Book SummarySell or Be Sold, by Grant Cardone

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Sell or Be Sold

In Sell or Be Sold, sales consultant and trainer Grant Cardone shares his 25 years’ worth of experience working as a salesman and his life’s worth of experience selling in a personal context.

Whether or not you’re officially employed as a salesperson, your happiness and even survival depend on your selling ability. Anything you do to get your own way—influencing, persuading, negotiating, or even just communicating—is selling. For example, you have friends because you successfully convinced people to spend time with you.

Becoming a Master Salesperson

Since sales is so important to success, it pays to get good at it. There are five steps to becoming a master salesperson:

Step #1: Commit. Put all of your time, resources, and energy toward sales and success. To do this:

• Mythbust your negative perception of sales (if necessary). You might have heard that selling is unstable or dishonest, but in reality, selling is a noble, respectable, important job that has several benefits such as control over your own hours and good money.
• Get over your dislike of selling (if necessary). The only reason people don’t like doing things is that they’re bad at them—feeling incompetent and powerless makes them uncomfortable. Once you learn how to sell (in step #2), you’ll feel perfectly comfortable.
• Stop looking for and eliminate other career options. This will force you to commit.
• Regularly remind yourself of your commitment. For example, Cardone wears a pin that says “100%” to remind himself of his commitment.
• Think of success as a duty, obsession, and ethical requirement—if you ever see success as something optional or that will “just happen,” you’ll never reach it.
• Take responsibility. Decide that whether or not someone buys is completely dependent on you, not them. Don’t make excuses or attribute things to luck.
• Take “massive action.” When you want something, put in at least 10 times more effort than you think you need, and be unreasonable and insane. For example, when Cardone was working on a client, he called him 15 times in 72 hours even though the client never returned his previous calls.

Step #2: Train. A good training program must be both theoretical and applied. To train effectively:

• While you’re driving, listen to audio programs about sales. Choose programs with concrete information (for example, how to handle an objection) rather than motivational programs.
• Role-play scenarios that make you uncomfortable or that you have trouble succeeding in.
• Take notes or record your interactions with customers so you can analyze them.
• Consult Cardone’s resources such as his video segments, other books, or coaching (payment required).
• Learn about your products. You need to be able to answer questions about the product and tell customers about its features and value proposition.
• Train every day, ideally before and during the day so you can use your training as a warm-up for real sales situations.
• When you lose a customer to a competitor, analyze why the competitor or product might have appeared more attractive than your offer. You can even ask a colleague, ideally a manager, to call the client and ask why she didn’t buy from you.

Step #3: Adopt a positive attitude. People are motivated by the need to feel good, and they prioritize positive interactions over product features, which means that if your attitude is good, you can sell products that are more expensive and less cutting-edge than your competitors’. To adopt your positive attitude:

• Avoid negative influences such as media and people with bad attitudes.
• Practice eliminating negative thoughts. Actions stem from thoughts, so if you can control your thoughts, you’ll be able to control the actions that shape your life. Try the following exercise: For 24 hours, don’t let any negative thoughts enter your mind and don’t do any negative actions (such as badmouthing). If you don’t last 24 hours, write down the negative thought or action that derailed you and restart the exercise.

Step #4: Manage your time with discipline. You should treat time like money and use it wisely. To do this:

• Connect with customers at lunch. (Don’t go for lunch with your coworkers—they’re never going to buy anything from you.) Either schedule a lunch meeting with customers or go to restaurants and strike up conversations with people who could become potential customers.
• Avoid things that waste your time such as calling your family, daydreaming, or taking coffee breaks. You’ll have time to relax and to spend with your loved ones after you’ve become successful.
• Use social media efficiently. Social media can be a time-waster, but having a presence is critical to sales because it allows customers to connect with you. Today, most people’s first step to making a purchase is to research it online. Take your social media reputation seriously, and respond promptly and professionally to any negative reviews.

Step #5: Sell to yourself first. Before you can sell someone on something, you first have to sell yourself on it, because if you don’t believe in the product, buyers will sense your lack of conviction and won’t make a purchase. To sell yourself:

• Be unreasonable in your conviction that what you’re selling is superior. Never even let it cross your mind that there might be something out there that can compete with your product.
• Ignore any negatives associated with your product and concentrate only on the positives.
• Be willing to buy the product yourself at the price you’re asking. If you believe that the product is guaranteed to work out (as you will need to, to be sold on it), then you should have no trouble using all your savings or going into debt to buy it.
• **Believe that not buying your product from you...

Sell or Be Sold Summary Introduction

When most people hear the word “salesperson,” they think of professionals in stores who encourage them to buy things. In fact, everyone is a salesperson—whenever you need to influence, persuade, negotiate, or even just communicate with someone, you are selling. The best salespeople sometimes don’t even use that job title—instead, they’re negotiators, politicians, coaches, and so on.

Whether or not you’re officially employed as a salesperson, your happiness and even survival depend on your selling ability. If you can’t convince someone that you’re worth spending time with, you won’t have any...

Sell or Be Sold Summary Part 1: Individual Foundations | Chapter 1: Become a Master Salesperson

The first thing you have to do to become a master at sales is to commit to the craft and develop your work ethic and skills, which we’ll cover in Part 1. Then in Part 2, we’ll cover the application of this mastery when confronted with a customer.

There are many salespeople in the world, but only a few of them are good, and only a handful are masters. Masters can predict customers so well they appear to have mind-reading skills, are unaffected by recessions, and have complete control over their lives—they work for whomever they want, sell whatever they want, and make as much money as they want. In this chapter, we’ll look at the steps to becoming a master.

Step #1: Commit

The first step to mastering sales is to commit to the art by putting all of your time, resources, and energy toward it. As soon as you commit, you’ll see results. (When you’re not committed, on the other hand, the results are delayed or don’t come through at all.)

• For example, when Cardone decided to commit to sales, he automatically started making more money as well as dressing better, picking up good habits, changing his language, and gaining more energy.

There are seven ways to...

Sell or Be Sold Summary Chapter 2: Sell Yourself First

In the previous chapter, we looked at four steps to becoming a master salesperson. Now, it’s time to start selling—to yourself. Before you can sell something to someone, you first have to sell yourself on it, because if you don’t believe in the product, buyers will sense your lack of conviction and won’t make a purchase.

To sell yourself:

1. Be unreasonable in your conviction that what you’re selling is superior. Never even let it cross your mind that there might be something out there that can compete with your product. Your belief should be unshakeable in the face of customer objections, and if you’re truly convinced, no one will even challenge you.

• For example, the people who work at Apple stores love Apple products. None of them would even consider buying a PC.

2. Ignore any negatives associated with your product and concentrate only on the positives. Every week, make a list of why you (and others) should own the product.

3. Be willing to buy the product yourself at the price you’re asking because you think the product is worth every penny. Expense is no excuse. If you believe that the product is guaranteed to work out (as you will need to, to be...

Shortform Exercise: Sell Yourself

You need to sell yourself on your product before you can sell it to anyone else.

Consider a product you sell or would like to sell. What are some of its benefits?

Sell or Be Sold Summary Part 2: Customer Foundations | Chapter 3: Connect With Customers

In Part 1, we worked on ourselves. Now, we’ll work on our customers, and in this chapter, we’ll first learn how to find customers and then three steps to connecting with them.

Finding Customers

Most salespeople focus the majority of their efforts on trying to sell to people they don’t know, and companies advertise to strangers and people who will never buy their product.

In fact, it’s far easier to sell to people you know, such as family, friends, and past customers, for two reasons:

1. They already know you. Your family and friends like you, know what you sell because they’re interested in your life, and want you to be successful. Your past customers like familiarity and trust you, so always keep in touch with them.

2. You already know them. You know their expectations and what they like.

• For example, one day Cardone got a new product that he knew one of his long-time customers would love. Cardone asked him to sign the buyer’s order without even telling him what the product was. The customer signed it, confident that Cardone would never mislead him, and he was right—he loved the product.

Approaching people you know isn’t an imposition because...

Shortform Exercise: Assess Your Network

It’s easier to sell to people you already know.

Who are three people you know but aren’t close to? Consider colleagues, past customers, old roommates, members of groups you belong to, people who went to the same school as you, and so on.

Shortform Exercise: Establish Trust

Customers need to trust you before they buy from you, and they trust what they can see rather than what they hear.

Think of a product you sell or would like to sell. How could you facilitate on-the-spot customer research about the product? (For example, you might offer to look up a competitor’s price for a customer on your phone.)

Sell or Be Sold Summary Chapter 4: Money

Once you’ve built a relationship with the customer and have her interested in a product, you’ll undoubtedly have to address money. In this chapter, we’ll look at some myths about money, price objections, and the phenomenon of “second money” (it’s easier to get people to spend more once they’ve already bought something).

Mythbusting Money

There are two myths associated with money that you need to be aware of when selling:

Myth #1: There’s a shortage. This is untrue—if we averaged all the money on the planet, everyone would have a net worth of $1 billion. If you don’t have your billion, it’s because you have the wrong attitude. Additionally, if there ever was a shortage of money, the government could print more.

Myth #2: People don’t like to spend. In fact, people do like to spend money because it lets them show off. U.S. culture is about consumerism and competition, and Americans like to buy things with an audience. The more people spend, the more fun they have, and the more they’ll like what they bought.

Price Objections

Now that we’ve cleared up two myths about money, let’s tackle one that’s more specific to sales: the myth that the major reason...

Sell or Be Sold Summary Part 3: Sales Processes | Chapter 5: Improve and Implement Sales Processes

In Parts 1 and 2, we learned how to work on ourselves and our customers to improve our sales game. In this part, we’ll learn how to improve existing sales practices and learn a universal five-step sales process that works for almost any industry.

Improving Existing Sales Processes

To assess your current sales processes, ask yourself:

• Are customers complaining about how long it takes to buy something?
• Are customers resisting you?
• Are you getting low profit per transaction? (Are customers only buying your inexpensive products, not your pricier ones?)

If you answered yes to any of these questions, use the following steps to improve your processes:

1. Shorten them. Many organizations have 10-12-step processes that take a long time to execute. Customers want to get in and out fast and don’t want to be forced to spend time with someone they don’t like (such as a salesperson), so the process should only take as long as a customer needs to become comfortable making a purchase.

2. Modernize them. Most sales advice is ineffective or 50 years out of date. Sales processes need to take into account the fact that today it’s easier to access information, people...

Shortform Exercise: Practice the Five-Step Sales Process

Cardone provides a five-step sales process.

The first step of the sale process is to greet the customer. Write down what you would say and do when a customer first walks into your place of business.