The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible

Book Preface

The purpose of this book is to give you a series of ideas, strategies, and
techniques that you can use immediately to make more sales, faster and
more easily than ever before. In the pages ahead, you will learn to get more
out of yourself, and out of your selling career, than you may have ever
thought possible. You will learn how to double, triple, even quadruple your
sales and your income within a few months, or as little as a few weeks.
This book is the written version of my internationally successful The
Psychology of Selling audio sales program. Since this program was
originally produced, it has been translated into sixteen languages and is
used in twenty-four countries. It is the best-selling professional sales
training program in history.
Become a Millionaire!
According to follow-up research on graduates of the audio program, more
salespeople have become millionaires by listening to and applying these
ideas than by any other sales training process ever developed. Using this
material, I have personally trained more than five hundred thousand
salespeople worldwide, from thousands of companies and from virtually
every industry. It really works!
My Own Story

I did not graduate from high school. Instead, as a young man, I went off to
see the world. I worked at manual-labor-type jobs for a few years until I had
enough money to begin traveling. I worked my way, on a Norwegian
freighter, across the North Atlantic, and then traveled by bicycle, bus, truck,
and train around Europe, across Africa, and eventually to the Far East. I
never missed a meal, but I did postpone a lot of them indefinitely.
When I could no longer find a manual-labor job, in desperation, I got into
sales. It seems that most of the decisions we make in life are similar to
backing up in the night and hitting something, and then getting out to see
what it was. In this case, for me, it was a sales job.
It seems that most of the decisions we make in life are similar to backing up in the
night and hitting something, and then getting out to see what it was.
Basic Training
I was hired on straight commission and got the three-part sales training
program: “Here’s your cards; here’s your brochures; there’s the door!”
Armed with this “training,” I began my sales career cold-calling, knocking
on office doors during the day and knocking on residential doors in the
evenings.
The person who hired me couldn’t sell. But he told me that sales is a
“numbers game.” He said that all I had to do was talk to enough people, and
eventually I would find someone who would buy. We call this the “mud
against the wall” method of selling. (If you throw enough mud against the
wall, somewhere, somehow, some of it will stick.) This wasn’t much, but it
was all I had.
Then someone told me that sales was really not a “numbers game.”
Rather, it was a “rejection game.” The more rejections you collect, the more
sales you are likely to get. Equipped with this advice, I ran from place to
place so I could get rejected more often. They said that I had the “gift of
gab,” so I used it. When a person seemed uninterested, I would speak
louder and faster. But even though I hurried from prospect to prospect, and
spoke louder and faster to each person, I was barely holding on by my
fingernails.
The Turning Point
After six months of struggling, making just enough sales to pay for my
single room in a small guesthouse, I finally did something that changed my
life: I went to the most successful guy in our company and asked him what
he was doing differently from me.
I wasn’t afraid of hard work. I would get up at five or six in the morning,
prepare for the day, and be waiting in the parking lot at 7:00 AM when my
first prospects came to work. I worked all day long, going from office to
office and company to company. In the evenings, I would knock on
residential doors until nine or ten at night. If the light was on, I would make
the call.
The top salesman in my office, who was only a couple of years older than
me, had a completely different approach. He would roll into the office about
nine o’clock. A few minutes later, a prospect would come in, and they’d sit
and talk. After a few minutes’ conversation, the prospect would take out his
checkbook and write a check for our product.
The salesman would then go out that morning and make another couple
of sales, and then have lunch with another prospect. In the afternoon he
would make another couple of sales and then perhaps have a drink or dinner
with another prospect. He was selling five and ten times as much as me, or
anyone else in our office, and he hardly seemed to be working at all.
Training Makes the Difference
It turned out that he had worked for a Fortune 500 company when he was
younger. That company had spent sixteen months training him intensively
in the process of professional selling. With those skills he could then go to
work for any company or industry and sell any product or service in
virtually any market. Because he knew how to sell, he could sell circles
around people like me, even though he was working half the time or less.
This discovery changed my life.
When I asked him what he was doing differently, he said, “Well, show
me your sales presentation, and I’ll critique it for you.”
That was my first problem. I had no idea what a “sales presentation”
looked like. I had heard that there was such a thing, but I had never seen
one myself.
I said, “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
He was patient and polite. He said, “OK, here is a basic sales
presentation from beginning to end.” He then walked me, step-by-step,
through a sales presentation for our product.
Instead of using a “speech” or clever one-liners to get attention or to
overcome resistance, he asked a series of logical questions, from general to
specific, that were ideally suited to a genuine prospect. At the end of this
series of questions, it had become perfectly clear to the prospect that he
could use and benefit from our product. The final question was simply to
close the sale.