Than I used to make in a week
Was this article helpful?
