The following strategy has probably helped more companies double their sales faster than any other single concept. The Ultimate Sales Machine will always look to be as efficient as possible. In a sentence: There's always a smaller number of "best buyers" than there are all buyers. That means that marketing to them is cheaper than marketing to all buyers. But it's how you market and sell to them that determines whether or not you will ever get them.



When Charlie Munger put me in charge of ad sales for one of his magazines, they had a database of 2200 potential advertisers. I did a market analysis and found that 167 of them bought 95% of the advertising in the top four magazines. This was especially important because these four magazines were getting all of the really valuable advertising in this market. None of these advertisers were in our magazine and we were all the way down at number 15 in terms of market share in our field.

By focusing intently on those dream 167 buyers, I was able to get 30 of them into the magazine in the first year. Suddenly executives who had never heard from us before were now hearing from us so intensely from every direction that within six months we had 28 of them in the magazine. That alone doubled the sales of the magazine. These were the big advertisers. When they came in, it was for premium positions-full color spreads, the inside front cover, back cover, etc. Up until that point, we had been scraping by on revenue from quarter-page, third-page, and a few half-page ads. We doubled the sales the next year by keeping those best buyers in the magazine and bringing in another 30. We doubled it again, a third year in a row, by bringing in the rest of the 167 the best buyers. When I doubled sales three years in a row, Charlie Munger said, "Are you sure we're not lying, cheating and stealing because, in all my years, I've never seen anybody double sales three years in a row."

Naturally, we weren't doing any such thing. We were just marketing and selling better than any of our competitors. That, and we truly had built the ultimate sales machine with procedures and policies for selling that all the salespeople had to follow. This book will cover every aspect of this in the ensuing chapters.

Best buyers buy more, buy faster and buy more often than other buyers. These are your ideal clients. No matter what else you are doing, you should be making an additional effort to capture them. I call this strategy the Dream 100 effort. It is your program for targeting your 100 (or whatever number is appropriate) dream clients constantly and relentlessly until they buy your product or service. The goal of the Dream 100 is to take your ideal buyers from "I've never heard of this company" to "Who is this company I keep hearing about" to "I think I've heard of that company" to "Yes, I've heard of that company" to "Yes, I do business with that company.