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.
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:
Step #2: Train. A good training program must be both theoretical and applied. To train effectively:
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:
Step #4: Manage your time with discipline. You should treat time like money and use it wisely. To do this:
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:
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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...
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.
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.)
There are seven ways to...
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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.
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...
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?
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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.
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.
Approaching people you know isn’t an imposition because...
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.
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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.)
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).
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.
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...
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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.
To assess your current sales processes, ask yourself:
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...
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.
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