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The 5 Sales Hacks C-Level Global Taught Chow Tai Fook

Their Market Cap Increased $11 Billion in 2 Years

Here’s how a group of 162 marketing and sales leaders started evolving their direct reports that include over 5,700 business developers to quickly close more deals.

Keep reading if you want to substantially impact your revenue growth with your frontline marketing and sales teams. This is about doing something simple that focuses on a handful of tactics that gets your marketers and sellers closing more deals with higher profit margins. Hell yea you want this! Too bad you’re skeptical that some sales hacks could truly make a difference.

I’ll share the 5 sales hacks C-Level Global started with the initial engagement with Chow Tai Fook. Incidentally, their market cap increased by $11B over the subsequent two years. Although we can’t take all the credit, we are not shy about taking the credit we deserve. Our methodology throughout their organization has been praised as, “The most effective and unique approach to getting sellers to embrace behavior changes that quickly raise their performance,” by Kam Biu Cheng, an Executive Director. Speaking of not being shy, spoiler alert, sales hack number one is just that. It’s about not being shy. Yet it’s also about not being arrogant or pushy either. The hack’s training concentrates on a blended balance of confidence and initiative. The culture of this Asian-based business lacked this balance. More on this hack soon.

Here’s a quick overview of this privately-owned conglomerate. Chow Tai Fook group is based in Hong Kong with holdings in jewelry, property development, hotel, department store, transportation, energy, telecommunications, port, casino, and other businesses. They were founded in 1929. Since 2018 Bob Peng has owned the company. Starting in 2018 C-Level Global was given the opportunity to help the holding company of Chow Tai Fook at a global sales level. There are over 30,000 employees of which nearly a quarter of them have marketing and sales-related roles.

Keep at the top of your mind that the success of this engagement hinged on 3 critical points.

  • The executive leadership wanted and supported the concept of starting with a small initiative that could grow into a comprehensive revenue growth business model. They recognized that starting off with big goals before priming the people to get buy-in does not work.
  • 162 Champions were harnessed at the beginning of this effort to not only earn and build true buy-in but also to allow the top managers to be vested in creating the comprehensive plan to follow. To help them rollout improvements we had each of these people nominate a 得力助手 (translated from Chinese as, right-hand man, and is pronounced as Délì zhùshǒu).
  • From the start, it was decided that a new and more generous reward and recognition system would be created to capture the hearts and minds of those responsible for growth. Sharing in the future desired rewards is a surefire way to get people to want to make changes.

Overview of the 5 Sales Hacks

  1. Continually develop your sales power mindset

Don’t be shy, yet don’t be arrogant or pushy either. It’s about the blended balance of confidence and initiative. This takes continual development. Finding one’s own sales power mindset is the secret. Trying to be like someone else is the wrong path that’s easy to get lost on. After all, it’s hard not to want to be just like the top seller who makes all the money. Don’t fall for that old mind trap. Instead, work on evolving into a more confident and caring version of yourself. Slow down, ask more questions, listen better, and validate what you hear. Learn to ask for what you want after building the rapport and assuring you are connected on salient points with the person you are helping. Notice how I didn’t say, the person you’re selling to, instead you need to see them as the person you’re helping. The power mindset helps others first. It also knows how to be clear that the help provided comes at a premium and doesn’t settle for making bargain deals.

Tip, make Sales Power Mindset a thing in your world. Talk openly about it.

  1. Let the customers sell themselves

Sales are about convincing people right, otherwise, you’re just an order taker? Nope, wrong! The best sellers know that the most persuasive person is the customer. Ask the right questions and lead the customers to convince themselves they want the product. Ask your audience why your product or service may not be right for them. Sounds counterintuitive, but it’s powerfully effective at closing deals. Too often marketers and sellers get fixated on telling all the great stuff about what they offer. Here’s the thing though, each of your potential customers is different. Sure you can and should have already figured out your customer personas. The fact is though, people are different depending on the day of the week. Meaning that you can’t know what is preoccupying the mind of your audience when you happen to be with them in person, on a call, when they read your message, or during a videoconference. SO shut up and ask great questions while you listen intently to use the information you gain. Listening, validating, and subtly tying together your offer to what you hear allows customers to sell themselves.

Tip, Neurolinguistic programming is a must for you to start studying today.

  1. Give dominant positioning to your prospects and customers

When possible, adjust your seat height. Sophisticated salespeople learn how to use little maneuvers to their advantage. You can take charge of meetings by adjusting your chair’s seat height. Begin the meeting with your chair adjusted slightly below your customer’s. This subliminally signals that the customer is in a dominant position. As the meeting goes on, slowly elevate your chair to sit slightly higher than the customer’s chair, thus placing them in a dominant position. The slow transition subliminally stages them to be more receptive to your thoughts and ideas. If you can’t adjust your chair or are standing then simply change your posture to achieve the same effect. A similar tactic is used in seat selection at a table. Allow your audience to sit at the head of a table since the head position is traditionally reserved for the alpha. When buyers feel in charge then they feel more trusting. Establishing trust leads to higher-margin deals.

Tip, be humble. Boastfulness jeopardizes your prospect’s perception of you.

  1. Under-promise and over-deliver

The exponential power of this tactic shines in the referral and repeat business that comes from the stellar execution of underpromising and overdelivering. Bluntly speaking, this tactic is a famous cliché that is harder to execute than it may sound. It’s also been called a bad idea based on the accusation it’s based on an overly simplistic understanding of the customer satisfaction model. C-Level Global’s experience has shown there’s a right way to go about using this tactic. Building a marketing and sales approach that has at least 2 or 3 unrevealed surprises in the follow-up processes with customers tends to greatly impress them. Primarily, this tactic focuses on preventing business developers from making false or out of the normal promises to customers, which is correct. More proactively, use this tactic by training business developers by creating an “impressive list.” This is simply a well-documented and extensive bullet point listing of all the awesome points of your offering. Simply put, create the most impressive and accurate narrative for your business. Then get this document highly visible internally. Test and train on the delivery of this narrative regularly. This is your award-winning script to under-promise and over-deliver.

Tip, make sure that operations, marketing, and sales are aligned on this narrative.

  1. Get your prospects to say no

Most sales training claims you need to get prospects in the mode of saying yes repeatedly. Elite persuaders understand that getting people to say no has its place in the big picture of sales. Repeatedly saying yes dilutes the significance and confidence of each yes. Yet, when they say no to multiple options when they finally say yes to the right option, they are statistically more inclined to stick with it. This is the exact reason why the best real estate agents show bad houses first, so when the customer sees the right one, they jump on it. Studies have shown that getting people to say no between 2 and 3 times in a row makes them much more likely to say yes if you hone your subsequent suggestion to accommodate parts of why they were saying no. The validation and alignment secured during this sophisticated exercise are one of the fastest ways to build connections with people. There is a level of comfortableness that sets in people’s minds once they have told you no a few times, but only if you smoothly absorb the rejection and gently contort follow-up offers to better align with what they seek. Even in the face of competition, this tactic expedites their decision process along with their confidence in saying yes to you. It helps to be able to name and identify The 15 Categories of Rejection that exists.

Tip, use rejection to calibrate your understanding of buyers to offer better solutions.

These 5 sales hacks need to be worked in tandem with all your marketers and sellers. Align the way they think and create messaging together. Then they can work together to enhance the daily tactics of selling. Once you get this momentum you can begin comprehensive revenue growth business model shifts. Stage in big changes versus jumping right into CEO announcements that the Board has been promised doubled sales in a couple of years. It’s not about being realistic. Hell, you can grow massively quickly if you go about it right. The critical factor though is that you need to start with buy-in. Renaissance Methodology has been deployed around the world as a change management process dedicated to behavior changes from the top of organizations through to the frontline staff and especially into the prospect base and client base. It thrives on calibrating to what the market is saying in real-time. Real business model shifts develop consistent-repeatable-processes. It will take 2 to 3 years to implement a sustainable enhanced revenue growth model. I suggest you get help to keep you on track.

 

About David Rose

David works with business leaders around the world helping substantially grow their revenue and profits using innovative strategies and tactics. His proprietary methodology has delivered over two billion dollars in revenue to his clients. He coaches and mentors business leaders to design custom “Sales Engines” to improve the people and process for substantial growth. David is an accomplished CEO, entrepreneur, board advisor, sales leader, digital presence accelerator, and brand transformer. From time to time he speaks and guest lectures at universities. David is a quoted source to business media and a trusted advisor to start-ups, SMBs, and Fortune 500 companies. The driving principle he implements in businesses is that the strongest revenue engines spawn from staff experience being paramount aside from customer experience as the close second. The impact he makes is on organizational behavior and culture at six levels; executive, financial, operational, digital presence, marketing, and sales level. David developed the Renaissance Methodology, R+E+N(AISS+A+N+C)E+¶. With this methodology, he developed, Modes-to-Market Analysis and Theory of Accelerance. Combined they help transform organizations into aligned-organic sales engines from the top to the frontline through to prospects and customers. David coined the phrase “CPR saves lives but C-R-P (consistent-repeatable-processes) saves and grows businesses.” He speaks and trains people on the paradigm-shifting discovery he made after years of research, which reveals for the first time, all the categories of Yes versus No. His book, Overcoming The 15 Categories Of Rejections, empowers people to learn and overcome all the categories of rejection they face. He is extremely active and divides his time between his family based in Dallas and helping international organizations implement C-R-P to grow revenue, integrate acquisitions into sales effective systems, and bolster shareholder value for Exit Strategies. He is continually researching and working on new publications and advances in business operations and revenue growth. Particularly in people and processes for excelling individual and team performances to substantially grow companies' profits.

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