No matter what you sell or who you sell it to, it’s important to remember that prospects are regular people just like you.
People are naturally skeptical and anxious about doing business with someone new, but if you can overcome your customers initial fear and take away some or ideally all of the risk in doing business with you, you’ve got a much greater chance of making the sale.
Understand that the victory, the moment you get the sale, should be an experience that’s good for both people involved – the seller and the buyer.
Selling should be a win-win for everyone involved where you benefit by getting paid for the products or services you provide – and your prospect gets the benefits of those products or services.
Sales Secret #2 - Girard’s Law of 250Joe considered this the most important lesson you could learnfrom him!Over time Joe learned that “Everyone knows 250 people in his or her life important enough to be invited to a wedding or to come to their funeral” from which he developed his “Law of 250”.
When you turn away one customer with a bad attitude or service, you run the risk of getting a bad name with at least 250 other people who may have purchased something from you.
That means if just one person a week is unhappy with the way they’re treated – by the end of the year there could be as many as 13,000 people influenced against you – and that’s not including the friends of their friends!Can you afford to have just one person come to see you and leave unhappy and unsatisfied?Consider the alternative.
If you provide exceptional service to just one person a week, you could have as many as 13,000+ people in a year who are encouraged to buy from you instead of your competition!!Now keep in mind – while 250 was the average when Joe wrote his book, consider the many additional ways we have to communicatewith friends and family today.
With the popularity of social media and websites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube to name a few, word of mouth can spread even faster to more people today than ever before.
It’s up to you to decide if people spread good news or bad news about doing business with you.
Sales Secret #3 – You need to sow before you can reap.
Joe learned quickly that most sales don’t happen immediately, but it takes time for your marketing to show results and for people to get to the place where they know, like and trust you enough to buy from you.
“Everybody on my mailing list knows my name and what I do for a living.
When it comes time for them to buy a car, I have got to be the very first person practically every single one of those thousands of people think of.
”“If they’ve bought before, they’re your best prospects now! – These people will keep coming back to you if you keep reminding them that you exist, in a nice way.
”Your job then is to keep your name in front of your customers throughout the year so that when it comes time for them to buy again or there’s an opportunity for them to refer you to a friend or family member, you are the first person they think of!Because of this, it’s critical that you maintain a mailing list of your customers and prospects so you can market to them on a regular basis.
Now, you can do this in a number of ways like sending out a printed or emailed newsletter to your customers, but Joe believed that “Personalized mail is the best thing anybody can receive from a salesperson”.
Joe’s primary method for getting new business was to send personalized greeting cards to his satisfied customers on a regular basis.
How regular?
Joe sent his customers a greeting card each month in addition to sending them a special Birthday card each year, and he uses a very nice, very soft sell message in his cards.
He never sent direct sales pitches, but instead said things like “Happy New Year – I like You! Joe Gerard, Merrolis Chevrolet.”
Now, you’re probably thinking that it takes a lot of time and effort to send your prospects a birthday card every year plus one every month and you’re right, it does!Joe started out writing and mailing cards on his own, but as his customer base grew he hired assistants and paid them to write and mail greeting cards on his behalf – and he did this because he knew this was one of the most effective yet least expensive ways to get new customers (this is why you MUST know how much it costs to get new customers with the different marketing methods you use!)Sales Secret
#5 – Hunting with BirddogsBird dogs
are people who are on the lookout to send customers to you that you pay a referral fee to thank them for sending business your way, and Joe’s Birddog system was an early version of what we would typically call an affiliate program today.
To develop your own team of Birddogs, you can simply give your business cards to current customers and ask them to write their name on the back of cards that they give out to others so they can get paid when they refer a new customer.
Joe paid $25 per sale, but you’ll have to adjust that to be appropriate for the product or services you’re selling – this is where it’s critical that you know how much you spend to get a new customer and also what the lifetime value of a new customer is.
Other sources of bird dogs can be small business owners, union officials or anyone that has an influence over a large group of people.
One of Joe’s favorite bird dog sources were barbers, and also banks, finance companies and credit unions, towing services and auto repair shops.
Joe made a habit of visiting new barbers each time he needed a haircut and he’d provide them with a sign that said “Ask me about the
best car deal in town!” and he’d give them a stack of business cards and explain his offer to pay $25 to the barber for each new car he helped sell.
Roughly 1 of every 3 sales Joe made was a direct result of his bird dogs, and the beauty of this method was that he didn’t pay for this advertising up front, he only paid when a sale was made!Pay your Birddogs a reasonable finders fee and they’ll refer new business to you all the time, and always be sure to properly thank bird dogs for sales they help you make.
Sales Secret #6 – Get prospects to know, like and trust you
Probably the most important sales lesson I’ve ever learned (and one they never taught me in college!) is that people buy from people they know, like and trust.
Joe knew this a long time ago though and he said “I believe one of the most important determining factors of a sale is “Does the prospect like, trust and believe me.
If I fail to develop these attitudes in a prospect, chances are I’ve also failed to make the sale.
” (p105)So, what can you do to help prospects come to know, like and trust you?Be open and honest in all that you do, and try to find some common ground – some way to relate to the prospects you’re dealing with.
Joe would pay close attention to the cars his prospects drove into his car dealership and notice things like bumper stickers or sports equipment that indicated what hobbies people enjoyed or what causes they supported and he’d always try to engage them in small talk relating to their interests.
You can also provide valuable, free information to prospects before the sale that show you’re interested in them finding the right product or service to meet their needs – even if that means buying from someone else – and take time to answer their questions without pressuring them in any way. Sales
Secret #7 –Allow prospects to demo or sample your products/services
“People like to try things out, to touch them, to play with them...No matter what you sell, look for ways in which you can demonstrate your product.
The important thing is to be sure that your prospect participates in the demonstration.
”As a car salesman, Joe would of course have prospects test drive the cars they were interested in and he’d let them go wherever they wanted – but ideally past their house or their neighbors so they could be seen driving the car.
This works better for some products or services than others of course, but your odds of making a sale increase dramatically if you can have your prospects experience what it’s like to own or use your product or service before asking them to pay for it.
If you’re selling an inexpensive physical product, can you offer a free sample for someone to take home and try out themselves?If it’s a service you provide, how about offering a free trial of it for 30 or 60 days?
Do you remember when AOL was starting out and how they gave away free internet access for 30 days or a few hundred hours?
Their free trial CDs were everywhere and because they tracked the effectiveness of their marketing, they knew that once you tried their service, you were likely to stay on as a customer for many months or years to come!
cards to his clients and prospects was something he could easily pay others to do for him.
His accountant showed him how hiring someone else to automate these tasks could be a tax write off for him while giving him more time to do what he loved and profited from most, and it’s something you should consider as well.
I’d recommend speaking with your accountant or tax professional to see just how doing this can affect you, but even if there aren’t tax incentives for hiring extra help.
it may be worth it to give you more time to do what you love while freeing yourself from doing some tasks that you don’t enjoy.
Getting help today can mean hiring someone locally help you out with your paperwork, or outsourcing things like phone calls or order fulfillment to people or companies in other states or even other countries.
(I’d highly recommend reading Tim Ferris’s book “The 4 hour work week” for some excellent advice on simplifying your life and becoming more productive!)
Sales Secret #10 –Winning after the close
The first thing Joe did after the sale is prepare a file card on the buyer with everything he knows about him and about what he bought.
Today you would most likely enter this information in a contact manager on your computer or located online.
At the same time, Joe would always send a special Thank You card to the customer which is noticed in that house because it’s so rare these days.
Joe tried to make a friend of every prospect, whether he sold them or not.
“You don’t have to twist anybody’s arm or tell lies to make a good living in this selling business.
All you have to do is use your head and plant enough seeds and fill enough seats.
If you do it right, you’ll be able to make a fine income and live with your conscience.
I have proved that it can be done.
” Keep selling after the close and look at a customer as a long term investment.
Once Joe sold a car to someone, he expected to sell them every car they were ever going to buy in the future, and he planned to sell their kids and their friends cars too..
Closing thoughts
I hope this brief review of Joe’s excellent book “How to sell anything to anybody” has given you some great ideas to help you grow your own business, but I’d highly recommend that you purchase his book and read through it yourself as I’ve only scratched the surface with his ideas that I’ve summarized here.You can find it at most major booksellers or at amazon.com and it’s a bargain for about only $10!Use this information to make some money!
Talk soon,
