HOW TO SELL ANYTHING TO ANYBODY – JOE GIRARD Page 1 of 13 About the Author _ “ The World’s greatest salesman “ - The Ginness book of Records named him , twelve times “ Number One Positive Thinker “ - Dr. Norman Vincent Peale , author of The power of positive thinking Introduction:- “Salesmen are made, not born. If I did it, you can do it. I guarantee it “ says Mr Joe Girard, . On January 1 st 1978, Joe Girard quit selling cars. During his fifteen- year of selling Cars (1963 – 1977) he sold 13001 cars at retail. Most of his time is now spent in writing books and columns, giving lectures, sales rallies and consulting. In this book the author describes his own life experience of how he became the number one salesman in the world. Some salient points from his above book are given below: - 1 Winning Bloodless Victories • When a salesman sells there is no loser. Both the buyer and the seller win if it’s a good sale. • If you think the sale ends when ,like they say in the car business , you see the customer’s taillights,you’re going to lose more sales than you ever dreamed of. But if you understand how selling can be a continuing process that never ends, then you’re going to make it the big time. • We are talking about automobiles. People buy them about every three or four years and even less often among the middle and working –class people who were most of my sales. If you are selling clothes or booze or things that people buy a lot more often, getting them back again and again is even more important. But it is harder to do with cars. So if I can show you the ways I kept people coming back to buy cars from me, you know it’s going to mean even more sales for you if you are selling these other kinds of product and services where success depends even more on bringing them back again. • I guarantee you that my system will work for you, if you understand it and follow it. I looked at selling situations and customers in different ways than I once did. This means that I have changed my attitude about a lot of aspects of my profession. • Whatever you are selling, there is probably somebody else out there one exactly like it. Not probably. It is a fact. It is very competitive world. It is a very tough profession we have chosen, but if we choose to deal with it as profession with rules and standards and principles, it can be made to pay off in financial and emotional satisfaction. • The First thing you had better know – if you don’t know it already – is that this is not always a nice world. Competition is a tough game, but everybody competes with everybody else for everything you and they want. Stick with me and you will see what I do mean. You will see how you can change people by selling them the right way, my way, and wind up with their money and their friendship. In fact, if you don’t get both their money and their friendship, you are not going to be in business very long. 2 The Way to Winning Attitudes • The only way to have the right attitudes is to know what the wrong ones are and how you got them and why you keep them. I am going to take you step by step through my discovery of the way to change from a loser to winner. I'll show you how to build in attitudes of a sure winner and how those attitudes led me to the development of my system. And remember this: Those attitudes and that system have made me the World’s greatest salesman. Page 2 of 13 3. It All Begins with Want • What I had to do was teach myself to concentrate on what I was trying to say and say it slowly and carefully. • Learning to overcome stuttering was one of the most important things that happened to me when I started selling. Because it made me think about what I was trying to say and what I should say and what people wanted to hear. That is something that everybody who sells should do all time of course. • I also learned some of the fundamentals of communication, because I learned to listen and to plan every word I said carefully. • It all begins with want. Nobody can be a great salesman without wanting. Wanting something very much. And the more you want, the more you drive yourself to do what it takes to sell. • Knowing what you want will power your drive. 4 The Customer Is a Human Being • Let us take a look at the way we perceive customers, and at what they really are. First of all, they are people, human beings with the same kinds of feelings and needs that we have, even though we tend to think of them as a different breed. Where I sell most of the people who come in to buy cars are working classes, and they work hard for their money – very hard. And most of them, whatever money they spent with us is money they won’t have to spend on something else they want and need. • The thing to remember is that when a customer comes in, he/she is a little scared. That person is probably there to buy. There are a lot of shoppers in the world. But mostly they are interested in what you are selling. Interested enough to be converted into buyers, even when they are shopping. But they are scared. They are scared of parting with $ 30 for a pair of shoes, $100 for a suit, or $5000 for a car. That is money and it comes hard. So they are scared. Scared of you too, because they all know or think they know that the salesmen are out to get them. They all think they know that they are not going to get what they want at the price they ought to be paying. That scares them. The Bloodless War 1. What we do every day of our working lives is a kind of war. They think we are trying to put something over on them, and we think they are there to waste our time. But if you leave it at that, you are in trouble. • They are human beings who work hard for their money and genuinely interested in buying something from you. That has to be the first basic assumption about everybody you meet. • If you understand what is going through that customer’s head, you can win that war and turn it into a valuable experience for both you and your customer. You can do that by overcoming your customer’s initial fear and scoring a victory, that is, making a sale. He should feel that he has spent his time well, that he has spent his money well. • A good sale is one where the customer goes out with what he came in for, at a good enough price so that he tells his friends, his relatives, and his co- workers to buy. • Those customers are the most important thing in the world to us, to each of us. They aren’t interruptions or pain in the ass. They are what we live on. And if we don’t realize that, as a hard business fact, then we don’t know what we are doing. I am not talking some of them. I am talking about all of them. 5 Girard's Law of 250 Page 3 of 13 1. Let me explain to you what I call Girard’s Law of 250. A short time after I got into business, I went to a funeral home to pay last respect to the dead mother of a friend of mine. At Catholic funeral home, they give out mass cards with name and picture of the departed. I have seen them for years, but I never thought about them till that day. One question came up into my head, so I asked the undertaker “ How do you know how many of these to print?”. He said “It’s a matter of experience. You look in the book where people sign their names, and you count, and after a while you see that the average number of people who comes is 250.” A short time later, a Protestant funeral director bought a car from me. After the close, I asked him the average number of people who came to see a body and attend the funeral. He said “ About 250”. Then one day, my wife and I were at a wedding, and I met the man who owns the catering place where the reception took place. I asked him what the average numbers of guests at a wedding were, and he told me, “About 250 from the bride’s side and 250 from the groom’s side.” I guess you can figure out what Girard's Law of 250 is, but I will tell you anyway: Everyone knows 250 people in his or her life important enough to invite to the wedding and to the funeral? Can you afford to have just one person come to see you and leave sore and unsatisfied? Not if just an average person influences 250 others in the course of his or her life. Not if a lot of the people you deal with every day deal with a lot other people every day. People talk a lot to other people about what they buy and what they plan to buy. Others are always offering advice about where to buy what and how much to pay. That’s a big part of the everyday life of ordinary people. Can you afford to jeopardize just one of those people? So when you turn away one, with anger or a smart-ass remark, you are running risk of getting a bad name among at least 250 other people with money in their pockets who might want to give some of it to you. This is a business attitude that you had better develop and keep in your head every working hour of every day, if you don’t want to be wiped out by Girard’s Law of 250. Every time you turn off just one prospect, you turn off 250 more. 6 Don't Join the Club. Remember: It is your business, no matter whom you work for or what you sell. And the better you build it, the more the people you sell become your customers. Every minute you spend looking for ways to avoid working costs you money. But if you are part of that clubby group of salesmen hanging around the front door, you are not using what you know, because you can’t make money hanging out with the boys. Among the favorite topics of conversation of salesmen in my business are which dealership is best, what’s wrong with the place they’re working at, and how it is better somewhere else where their friend works. But I have stayed in the same place all these years because what counts most is how you work, not where you work. The message I’m trying across is this: Don’t join the club. And if you are in it, ease your way out, because it will encourage other bad habits and wrong attitudes. Don’t join the club. Instead use all your time to make opportunities. 8 Fill the Seats on the Ferris Wheel Page 4 of 13 Make Sure Everybody Knows What You sell That sounds like pretty elementary advice, and maybe you’ve heard it too many times already. But I have run into a lot of salesmen who never tell people – other than close friends and relatives – what they do for a living. If your sales are to business or industry, you may think this is not important or that it can’t help you. I say it can. Remember the law of 250. People are always talking about whom they know and what they do. I know of a salesman who sold a $120,000 computer service because a friend told another friend about him. I believe that every salesperson ought to be proud of his or her profession. So make sure everybody knows you’re a salesman and they know what you sell. 9 Girard’s Toolbox. I had to name the tools that work best to build my business, the list would probably not surprise you by this time. It would obviously include the telephone, my files, the mail, my business cards and my birddogs. Satisfied customers are the best bet for future sale. I use a diary to remind me when to call back long-term prospects. • Start Building Your File Now. When you make your own card file, put down everything you notice about a customer or a prospect. I mean everything: kids, hobbies, travels, whatever you learn about the person, because they give you ways to talk to the prospective customer about things in which he is interested. And that means you can disarm him by leading him into subjects that take away his mind off what you are trying to do, in which of course is to trade him your product for his money. There is nothing more effective in selling anything than getting the customer to believe, really believe that you like him and care about him. If you happen to know the birthday of a customer, his wife, and his kids, you will have them in your prospect file. You can imagine the impact if you send them birthday cards. If you are selling anything more valuable than groceries or necktie, the cost of doing that will be more than paid for by the way it reminds them of you in the most favorable light. A Small but Powerful Selling Tool Just every salesman has business cards. But I know a lot of them who don’t go through a box of 500 in a year. I go through that many in a good week. I hand them out wherever I am. I leave them with the money when I pay the cheque in restaurants. I have even been known to throw cards out by the handful during big moments at sport events. You may think that this is strange behavior, but I am certain that it got me some sales. I have lot of interest in buying from me, because throwing cards is an unusual thing to do, and people don’t forget thing like that. The point is that wherever there people, there are prospects, and if you let them know you are there and what you do, you are building your business. Page 5 of 13 Try to Sell Everybody You Talk To It is like passing out cards to everybody you meet or do business with. Somebody needs a car, and your card can get handed around a lot until it gets to somebody who is in the market at that moment. And there is your sale. What do cards cost? Practically nothing. Say $9 a thousand. But if you get only one sale for every thousand cards you pass out, the cost doesn’t mean a thing, because the odds are overwhelming on your side. Effective use of business cards – which means carrying bunches of them all the time and giving them out everywhere – is one of the cheapest business building tools you can have. O. K., but business is not love – it means money. Now suppose that every one of those 250 people who like you and have your card also have an incentive to get other people buy from you – an incentive like money or free dinner or free service. That is basically what I mean when I talk about birddogs. You can figure out a lot of ways of putting that combination together yourself to build winners. But we’re going to talk about the ways I have built my birddog system to the point where it produces maybe 550 car sales for me every year at very small out-of-pocket cost. If you have a telephone, a mailbox, a pen, a file of prospects, and business cards, you have the most valuable tools in the world for doing business. I guarantee you that the proper use of these simple tools can make you a star selling professional. Fill your toolbox-and use it all the time 10 Getting Them to Read the Mail If They Bought Before, They are your Best Prospects Now The mail may be your most important means of contacting your prospects and customers on regular basis. The top people on your list, the ones who have bought from you before and are satisfied with the relationship, will more than pay for the extra effort and money it takes to attract their attention. Those people will come back to you if keep reminding them that you exist, in a nice way. May be you have only 200 or 300 of those prospects. Your time is limited and your money is limited. So you are making an investment in mailing that provide you with personal leverage. By making effective use of your time and money in planning and executing attractive, personal mailings, you get the next best thing: You get something of yourself into their homes, causing them to remember you, and, at the right time, buy from you. That is the kind of high- quality, personal investment leverage we should try for all the time in the selling profession. Get your name in front of your prospects whenever you can – and get it into their homes. 11 Hunting with Birddogs Nobody in the business is so good at it that he can’t use help. I’ll take all the help I can get, and I’ll pay whatever it is worth to get it. May be you don’t use the term “birddog,” but whatever you call them, they are people who send other people to me to buy cars. And I pay them for those sale- $25 apiece- but not until they are sold. I have a strict rule about paying birddogs. I pay them. I don’t stall them. Keep Your Promise – They’ll Love you for It. The point is that when you have told people you will pay them for a sale, you have made them a promise. You have given them your word. If you “stiff” them, you become a liar and a cheat. Try that on 250 people and see what happens. Where do I find birddog? I find them in the same ways that you will. I am going to tell you in detail how I get them and keep them. Everybody Can Be Your Birddog. Page 6 of 13 The process started for me with the question: Whom do I know that would like to get $25 for sending me a sale? I don’t know any Rockefellers, but I know some people who earn pretty big money, and I cannot think of anybody I know who would be glad to pick up extra $25 for sending me a customer. I once paid to a fee to a brain surgeon whose biggest money problem is storing it. And I have several ministers who send me a lot of $25 business. When a make a sale and the customer takes delivery of his car, the last thing I do as he drives out is put a stack of my business cards along with the one that explain my birddog arrangement in the glove compartment of the car. A few days later, when he gets my thank – you card, he also gets another stack of cards. He is now a birddog. He is also on my mailing list, so at least once a year he gets a mailing that includes my birddog recruiting kit as a reminder that my offer is still good. A satisfied customer is obviously an easy source of other business. If my deal was good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for his friends and his relatives, he has to figure. That goes to anybody. But when I find that my customer is somebody who is a leader, somebody that other people listen to, I make an extra effort to make him a good deal and to recruit him as a birddog. Sometime people won’t take money from me for sending me sales. It bothers them for lots of reasons. In some cases, they really are grateful to me for giving them a good deal on their own car, so they think I have done enough for them and they’re glad to send other people to me. A few of those people even return the $ 25 cheque when I send it to them. If they do, I call them and apologize for whatever is bothering them. But that does not happen too often, you can bet, because $25 is $25. There are some problems with paying people cash. In some places, it is against law. But I do know that in a lot of places you can give people gifts or free services where you can’t give them cash. What is necessary in developing a big and effective system of birddogs is to make it worth their while. I have found that $25 or it’s equivalent is the minimum amount that will work on most people. Less than that, and there will only be a trickle of extra business. But I don’t want people to feel guilty about getting paid for doing me a favor. I want them to feel rewarded and I want to feel obligated, but I don’t want them to feel guilty. Mostly they don’t, though, it is not a big problem. How to Pay If They Won’t Take Cash When people tell me that they don’t want to be paid cash for sending me sales, I handle it in a different way. If somebody is sent in a by a birddog, I make it a practice of phone the birddog and thank him and tell him that I am putting his $25 cheque in the mail. If he says he is not allowed to accept money because of some employer rule for any other reason, I tell him that I would like to do something else nice for him. Then I contact a good restaurant in Detroit where I know the management, I ask them to send my birddog a card entitling him and his wife to be my guest for dinner. Or if he is not the sort who would like that, I may send him a note telling him that he can bring his car into our place for a certain amount of free service. I offer these ideas to you as ways of getting around whatever legal or other problems you may have in your area that would stop you from paying cash for your birddog business. Mostly, though, I have found that if I send somebody a check at his home address, there is no problem. Now I realize that in some fields it’s not ethical to reward a birddog financially, but that’s no reason to use them. When you ask a customer for a referral you’re actually doing him a favor. Here’s how. Most people like to help others; they enjoy passing along a good tip about a great deal or a nice salesman. If you treated them right they’ll be happy to tell their friends about you. If the friend also buys, it gives the original customer a good feeling that he was able to help a friend. Also, almost everyone feels a need to toot his own horn now and then. Bragging about what a good deal they got fills that need. When a friend buys on their recommendation it reinforces their belief in their own good judgment. Let’s face it, you and I do the same thing for the people we like – our doctor, dentist, barber and painter. So why hesitate to ask others to help you build your business? You both benefit. Page 7 of 13 Bird-dogging Your Birddogs Once you have made contact and have passed the word about the fee you pay and left them with your cards, you still have to keep in touch. When things are slow and I have some spare time, I am likely to go through my birddog file just to see who has not been sending me any business. Then I will call up and shoot the beeze and ask how come I have not been sending them any $25 checks lately. They may just have forgotten. If they were new birddogs, they may not got into the habit of suggesting buying a new car from me. Some of my birddogs steady stream of prospects, because they sense opportunities whenever they arise. Others need to be prodded at the beginning of the relationship, and even long afterward. It is a matter of how easy or how hard it is other people to develop the habit of reacting at the right moment to earn that extra $25 from me. Everybody has to develop new habits. It took me a while to develop the sense of who can produce extra business for me. I keep finding people all the time, because I have learned to look for people all the time, wherever I am. I go to my health club after business hours, and I make sure that the locker room attendant and the masseur know what I do and have some of my cards. I don’t make big thing out of it, and I get business from other members without birddogs. But you always have to watch for opportunities, and sometimes there are certain kinds you might not expect in advance. A Freebie That Works for You A lot of time you will be approached by police and sheriffs and firemen to by tickets for their social functions. Even the mailmen have them in some places. I am sure you have the sense not to turn down people like that for a lot of reasons, especially if you are in business. But I have found that they make first-rate birddogs. So when I get the chance, I’ll buy their tickets and offer them a stack of my cards and tell them about my $25 policy. The same works for fraternal organizations. When their people come around selling ads in their program books of their affairs, I always by an ad. But I don’t go for those reads: COMPLIMENTS OF A FRIEND. Mine always say something like that read: BEST WISHES FROM JOE GIRARD, MEROLLIS CHEVROLET. I send a stack of cards to the person who solicited the ad. And if I have the time, I go to their functions, because they are good places to meet people and let them know what I do for a living. I know that a lot of other people, including dentists and insurance salesmen, do the same thing. But that only proves that it is a good way to build your business. Anybody talks to other people every day in his work can be birddog. And keep in mind especially those people who traditionally don’t make much money. I have heard other salesmen complain sometimes about birddogs when they first start to use them. One fellow said to me, “I started giving out cards a month ago, and I have not got a single sale from any of them.” My answer is always the same: Just be patient. You have planted the seeds. Just keep on planting. There will be plenty to harvest. Last year, as I said, I sold about 550 cars through birddogs. A lot of salesmen would have been happy to have that as their total sales for the year. And I don’t know how many customers I sold through word of mouth that started with cards I passed out to birddogs. The chain is endless if you keep it going. And the cost is almost nothing, because it is all extra business. Paying $25 can make you hundreds, but you really have to pay it to get that payoff. 12 Knowing What You’re Doing – and Why You Don’t Have to Close Better to Sell More Remember that we have been talking about planting and harvesting. We have been talking about the odds and probabilities of business. Now there is no way you can doubt that if you do everything in the face-to-face selling situation exactly the way you have always done it before, you will sell a lot more if you do it a lot more. We are now talking about nothing about quantity. Page 8 of 13 I am deadly serious. If you get twice as many people to come to you every day, you will sell twice as many people you used to. If your normal pace to sell 50 percent of your customers, and you have two a day, you get one sale per day. That is basic arithmetic. You don’t have to have high school diploma to figure that out. But now let’s go to some bigger numbers. If you get four customers a day and do the same thing as before, you still sell only half of them. But now you will be getting two sales a day. You have just double your output. You think I am trying to be funny, but I am not. I am deadly serious, as I said before. Well, let me tell you something: You can keep it up. For sure, you can get more people to come in to see you. And even if they only buy as often and as much as before, you will be on a permanent hot streak compared to your usual volume. How to boost your “kill rate" is another story, and we’ll get to some part of it. Work Smart- Not Hard I am not joking. What I am saying is that the way to get the job done is to decide what it is – every day. I mean you must – I don’t say should- take some time every morning and decide what you are going to do that day. Then you must do it. Don’t get me wrong. I am not sitting here and preaching about glories of hard work. I don’t believe in hard work. I believe in smart work. I believe in effective work – work that works. Lose One Day – But Not 250 But I want to say one thing about my work schedule. If I get up in the morning and feel depressed for some reason and I can’t shake it, I may decide not to go to work at all. And I don’t recommend not working as a way to build business. But sometimes you know you just aren’t going to be worth anything on the job. If you go in on that day, you may wind up making a bad mistake or getting into fight with somebody that you cost you 250 people. If you really are convinced that you won’t do anybody any good by going to work for a morning or an afternoon or a whole day, then don’t do it. Because you don’t want to carry dissatisfaction of any kind into your place of business. They can be like a contagious disease. If those feelings keep up more than a day, you have got problems that I can’t help you solve. But if they happen just once in a while, then plan your day to do something else. One sure way to get over the dissatisfaction of a bad day is to review that day and try to understand why what happened to you happened. I do that at the end of every working day. I replay the day, examining every sale I made and every one I lost. That’s right. I don’t sell everybody I see. Which is why I spend so much of my money and energy making sure that I will see a lot of people. I play the percentage I recommend that you play. Maybe I sell only half the people I see in a day. But that usually means that I see at least ten people and sell at lest five of them. I have been averaging better than five cars per day every day in recent years, not because I have high kill rate but because I have a high prospect rate. But I go over every contact I made during the day. What did I say to that fellow that finally made him buy? Why did the other guy really not buy? Was he just shopping for sport? Or is that too easy way to explain away some mistake I made? When I first began to do this customer-to customer analysis of my day, if I couldn’t think of a mistake I made, I would sometime call up my customer I lost. I would tell him who I was and why I was calling. People usually want to help you. I’d say I was trying to learn the business and learn from my mistake. Incidentally, my reply to each day is not is not just my idea. Some of the greatest and most successful people in history developed this habit and attribute much of their success to it. I know that for the time it takes me I have been rewarded handsomely. Want some good advice? Try it. Page 9 of 13 People sometimes think that they know more about themselves and their feelings and reactions than they actually do. And there is nothing more important to learn about yourself than the difference between the way you see something and the way the guy on the other side of the deal see it. Because you never want to be on the other side. Your success in winning the war comes with narrowing and finally eliminating the gap between you and the customer. You want both of you on the same side, and what this means that you have to do maneuvering to get you both on the same side, whatever tools and methods you use to do it. Knowing What You Lost Helps You Win I always want to why I lost every sale I lost. And I hardly ever accept “ I was just looking ” as the answer, because if somebody takes my time and his to come all the way over to our place just to look, he is already pertly sold. And I want to know why I did not get him totally sold. I think that this is a rule that is good maybe 95 percent of the time in automobile selling. And probably good most of the time in every kind of selling. If some comes in and “just looking,” he is enough interest to be sold most of the time. So if you let him “just look” every time, you are probably not getting nearly your share of sales. And if you try and fail, don’t charge it off in your mind to “just looking”. Analyze your performance in the confrontation and try to see where you failed to convert him. Because chances are you did fail. Just keep in mind that somebody who is “just looking” may really be saying that he is scared of you your ability to grit him to part with his money – even if it is for something he really wants to buy. One thing that I have found - it is something nobody likes to admit – is that maybe somebody else sell a person if you can’t. A lot of business requires that a salesman turn over a customer to somebody else in the place before they let him walk. 13 Honesty Is the Best Policy When I say that honesty is the best policy, I mean exactly that: It’s a policy and the best one you can follow most of the time. But a policy, as I mean it, is not a law or a rule. It is something you use in your work when it is in your best interest. Telling the truth usually is in your best interest, of course, especially if it is about something that a customer can check up on later. You never get caught by telling the truth – or making a prospect feel good when you stretch it. 14 Facing the Customer I make a lot of money, and I have for years. And I like good clothes, and wear them whenever I can. But one place I do not wear my best clothes is to work. Don’t get me wrong. I dress neat and clean. Nothing cheap. I believe a salesman should look as much as possible like the people to whom he sells. And in my area they are mostly working people. They work in the factories and offices around here, and they work hard for their money, and they are not in the top brackets. So if they walk in and met by a guy with clothes that look expensive, they get even more scared than they were before. Look Like You’re Their Kind of Guy When they see me for the first time, they relax a little. Because I wear a sport shirt and slacks. I never wear clothes that will antagonize my customers and make them feel uneasy. You may think I am too much of this point, but let me assure you that I am not. People complain to me about other salesmen. So it’s important. I put up sales award certificates and plaques, so people will know that they are dealing with a top salesman. After all, they think, if this fellow sells so