By J.B. Bernstein – @JBBERNSTEIN
There are six key challenges that you face when trying to sell in the seven figure arena.
- TARGET MARKET SIZE
- PURCHASE MOTIVATION
- FINDING COMMON GROUND
- MARKET DYNAMIC SENSITIVITY
- MIDDLE MAN PARADIGM
- PRICE VS VALUE
Part 2 of this series focuses on the Target Market Size challenge.
As with all the challenges you will face as a salesperson, I have found creativity is the key to overcoming them.
I mentioned in part 1 of the series that the target market size is in INVERSE proportion to the price of the offering. So if your price is north of a million dollars, implicitly the market is tiny.
There are a few obvious ways to maximize sales here.
To Increase your share of the existing market
OR
To bring new customers to the category
OR BOTH!
None of these are easy.
When it comes to super high end products and services, it is hard to wrestle customers from competitors. In many cases their wealth is generational, and they will continue use the brands that they grew up with. In essence you have to convince them that a brand they are happy with is not as good a choice for them as your brand. You can see how difficult that might be.
In terms of bringing new customers into the category, that is even tougher. In order to bring new seven figure customers in, you need to find people who have just come into money, or you need to find people who can afford your brand, but have opted not to buy it. Obviously, if someone can afford to drop a million dollars on a product or service and they have decided, for whatever reason, that they don’t need it, it will be difficult to change their mind.
That is why I say you have to think about your target creatively. Many of the high end sales organizations realized that one way to sell a million dollar product was to spread the purchase across more than one customer. If it was hard to find one person to pay a million dollars for something, could you find 100 people that would pay $10,000.00 each and could you make a model to keep them all happy.
The private jet market created just that structure in their owner share programs, card programs, and charter programs.
High end resorts applied the time share concept to their properties.
Heck, you can even lease a Rolls Royce.
Back in 2004 the thought hit me, how could we apply that to an athlete that was expecting to make at least a million dollars on a deal?
In sports marketing there are always more super star athletes than there are seven figure deals. So I started thinking about how we could look at our target market differently to get my client the value he deserved without having to go to a massive corporation like Pepsi or Master Card. That is how the BONDS-AROD Holiday Celebration was born.
We created an amazing 2 day event with Barry and Alex. The first day they hosted an amazing dinner reception that was limited to just 100 people. All attendees got to see exclusive highlights, got to be part of unique Q&A with the players emceed by Michael Kaye, got a gift bag valued at $4,000.00, got an amazing feast, and every person in the room got to spend 5 minutes 1 on 1 with Barry and Alex. The second day was a very unique signing hosted by Jay-Z’s 40-40 club, unlike any signing I have ever seen. Basically, there was a party going on downstairs, and we brought people upstairs in small groups where they got a signature and picture with Barry and then with Alex.
I can’t divulge specific numbers, but suffice it to say that we were able to create a fee and workload for the athletes that were similar to what they would have gotten if they had done a big national ad campaign with a fortune 500 company.
Creativity played a critical role for us in terms of how we thought about our target, and in the end, that creativity allowed us to close the deal.
jbbernstein 