Harry Browne - The Secret of Selling Anything

THE SECRET OF SELLING ANYTHING 2008
by Harry Browne.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information, contact: PLWBrowne@HarryBrowne.org

Internet edition: 2008

How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation (1970)
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973)
You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis (1974)
The Complete Guide to Swiss Banks (1976)
New Profits from the Monetary Crisis (1978)
Inflation-Proofing Your Investments (with Terry Coxon, 1981)
Investment Rule #1 (1985)
Why the Best-Laid Investment Plans Usually Go Wrong (1987)
The Economic Time Bomb (1989)
Why Government Doesnt Work (1995, 2003)
Fail-Safe Investing (1995, 2003)
The Great Libertarian Offer (2000)
Liberty A to Z (2004)
2000+ Libertarian Quotes (2007)
Investment Strategy in an Uncertain World (2008)
Freedom The American Way (2008)

This book is a compilation of two unpublished manuscripts (The Secret ofSuccess and Selling is Easy) written by Harry Browne in 1966 and 1969. He was thirty-three and thirty-six years of age at the time and a sales consultant and lecturer in the Los Angeles area.

He had twenty years of successful selling and sales management behind him. He had written folders and booklets on salesmanship and economics. He had authored the courses The Art of Profitable Living and The Economics of Success which had received excellent market acceptance in Southern California. His weekly newspaper column, The American Way, was being published in 110 newspapers. And he was in demand as a speaker, consultant and writer all of which had been accomplished with no more than a high school education.

Harry was not the stereotypical hard-driving, constantly-on-the-go success seeker, however. In fact, he had found a way to make an unusually good income as a salesman while working only fifteen to twenty hours per week. This allowed him the luxury of enjoying his non-professional interests classical music, opera, good food and wine, sports, television, and writing.

Because he had never wanted to be an average salesman, he had paid particular attention to the top successes he had met along the way observing them closely to determine the nature of success. In so doing, he had come to understand why people buy and the world around him. And he had found that the principles he had observed applied to any type of success-seeking whether or not in the sales field.

Every word in this book was written by him from his own successful experience. And although the manuscripts remained unpublished until now it is an example of his ability to communicate to others the knowledge hed gained early on.

I hope you enjoy it!

Best wishes,
Pamela Wolfe Browne

If youve read other selling books, youre probably tired of the false promises that never quite work out. Youre probably tired of being told you can do it if you just believe you can.

Youre probably tired of reading about tricks that made a particular sale tricks that may have been appropriate to a particular situation, but not yours and even if they were appropriate, how would you have thought of them at the right time?

If youve read books on selling before or listened to sales experts, youre probably tired of being pumped with hot air told how you must come alive, be full of enthusiasm, dominate the world around all the things that dont happen to be a part of your basic nature.

Well, this book isnt anything like that. In fact, this book was written to refute many clichs of selling that have been accepted without question for years.

This book will prove to you, I hope, that the stereotyped image of the born salesman is a mistake. You dont have to remake your personality and become super-enthusiastic, super-aggressive, domineering. Not only are those traits not necessary, they are actually a hindrance to making sales.

And you wont have to develop that uncanny ability to come up with the right answer at the right time that super-human knack of having the brilliant flash of insight that is so prevalent in books on selling. Sure, given several days to think about it, the writer of a sales book can always come up with a solution to a sales problem. But how does that help you when confronted face-to-face with a question that must be answered now? This book will show you that you dont need such skills.

This book can truly revolutionize your selling career but only because it will show you that you no longer need to waste your time developing skills that are of no value to a salesman. For example, here are some of the points that will be made in the course of this book:

1. Contrary to the accepted mythology, enthusiasm is not a virtue; it destroys more sales than it creates.
   
2. Positive thinking is an unrealistic fallacy. The salesman who thinks negatively has a far greater chance for success than the so-called positive thinker.
3. Sales success does not come from convincing people to buy things they dont want.
   
4. The salesman who always has an answer for every objection is also probably plugging along with a very low income.
   
5. Extroverts dont make the best salesmen; they are invariably outsold by introverts.
   
6. To be a good salesman, you dont have to be a smooth talker.
   
7. Another all-time sales fallacy is the statement When the going gets tough, the tough get going. When the going gets tough, I usually take a vacation.
   
8. The desire to be able to motivate others is unrealistic and foolish. A really-great salesman will never try to motivate anyone.
   

Perhaps all of this sounds so far removed from what youve heard about selling through the years that you wonder how it could possibly be true. I intend to demonstrate the validity of these statements in two ways.

First, my own experience verifies their worth. Almost invariably, in any selling experience where Ive found myself, I have outsold everyone else around me usually while working far fewer hours.

In addition, Ive seen these principles work for a few others, too a very few, for they are unknown to most people.

But there is nothing mysterious about them and that brings us to a second way in which I will demonstrate their validity. I will prove them to you. We will deal with life logically and carefully in this book. Everything will be proven in terms of the real world as it is in ways we can both understand.

And because these principles are self-evident, you will be able to apply them simply and easily. You will not be told again (for the hundredth time) that if youll just believe them and try them and remove any thought of failure from your mind, they will eventually work for you. No, youre tired of having to approach success in terms of faith.

I will prove the validity of these principles and then you can integrate them into your daily life one at a time, if you so choose. And you will most likely see their effect the moment you try them.