Brian Tracy - The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible

The Psychology
of
Selling

2004 by Brian Tracy

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tracy, Brian.
The psychology of selling : how to sell more, easier, and faster than you ever thought possible / by Brian Tracy.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7852-1200-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7852-8806-0 (trade paper)
ISBN 978-0-7852-7910-5 (ie)
1. SellingPsychological aspects. 2. SellingHandbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title.
HF5438.8.P75T73 2004
658.86'01'9dc22

2004026834

Printed in the United States of America

09 10 11 12 13 QW 18 17 16 15 14

This book is dedicated to my friends, colleagues, students, and
practitioners of the great art of selling, to those men and women
who bravely go where no one has gone before to make the sales
upon which our companies and nations depend. You are the true
heroes and heroines of our competitive enterprise system.

CONTENTS

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are
fashioned all plans created by man.

NAPOLEON HILL

T he purpose of this book is to give you a series of ideas, strategies, and techniques that you can use immediately to make more sales, faster and more easily than ever before. In the pages ahead, you will learn to get more out of yourself, and out of your selling career, than you may have ever thought possible. You will learn how to double, triple, even quadruple your sales and your income within a few months, or as little as a few weeks.

This book is the written version of my internationally successful The Psychology of Selling audio sales program. Since this program was originally produced, it has been translated into sixteen languages and is used in twenty-four countries. It is the best-selling professional sales training program in history.

Become a Millionaire!

According to follow-up research on graduates of the audio program, more salespeople have become millionaires by listening to and applying these ideas than by any other sales training process ever developed. Using this material, I have personally trained more than five hundred thousand salespeople worldwide, from thousands of companies and from virtually every industry. It really works!

My Own Story

I did not graduate from high school. Instead, as a young man, I went off to see the world. I worked at manual-labor-type jobs for a few years until I had enough money to begin traveling. I worked my way, on a Norwegian freighter, across the North Atlantic, and then traveled by bicycle, bus, truck, and train around Europe, across Africa, and eventually to the Far East. I never missed a meal, but I did postpone a lot of them indefinitely.

When I could no longer find a manual-labor job, in desperation, I got into sales. It seems that most of the decisions we make in life are similar to backing up in the night and hitting something, and then getting out to see what it was. In this case, for me, it was a sales job.

It seems that most of the decisions we make in life are similar to backing up in the night and hitting something, and then getting out to see what it was.

Basic Training

I was hired on straight commission and got the three-part sales training program: Heres your cards; heres your brochures; theres the door! Armed with this training, I began my sales career cold-calling, knocking on office doors during the day and knocking on residential doors in the evenings.

The person who hired me couldnt sell. But he told me that sales is a numbers game. He said that all I had to do was talk to enough people, and eventually I would find someone who would buy. We call this the mud against the wall method of selling. (If you throw enough mud against the wall, somewhere, somehow, some of it will stick.) This wasnt much, but it was all I had.

Then someone told me that sales was really not a numbers game. Rather, it was a rejection game. The more rejections you collect, the more sales you are likely to get. Equipped with this advice, I ran from place to place so I could get rejected more often. They said that I had the gift of gab, so I used it. When a person seemed uninterested, I would speak louder and faster. But even though I hurried from prospect to prospect, and spoke louder and faster to each person, I was barely holding on by my fingernails.

The Turning Point

After six months of struggling, making just enough sales to pay for my single room in a small guesthouse, I finally did something that changed my life: I went to the most successful guy in our company and asked him what he was doing differently from me.

I wasnt afraid of hard work. I would get up at five or six in the morning, prepare for the day, and be waiting in the parking lot at 7:00 AM when my first prospects came to work. I worked all day long, going from office to office and company to company. In the evenings, I would knock on residential doors until nine or ten at night. If the light was on, I would make the call.

The top salesman in my office, who was only a couple of years older than me, had a completely different approach. He would roll into the office about nine oclock. A few minutes later, a prospect would come in, and theyd sit and talk. After a few minutes conversation, the prospect would take out his checkbook and write a check for our product.

The salesman would then go out that morning and make another couple of sales, and then have lunch with another prospect. In the afternoon he would make another couple of sales and then perhaps have a drink or dinner with another prospect. He was selling five and ten times as much as me, or anyone else in our office, and he hardly seemed to be working at all.

Training Makes the Difference

It turned out that he had worked for a Fortune 500 company when he was younger. That company had spent sixteen months training him intensively in the process of professional selling. With those skills he could then go to work for any company or industry and sell any product or service in virtually any market. Because he knew how to sell, he could sell circles around people like me, even though he was working half the time or less. This discovery changed my life.

When I asked him what he was doing differently, he said, Well, show me your sales presentation, and Ill critique it for you.

That was my first problem. I had no idea what a sales presentation looked like. I had heard that there was such a thing, but I had never seen one myself.

I said, You show me yours, and Ill show you mine.

He was patient and polite. He said, OK, here is a basic sales presentation from beginning to end. He then walked me, step-by-step, through a sales presentation for our product.

Instead of using a speech or clever one-liners to get attention or to overcome resistance, he asked a series of logical questions, from general to specific, that were ideally suited to a genuine prospect. At the end of this series of questions, it had become perfectly clear to the prospect that he could use and benefit from our product. The final question was simply to close the sale.