Adventures in Global Selling
Copyright © 2010 Gayle Hickok and Bill Wilson
Smashwords Edition
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter I Introducing This Book
Chapter II Introducing Gayle
Chapter IIIGetting Started in Making Big Sales
Chapter IV Lemonade from Lemons and a Way to Successful Selling
Chapter V Practical Selling and Practical Self-Improvement
Chapter VI Selling in Canada and an Invention I Couldn’t Patent
Chapter VII Bernie
Chapter VIII In Mexico: Condos, Timeshares, and Big Jugs of Lemonade
Chapter IX To Russia, but Forget About Love
Chapter X In Thailand and Mexico Again
Chapter XI Gayle’s Nine “Bes”
This book is Gayle Hickok’s story.
We have written it in the first person.
Introduction
The book you are about to read began a few years ago. One evening Gayle and Bill and some friends were enjoying a meal and a night out at a restaurant near La Paz on Mexico’s beautiful Baja peninsula.
Gayle asked Bill, “How would you like to collaborate on a book about my adventures, a book that would also include lessons from my experiences?” Bill replied, “Let’s do it, the idea’s a great one.” That’s how this book began. Bill’s interviews with Gayle form the book’s backbone. It’s fleshed out here and there with other sources, but the judgments are always Gayle’s. We think we’ve achieved a nice balance between recounting Gayle’s amazing adventures and drawing sales and marketing methods from them.
Each of us takes full responsibility for what you find here. That doesn’t mean we could have done the book on our own. We had a lot of help from others and we want to thank them for it.
Thanks to Kitty Wilson for her editorial skills.
Thanks to Sukey Janes for drawing that “gate selling” diagram.
Special thanks to Jess Kellogg for giving us a lot to write about.
Thanks to Dave St. John and the staff at Elderberry Press.
Thanks to everyone else who made it all happen.
Gayle Hickok
Bill Wilson
Chapter One
Introducing This Book
It was a bright, sunny day in July 1974. I was driving my new Maserati from my Toronto office east to the one in Montreal with my daughter Lisa, then a pert twelve year old but, you know, mentally going on thirty. We were cruising comfortably at a steady 100 mph, when I began a lecture on one of the several subjects that we single dads and their growing daughters have to deal with. The theme of my lectures was almost always the same, how growing daughters should benefit from the accumulated wisdom of their dads.
Lisa knew we were strapped in and she had no place of escape for at least three hours. I’d just launched my lecture when she interrupted.
“Hold it, hold it,” she commanded. “Wait a minute. I need to make you a deal.”
“What do you mean, make me a deal,” I asked. “I’m the boss here.”
“Well,” she went on, “you can just tell me the end of your lecture and I’ll let you know if I need to hear the beginning and the middle.” She was right, I admit, because she’d heard precisely the same thing many times before. After that, we had only condensed versions of our little talks, with an emphasis on fast forwarding to the focus of our discussion.
That conversation in my speeding coupe was just one more proof of the fact that we adults learn from our children, as I certainly have from all five of mine. Now I’m learning from my grandkids. I’m going to apply some of that knowledge by making three points with you.
• • •
First point: In keeping with Lisa’s concept, I’m going to begin my story with the ending, at least as my life has developed so far. I hope from that you’ll decide to explore the beginning and the middle with me.
• • •
Second point: I’m a professional salesman, through and through, and damn proud of it. Oh, yes, I’ve been the manager, owner, vice-president, even president of various business ventures, but the highest compliment you can pay me is “You sure are a good salesman.” I’ve had fun selling. I love selling because it has opened me to new and exciting experiences.
Another thing. I highly respect sales people of both genders, but please excuse me for not referring to folks in our profession as “salespersons.” I love women. They are some of the best in the business. But “salesperson” is a clumsy word. After all, Arthur Miller didn’t name his famous play “Death of a Salesperson.” Sometimes “person” just doesn’t apply. I remember how the town of Woonsocket, Rhode Island was ridiculed after it renamed manholes “personholes” and manhole covers “personhole covers.” So I’ll refer to “people in sales” or “sales people” at times but always to myself as a “salesman.”
• • •
Third point: Throughout my story I’ve sprinkled anecdotes and incidents which I hope will entertain you. Often I’ll be describing sales situations which illustrate an important lesson that I’ve learned, either from others or through my own experiences. Don’t worry, this isn’t another one of those hundreds of “how-to” volumes or “salesmanship” workbooks. My purpose is to stimulate, inform, and inspire you, and if I do those things, I’ll be really pleased that together we’ve accomplished something meaningful and worthwhile.
Chapter Two
Introducing Gayle
I’m a salesman. I’m beginning at what for now is the end of my selling story and I’ll tell it to you in one short paragraph.
I’ve worked and lived all over the world, and now I’m working and living in the best place on the planet, the La Paz area of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. I’m working for a first-rate development company, Lomas del Centenario. Here the air is clear and bright, the temperature is moderate for most of the year, the people are friendly, and the crime rate is low. By a little luck and some design, I arrived here several years ago and doubt I’ll ever leave.
Now then, find out who I am and how I got here. As I’ve told you, the highest compliment anyone can pay me is, “You’re a great salesman!” This book is about how and why I became a successful salesman and cheerfully gave my adult life to selling. You should read it because you and I are alike, we are in sales, along with everybody else. You think, wait a minute, I’m a teacher or a housewife or a doctor or any other occupation light years away from selling. In fact we are all selling.
Let’s face it, teachers are selling themselves and their subject matter to their students. Housewives are selling their husbands on repainting the living room and their kids on taking out the trash. Doctors are selling treatments to their patients. Employers, if they want to keep their employees, are selling themselves to their workforce. Employees, regardless of whether they want to stay with their employers or use their present jobs as stepping stones to other work, are marketing themselves to their employers.
It’s only when some of us become professional sellers that other people set us apart as folks who aren’t quite legitimate. Trust me, I’ve heard all the jokes, the jibes, and the stories about sales people. They make the male of the species out to be pudgy, pushy, and a blusterer. He’s dressed in a loud checked yellow jacket, a rumpled bright green shirt, brown houndstooth slacks ending about two inches above his ankles, argyle socks, and scuffed tan loafers with frayed tassels.
If this clown wears a tie it’s a bold pattern splotched with this morning’s breakfast. If he knows more than the minimum about the product he’s selling it’s an accident. Often he’s less than truthful about what he does know, because he’s too absorbed in making a quick buck, and then moving on to the real business of his life, fast cars, boozing, and chasing women. Our stereotype guy isn’t very bright or well educated. He mangles grammar, recycles a limited vocabulary, and mouths clichés, “Right,” or “You bet, baby.”
There may be, probably are, salesmen like the stereotype. If they are successful it’s in spite of their appearance and attitude. If they are successful it’s because they use selling methods that work. I’m successful partly because I don’t dress or act like the stereotype, but mostly because I and other consistent producers use proven methods. I repeat, this isn’t a methods book, though I’ll share with you some successful selling techniques and methods along the way. I pull together these methods under the heading of nine “Be’s” later on.
• • •
I’m really irked by the notion that people in sales are dim bulbs. That is not my experience with other people in sales. They are at least as intelligent, thoughtful, and well educated as the general population. Speaking for myself, I’ve written course outlines and notes, sales brochures, and other promotional pieces. I’m the author of the pamphlet, “The Five Myths of Mexican Real Estate,” which we distribute at our Lomas del Centenario company seminars in the United States and Canada. Later I’ll give you a condensed version of that pamphlet, my explanation of what Mexico really is, versus the “bandido” and drug-infested image promoted in the media.
I’m the author of a TV documentary script on the global crisis of overpopulation. I argued that unchecked population growth caused or worsened all the dangers bedeviling the experts. I related climate change, food shortages, the lack of clean water, soil depletion, the pressure on natural resources, and the conversion of cropland to housing to the need for population control.
I didn’t endorse coercive population control like China’s but appealed to enlightened self-interest. The script is complete with voice-over dialogue and descriptions of visuals. I wrote it during one of those rare instances in my life when I had some free time and friends in the TV production industry. But I got busy again and never submitted it. In any case the script demonstrates my literacy, and my concern for issues beyond booze, women, and fancy cars. Many people in sales share those concerns.
• • •
Besides a knack for writing, I have the ability and ambition to operate successful businesses. Some I ran myself, others in partnership. Other companies demonstrated respect for my ability by hiring me as a consultant. I liked all those experiences, but they took me away from my first love, selling. I always wanted to return to selling. Whatever I do in the future, I’m determined to allow time and space to be on the front line in sales.
Selling is not just about selling, it’s about opening doors to other adventures and experiences. Look at my life. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of traveling all over the world and I’ve actually lived in Canada, Mexico, the Cayman Islands, England, Australia, Thailand, Russia, the Bahamas, and, of course, all around the United States. I’ve sold Fords, car washes, video games, country club memberships, houses, condos, timeshares, car wash franchises, modular homes, and tire recycling plants. I’ve even sold scientists who possessed dangerous skills on the idea of retiring rather than letting their knowledge fall into the wrong hands. In addition to being a consultant, I’ve been a motivational speaker described as a “walking enthusiasm generator.” My real estate sales course taught at least one member of the class “more in one day than all four years of selling experience.”
If success is measured by the accumulation of this world’s goods, I have my share. I own a respectable amount of real estate, and I have all the toys most men would want. Did I manage to get all this – debt free, in case you’re wondering – by treading the miser’s path to accumulation? Not on your life! I’ve always spent money to make a sale, have fun, or enjoy creature comforts. At one time during what I call my “look at me, baby” phase, I owned two Maseratis, a good thing because one or the other was always in the shop, and a Rolls Royce. Expensive suits were my trademark. Cheap hotels and apartments held no charms for me, and I went high-end as soon as I found my financial feet.
• • •
Far beyond material goods, I value my family. I have a wonderful younger sister, Claudia, who lives in Palm Springs, California. Two marriages blessed me with five children. All of them are grown, and I have watched their development with loving interest over the years. Deborah, my oldest, is married to Phil, a successful realtor and the author of real estate sales books. Scott, my second oldest son, and his wife work with Deborah and Phil in the real estate business. Edward, my oldest son, has been an excellent salesman, too, and now lives with his wife in Hawaii. Steven, the youngest son, lives with his wife in Montana, where he works for Wal-Mart. Lisa, a housewife for most of her adult life, lives in Oregon. All together they’ve presented me with eleven grandchildren, and the grandkids have produced two great grandchildren. So I’ve made my contribution to the propagation of the race! And I’m not done yet!
I’m a contented man, not because of my possessions, or even because of my family. Success has made me happy, but what is success? Here it is: success is the progressive realization of meaningful, worthwhile goals. You can be as successful as I am, or more successful than I, by setting a series of worthwhile goals and moving toward them. Read what I have to say later about this program, then consistently, persistently apply the techniques I present there, and you will succeed. When you succeed in the way I’ll present, you will have something more precious than riches, and that’s peace of mind. That’s what success in life will produce, peace of mind.
Let me repeat this. Success in all the important areas of life will come to people who diligently move toward commendable, constructive goals. Sellers who succeed are almost always ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they have learned how to motivate themselves. Does having peace of mind free them from the minor irritations of life? No, but they realize that the irritations are minor and easily dealt with. Does success mean that they became perfect? No. Does my success make me perfect? Hardly. But I have worked hard to improve my approach to sales, as well as enrich other areas of my life. As a result I love selling more and more every day.
How much do I love selling? I’ve retired twice, grown colossally bored or mentally itchy in a few months, and returned to selling both times. I’m trying to retire again, to my new house with a smashing view of a lovely bay in Mexico. Will it work this time? We’ll see, but if selling lures me again, don’t be surprised. As I told you at the beginning, the highest compliment anyone can pay me is “You’re a great salesman.”
• • •
Now a final word before we look at my life. I’ve had many adventures. Most of them were hugely rewarding, while some were memorable even without any financial or psychic gain, and one or two were terrifying, such as watching a friend’s head blown apart by a pistol shot. I tell all of them as I remember them. Someone else who was there could remember those incidents a little differently. I will tell these stories my way because it’s my life, the life of a salesman.
Chapter Three
Getting Started in Making Big Sales
If you’re wondering when I began selling, keep reading. Before I could sell anything I had to be born, in Terry, Montana, in 1934. Terry is a small town on the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana, in fact the Yellowstone is on the north side, and now Interstate 94 is on the south side. Other than being the county seat and my birthplace, the only other thing Terry had to recommend it was where my father, Thomas, worked at my grandfather’s Ford agency. My father was a car mechanic, or as we would say nowadays, a technician.
I want to pause just for a moment to introduce you to my grandfather, Claude Wagner, a wonderful, talented man. Granddad gave me the inspiration, the security, and the helping hand up that even the best of us need at least once in our lives. He could help financially because he made a great success of that Ford agency.
You’d think that Terry would be too small to support a stand-alone, single make dealership. When I was born the Great Depression was going full blast and a Ford agency in a fairly isolated place like Terry was one of the few money makers around. Granddad’s agency dated from the days of the Ford Model T, the greatest all-time sales maker for one model until the original Volkswagen beetle finally beat its record. Model T sales slowed in the later 1920s, so Ford followed the Model T with the Model A in 1928. The A was an extremely popular car until the really hard times came in 1931.
Then Ford produced the first low-priced V-8 for the 1932 model year. It was a marvel of power and speed, and sold despite the Great Depression. The V-8 was such a hot car the gangsters loved it. John Dillinger, the FBI’s Public Enemy Number One for a time in the 1930s wrote Henry Ford, “Hello Old Pal. You have a wonderful car. It’s a treat to drive one.” Clyde Barrow, the notorious outlaw of Bonnie and Clyde fame, went Dillinger one better. He wrote Ford about how “I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one.” Barrow’s statement wouldn’t pass muster with the grammarians but he got his point across. So Granddad’s agency handled three of the hottest automotive sellers in a row. His location and his ability paid off for him.
Back then, people stayed loyal to their local dealer. They almost had to. People thought highways were great if they were graveled and had two-lane bridges. You just didn’t wander fifty or a hundred miles from home to buy a car, because most roads weren’t good enough and the low-priced cars, at least, weren’t that comfortable. Most people worked long hours and didn’t have the time, so if you had to have some repair work done that you couldn’t do yourself, you went to the nearest dealership.
With twenty or twenty-five percent of the workforce unemployed and many of the employed working for peanuts, most people couldn’t afford a new car. The Great Depression forced a lot of folks to keep their Model Ts or Model As, or other old cars long after they would have traded them. Granddad made money on his service department, keeping those old cars running, even when new car sales slowed.
• • •
World War II saved me from growing up in Terry. My parents – my mother was Alice Hickok – moved in 1942 to Missoula, Montana, briefly, then to what was a little, forested town, Woodinville, not far from Seattle. They were shipyard workers in nearby Kirkland, a Seattle suburb that looks west into the city from across Lake Washington.
After the war my dad became something of a rolling stone. We moved to Port Angeles, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Then we lived in Sequim (pronounced Skwim), near Port Angeles, then back to Port Angeles as Dad worked at different mechanic’s jobs. I bounced around from school to school but got through a year of high school before Mom split from Dad.
Then we – my Mom, sister, and I – moved in with my maternal grandfather. By then he had sold his dealership in Montana but earned money from leasing the building and from his active commercial real estate agency. He specialized in apartments and business buildings. He had a nice house in the Hawthorne Hills section of northeast Seattle with enchanting views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains. He was really the major father figure of my life. For years he drilled into my head, “Go buy corner lots in growing cities,” and “you gotta go into real estate. Go to the University of Washington, study business administration, learn all you can about real estate.”
Granddad’s enthusiasm and purpose in life were responsible, ultimately, for my life in real estate sales. He was an outgoing guy, an outdoorsman who made hunting and fishing trips to Alaska. He was a dedicated patriot who flew the flag on national holidays, but was too old for the service when World War II began. He wanted to do something for his country so he closed his real estate business and took a job as a uniformed guard at Boeing aircraft, where they produced the great B-17 bomber. He was proud of that uniform. After the war he reopened his real estate business.
Now you’re thinking, this is where Gayle goes into sales and makes his millions, if he isn’t making them already. I’d like to tell you that was true, or that I just needed a little grandfatherly advice to get off my newspaper route into something bigger. I’d like to tell you stories similar to those in some salesmen’s autobiographies, for instance that I was selling before I could walk. Would you believe that I took the sheets off my crib mattress and sold them to expectant moms in Terry? No? How about my standing on a street corner at age four hawking the Saturday Evening Post in deep snow while a Montana blizzard howled around me? Or that I was such a super salesman that I repeatedly sold out and ran barefoot through the snowdrifts for more magazines? Huh?
I thought so. Sales had to wait awhile. I graduated from Roosevelt High School, north of Seattle’s University District, in 1952. Then I entered the University of Washington, majoring in business administration. Anyone who went to the University of Washington with me in the years 1952 to 1955 who returns to the campus today discovers more change than continuity. Most former students on the “upper campus” will orient themselves on the magnificent Collegiate Gothic façade of the Suzzallo Library.
The original Suzzallo is much the same but the cool, green plaza in front is gone, replaced by a red brick paving on top of a vast underground parking garage, today’s “Red Square.” Blocky buildings enclose “Red Square,” covering much of what was open space then.
In my day Collegiate Gothic buildings dominated the campus. Many of them went up in the teens, twenties, and thirties. Sure, there were a few buildings in contemporary styles but they didn’t compete for architectural control as they later did.
The feel of the campus was more spacious, relaxed, and at the same time more intimate. The intimacy wasn’t because of the many fewer buildings. There were only about 16,000 of us students, compared to more than 40,000 now. I couldn’t have imagined that kind of growth in the intervening years.
Not many of us concerned ourselves with the university’s prestige. I certainly didn’t. I was a local boy going to the nearest local university and that was about it. In 2008 the university made much over its ranking of 11th among the national public universities in the U.S. News and World Report ratings. It didn’t move up in the 2009 rankings, so scarcely mentioned them. It did celebrate its second place in the Sierra Club’s list of environmentally conscious universities. Greenopia put it on the top of the heap among the “greenest” universities, another cause for celebration. Ratings like that didn’t exist in my day and I doubt that they would have made much difference to me if they had.
In any case I wasn’t a joiner or a big man on campus. Working my way through the university took too much time. By then Granddad had taught me how to play the piano, a skill I supplemented by reading and applying books on chords and practice exercises. My piano playing helped to pay my way through the university. I formed a trio with two classmates, a bass fiddle player and a drummer, and we played calm, gentle, “old ladies” type music for the luncheon meetings of a women’s club. Old ladies! I’ll bet I’m older now than most of the women were then! We thought of them as ancient but the perspective of young men changes as they age.
Music has always been part of my life from my piano playing days. I even enrolled in music appreciation while at the university, not your typical course for a major in business administration. Now I have a nice keyboard and play for parties with friends here in Mexico. But, to go back to my university days, I never graduated. I got married and had to get a job working in a supermarket.
• • •
The so-called Cold War with the Soviet Union and its allies was in full swing then, and I was a prime candidate for the military draft. I didn’t evade the draft but avoided it because my wife and I began a family. In those days if your draft board had a good supply of young unmarried men or young men who were married but without children, the board called them first. The other thing I did was join the Navy Air Reserves at the Sand Point Naval Air Station on Lake Washington. The Navy could have called us up individually but it didn’t.
I was an Airman First Class, not a bad rating, and I didn’t have a bad job, but the job I did have convinced me that I wasn’t made for a military career. I was the flight engineer, and sat between the pilot and co-pilot of our squadron’s first aircraft, the PBY. It wasn’t exactly flying first class and it wasn’t meant to be. On one training exercise I had the flu and couldn’t fly. Another airman took my place. On that exercise the pilot decided to shoot a water landing because he was tired of waiting for a long line of planes to land on the field. In anticipation of a field landing, he’d put the wheels down. Nobody, not the pilot, not the co-pilot, not the flight engineer, not the control tower, remembered or noticed that the landing gear was down. The wheels hit the water, pitched the plane forward, it sank, and the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer were killed.
We had a much more exciting but thank God not fatal episode after the squadron graduated to the PB 442, the Navy’s version of the B-17. One time we were going out on a practice bombing with fifteen recruits on their first flight, tanks full of gas, and bays loaded with bombs. We’d just become airborne when the tower notified us that our starboard landing gear wasn’t up. The hydraulic system had failed, and the landing gear was just flapping around loose.
I went back into the belly of the plane to try to crank the landing gear up manually but it wouldn’t go. Now the problem is, if you try to come in on one good landing gear, the plane will tip, spin around, maybe even cartwheel. The only solution was to try for a belly landing, but first we had to fly out to Puget Sound, jettison our ammunition, and dump all our gas until we had just enough gas left to get back.
The pilot raised our good landing gear, knowing that the bad one would collapse on impact anyway. It was quite a show. We came in as low and slow as we dared. The ground crew laid down fire suppressant foam on the runway, the fire trucks and ambulances were out there, every emergency siren was wailing, and almost everybody at the station was lining the runway. We hit the runway, made a terrible grinding racket, but the plane stayed on the runway and there was no fire. Those fifteen recruits, mostly eighteen-year-olds, sure had a memorable first flight. They were scared green, which isn’t to say that the rest of us considered it a picnic.
After that incident we refused to have the same number, 203, on our replacement plane but that didn’t help us much. I wasn’t on board for this one, but it was at least as big a deal because the plane landed just short of the runway and broke in two. Nobody was hurt but the ground crew was a good month cleaning up the wreckage. Our squadron was rather infamous. By the time of the third wreck I’d decided that the military life wasn’t for me. I got out when my time was up.
• • •
At any event I was only what they called a “weekend warrior,” and I needed more than the scanty air reserve pay and my income from clerking in a supermarket to raise a family. So I asked my uncle, Eugene Wagner, for a job in his Ford dealership in Burien, Washington. Burien is in the Seattle metro area, just south of Seattle. My uncle put me in the parts department where I worked for a time. There was nothing wrong with the parts department work, and I learned a lot about the complexities involved in keeping a car dealership functioning, not to mention keeping cars on the road. But a lot of it was routine and less than exciting.
My mind kept returning to what Granddad said about sales, not real estate sales especially, but selling in general. I remembered what my supermarket manager said, after watching me help customers and point out things they might buy.
“You know,” he said, “you’re a natural-born salesman.”
As you’ll discover later, I don’t accept the belief about “natural born” salesmen. I think that anyone can sell if he or she has the right outlook and determination to succeed. In any case, I’d made it a point to be friendly to our customers. Conversations with those customers made me concerned with meeting their needs, insofar as I could do that with our supermarket stock. What was at least as important, I noticed that the salesmen who visited the supermarket were well dressed, self-assured types who obviously weren’t leading a threadbare existence.
I went to the public library and read books on selling and watched some of the photo slide presentations on selling that they had there. The thing that really stayed with me was this: people rarely buy an object itself, be it a house, a car, or a coffeemaker. They buy objects that involve or project a style of life, a self image, or some life goal that they want to achieve. This reality has come home to me again and again. Like it or not, people don’t buy, say, a house. They buy a “home” that, within their ability to pay, reflects and reinforces the way they live, or believe that they ought to live.
Armed with this insight, a lot of brassy nerve, and the eagerness of a twenty-two year old, I went to my uncle and asked him if I could go into sales. I told him I’d made up my mind to make selling my life’s work. He said, “young people your age don’t usually sell cars,” but hesitantly and reluctantly he let me have a shot at it.
• • •
The car business has changed so much and so many times since I got into it that you have to understand what it was like in 1956. Back then, imports were, as they say, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. One import segment was upscale, of the Rolls Royce and Bentley type, cars priced well beyond what almost everybody could pay. Then there was the low end, the Volkswagen end, made up of cramped, little, underpowered cars that weren’t that much cheaper than a stripped down version of a much roomier Chevy, Ford, or (in those days) Plymouth. I don’t think I’d even seen a Volkswagen then. When I did hear about them, what I heard about was their limited space, ugly shape, slow speed, and loud, unconventional air-cooled engines. They weren’t to be taken seriously.
Practically all car buyers were wedded to one product family. They were Ford, General Motors, Chrysler buyers, or they bought independent makes not belonging to the Big Three. Oh, they might move up within a product line, trade up from a Ford to a Mercury or even a Lincoln, but they stayed in the line. There were a few independent makes around that survived the Great Depression and World War II, Studebaker, Packard, Hudson, Nash, Willys – but they were gone or going. Postwar startups like Kaiser faded pretty quickly. We didn’t worry about them any more than we worried about imports.
Back then we could count on a Ford buyer having brand loyalty, returning to us at the Ford dealership to buy another Ford. Women rarely went into our stores, unless their husbands or some other man accompanied them. Despite that, we knew that women had a say in buying cars, for instance, in how much car the family could afford, in interior features such as easily adjustable seats, and in exterior and interior color combinations.
But the talk on the floor between sales staff and customer was usually man-to-man. There was some dickering over the price of the new car and over the trade-in allowance, but most of the man-to-man talk was about the engine or other mechanical features of the new car. When we did talk money, the talk was mostly about getting the monthly payments down to a level the customer would or could accept.
You may think that salesmen for the Big Three had an easier time of it then with no foreign competition and a high degree of brand loyalty. Also there were no professional bargainers hired to negotiate a price for the real buyer. Consumer Reports “New Car Price Report” that reveals exactly what dealers pay for each car and each option, and how much they receive in cash rebates from the manufacturer, did not exist.
Personal technology opens up a whole new negotiating package for customers. Folks who don’t subscribe to Consumer Reports or use its website can search for detailed information on their Blackberrys and iPhones. Using Twitter, a customer can ask fellow Twitterers known to be good negotiators to keep an eye peeled while he bargains in a showroom. He sends messages about how he’s doing and they respond with advice.
There is now so much pressure on dealers that some of them routinely reveal their exact markup to the customer. The biggest dealer chain, AutoNation, has a website enabling customers to check inventories, list prices, and trade-in quotes for their ZIP code or anyplace else. Nobody dreamed that the customer would have those tools and more at hand when he walked into a showroom.
All that’s nice but it’s hindsight. Back then we didn’t think it was easy, that someone had handed us a good living on a platter. One miscue could send a prospect to General Motors or to another Ford agency. We had to size up the customers quickly and accurately, we had to make a winning first impression, and we had to use our negotiating skills to keep the customers on track until we got their signatures on the sales forms. I didn’t doubt that I could do all of it, and my self-confidence contributed mightily to my success.
The first day I was on duty I walked out to the sales floor in one of my two brand new suits. I was proud to see my name on the chalk board, showing that I was “up” that day. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the car business, the sales people who are on duty on any given day have “ups,” taking turns greeting the customers as they walk through the door. A customer, too, is called an “up.” You take the “up” who walks in when it’s your turn.
My first “up” was a young guy. He saw a 1956 bright red Thunderbird convertible parked on the showroom floor. The T-bird we’re talking about here is the original design, a two-seater with a powerful engine. Ford unveiled it late in 1954 as a 1955 model, rsponding to Chevy’s Corvette, first rolled out in 1953. The Corvette was also a two seater, with a low-slung, fiberglass body. It had the wraparound windshield and swooping, slightly bulbous lines of all the GM products of that time. It looked sporty but it came with the old Chevy “stovebolt” six and a sluggish two speed automatic transmission.
Contrast that with the T-bird, also low-slung on a short wheelbase, but a trimmer, slimmer looking car with a bomb under the hood. Its 215 horsepower V-8 could run rings around the original Corvette. Some called it a banker’s hot rod.
So the car was a stunner. The young guy walked over to it and asked me, “How big is the motor in this car?” Now you have to know that all the other salesmen, older fellows who were dubious about me, were eavesdropping on my talk with the young guy.
“How big is the motor in this car?” he asked
“Well,” I said, gesturing with my hands, “that one is about four feet long and two feet high.”
All the other salesmen were shaking their heads and wringing their hands.
“You’re single, right,” I asked the young guy.
“Yes.”
“You can get a lot of women with this car.”
Now the nuts-and-bolts type salesmen are sure that this is a sale down the drain. They’re thinking that we’re gonna be sued. They know men, even young guys, won’t buy a car from a wiseacre like Gayle. But I went on.
“This car goes really fast. Don’t worry about the motor yet. We’ve got a T-bird parked outside. Let’s go for a ride.”
The first goal was to get them into the demonstrator.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said in a tone that wouldn’t take no for an answer.
We got into that beautiful car and drove down one of Burien’s main drags, Ambaum Boulevard, to a bar that most of my co-workers went after work. They went there to drink a little and relax, but also to check out the girls who frequented the bar. We found a parking place right in front.
“Let’s have a smoke and watch the attention you get,” I said.
Sure enough, within two or three minutes after we lit our cigarettes a couple of real pretty girls got off work and came by, admiring the car. The young guy was startled, he’d never seen anything like it.
“Have you seen the new Thunderbird yet,” I asked the girls.
“No,” they said.
“Come here and have a look, it’s nice,” I told them.
They were impressed and the four of us stood around talking about the car for a while.
On the way back to the dealership I filled the young guy in on all the mechanical details. I explained to him that if he were buying the car on time (and how else would a young guy buy it?) for only a few dollars more a month he could have that optional 215 horsepower V-8. I told him about the advanced carburetion, the brakes, the suspension, the generous interior room for a two-seater, and so on. I did know all that stuff. I sold the car.
The important lesson I learned right at the beginning was to get at the purchaser’s end result, the WIIFM, the “What’s In It For Me.” In the case of the young guy, it was to meet and date girls his age. I showed him how the Thunderbird would polish his image and help him get the girls. If he has that car now, he’s still getting attention from the ladies because it has become a classic and even more admired than when it was new.
My turn came up the next day when an older couple walked in. They were walking around a four-door sedan. The 1956 Fords had a rakish body that also looked comfortable so I knew that they probably were already sold on comfort and style. Sure enough, the man began asking about motors.
“Oh we have three kinds,” I said, “a yellow one, a blue one, and a red one. The red one goes the fastest. That’s why it’s important for your family’s safety.”
I knew from my uncle’s excellent morning sales seminars that you didn’t sell speed thrills to older people, they’d had enough of those.
So I linked speed to security and safety.
“When you step down on the gas with the red motor, it will whisk you around a truck on a hill safely and with room to spare.”
“Do you have grandchildren?”
“Yes.”
“Do they ride with you sometimes?”
“Yes.”
There was my clincher, because Ford had just installed safety door locks that kids couldn’t open and that held the doors closed much better in a crash.
“Well,” I said, “you’re going to be very happy with this car, it has the convenience of a four-door and the safety of a two-door because Ford just came out with these safety door locks. Get in the back seat and let me work them for you.”
So they did. Then we took a demonstration ride. I sold that car.
I sold my third “up.” Sold my first three “ups,” much to the delight of my uncle but to the dismay of the other sales people, because I wasn’t doing things in the conventional way. I’m not going to tell you that I sold every customer any more than I’ll tell about standing barefoot in the snow selling magazines. I did well enough to be the number one salesman in the company for several years.
I learned what people really buy. I learned that the secret of sales success is to find out early on through questioning or shrewd guessing what the customer is actually after. I learned to paint a word picture of the end result, “you can get the girls with this car,” or “your grandkids won’t fall out of this car,” then put the customer in the picture by showing him how the girls respond or how the door locks work. From the get-go, my sales experience was challenging, exciting, and financially rewarding.
• • •
My next job was not so successful but I’ll tell you about it without any glossing over because in sales as in other areas of life we should learn from our mistakes. My mistakes taught me how to respond to people better when in later life I headed up sales teams.
To get on with the story, my uncle in Burien took an opportunity to invest in a going concern, a Ford dealership in Salem, Oregon. The Oregon dealership had been in the same family for years, the family had built it up, and it was well respected. My uncle asked me to go down to Salem to be the assistant sales manager and naturally I couldn’t say no to the man who’d given me my first break in sales. Then my uncle had a heart attack, went to the hospital, and made me general manager.
Sure I knew something about selling, but I knew next to nothing about managing and certainly very little about the other departments of a dealership, except for parts. All I knew about the service department came from taking cars there to have them repaired or maintained, and from working under the same roof with it. I knew it was an essential part of the business, but beyond that, not much.
The boys in the Salem shop probably would tell you that I knew less than zero about the service department. What I did know for certain was that we inherited most of the people from the previous owners of the dealership. They were old-timers, many of them, and had helped to make the business a success. That included the folks in the service department.
I’ll never forget the head of the service department. Charlie was his name, a burly, outdoorsy type who’d been getting the job done for thirty years. Thirty years! One day I had some question about what was going on in the service department. I looked for him and he wasn’t there.
“Oh, Charlie’s out hunting,” the assistant service manager said.
“What do you mean, out hunting,” I asked.
“Every year when deer hunting begins, Charlie goes hunting.”
Now I didn’t like being left out of the loop, not knowing where the head people were. I was their boss after all. Of course had I stopped to think about it I would have realized that Charlie had been there longer than I’d been alive. This was his arrangement with the previous owners and he didn’t have to clear it with anybody.
Instead of thinking I got upset and shot off my mouth. I raised my voice so that everyone in the shop could hear.
“You never told me anything about it. He didn’t say anything about it. You tell him when he comes back to come to my office immediately.”
A week later I went out to the service department. Charlie was there, just back from deer season, putting on his shop coat. The assistant shop manager, the accountant, and four or five mechanics were on the shop floor. In front of them, I let Charlie have it.
“How could you leave your job without telling me? How could you do such a stupid thing?”
“I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I go out hunting the first week of deer season. I always go.”
His retort made me madder.
“That may be,” I practically shouted, “but you don’t take off without telling me. Never do that again!”
I’d really told Charlie off, hadn’t I? Three weeks later I go out to the shop looking for Charlie and he’s not there. This time it’s elk season and Charlie’s off, hunting elk. Did he tell me? Nope. I blew up.
“I told him not to go! He’s fired! You have him come see me!”
In my defense, Charlie should have realized that there was a new ownership, that he might regard me as a punk kid in a temporary job, but that I was his boss for better or worse. He should have cleared his elk hunting with me. Still, I shouldn’t have hit the ceiling, dressed him down in front of his subordinates, or told others that he was fired without telling him first.
None of what Charlie might have done or should have done cooled my righteous wrath. A week later I went out to the shop and there’s Charlie, putting on his shop coat again, as if nothing happened.
“Charlie, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to work.”
“I told you last time, the next time you do a thing like that without telling me, you’re fired!”
My outburst and my raised voice brought everybody to a semicircle around Charlie, waiting to see what cantankerous old Charlie would do. Charlie pulled off his shop coat and threw it on the floor.
“Well I’ll be damned! If I had known this job wasn’t going to be permanent when I took it, I never would have took it in the first place!”
Later I found out that I’d handled Charlie in the wrong way.
My job ended soon after, and it was probably just as well. My uncle’s health problems forced him to sell the dealership. I didn’t want to stay in Salem, a nice, tidy town but one too small for my ambitions. Besides, my chances of staying on with a new ownership were slim to none. So I returned to Seattle and went back to selling cars.
• • •
Now, what had I learned about selling? I learned that, of course, you have to know the product, whether it’s a car, an automatic car wash, a video game, or a house. But telling the customer about the virtues of the product is not going to make you a master of selling. It’s finding out what the customer wants the product to do for him or her, then shaping your sales talk around the customer’s wishes that makes sales.
Chapter Four
Lemonade from Lemons and a Way to Successful Selling
When I returned from Salem to Seattle I made lots of lemonade out of a really large lemon. In fact, I wound up making the biggest sale of my car selling career. Here’s how it happened. I went back to work at my uncle’s Ford dealership in Burien, this time as fleet sales manager. I was doing well, had a brand-new demonstrator to drive, and went one night to downtown Seattle for dinner and drinks. I’d had a little too much of both and fell asleep at the wheel just after crossing the Burien city limits.
I woke up soon enough. You could say that I awakened with a bang. That loud noise was the front end of my car hitting the rear end of the car in front. It jolted me out of my slumber. The driver of the car ahead was doing the right thing, waiting at a red light. The collision propelled the car ahead clear across the intersection and caved in the back of that car. My new demonstrator wasn’t in such great shape either. The impact smacked the bumper, grill, front sheet metal generally, and tore open the radiator. Water was running all over the intersection.
I got out of my car and hurried over to the car I’d hit. By the time I got there, a great big guy was standing outside the driver’s door, talking on a microphone. Practically speaking, in those days only law enforcement had microphone setups like that. A woman in the back seat was holding her neck and moaning, “Oh, I’m hurt.”
“Are you the police,” I asked the big guy.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I’m the chief.”
He was actually the sheriff of the whole darn county, King County, and he was telling his troops he’d been in a wreck. Within a few minutes the squad cars were coming in from everywhere, red lights flashing and sirens blaring. I’d struck their leader. Things did not look good.
While the deputies were arriving and looking over the scene, the sheriff, Murray Gamrath, and I were talking. He looked down at the dealer plates and the plate surround on my bashed-in demonstrator.
“You work for Gene Wagner?” he asked.
I told him I did. With that, the complexion of things began to change. My uncle had been an active contributor and fund raiser for Murray’s election.
“Let’s take both cars to the dealership and have them repaired,” I suggested.
Which we did. That cleared matters a bit but I was still worried about filing an accident report. I called a friend in the sheriff’s department.
“How much trouble am I in? Can you go over and find out what’s going on?”
“I’ll call you back,” he promised.
“Good news,” he declared when he called back. “Murray already filed an accident report. He said that a third car cut in front of him, and cut him off while they were traveling toward the red light. He had to put on his brakes, leaving no time for the car behind (mine) to stop. The third car ran the red light and disappeared.”
Of course it was all nonsense. Even if any of it were true, I should have gotten a ticket for following too closely or some such offense. But who was going to argue with the sheriff? What a relief!
“What kind of whiskey does Murray drink,” I asked.
“He likes Scotch,” my friend replied, naming the brand. I’d already learned that we lived about three blocks from each other.
I bought a bottle of Scotch, called Murray, and arranged to meet him at his house.
“We’re neighbors,” I said as I walked through Murray’s door with the bottle of Scotch.
He and I proceeded to drink that bottle of Scotch and had a fine time doing it. That was the beginning of a good friendship. We socialized a fair amount. Murray introduced me to some people he knew in the state patrol and through them I was able to sell some patrol cars.
Indeed the whole episode worked out very well, except where the insurance company was concerned. The woman in the back seat of Murray’s car was his mother-in-law. She spent a year going to downtown Seattle every week for treatments on her sprained neck, at the insurance company’s expense.
But I’m yet to get to the big sale. One day Murray was having a party and invited me.
“I have someone coming over and I’d like you to meet him if you haven’t.”
The guest was Albert D. Rosellini, the governor of Washington state. He’d been in law and politics for a long time, and knew just about everybody.
“You know Al, don’t you,” Murray asked.
“No, I haven’t had the pleasure,” I replied.
Rossellini found out what I did and introduced me to one of the big wheels at Boeing aircraft, who was also at the party. “Oh, we’re just putting out some bids for some cars,” the Boeing guy told me.
I checked it out. “Some cars” was 500 cars! Did I ever get busy on that one.
I landed the contract and I’ll tell you how I helped myself get it. I knew we would have some stiff competition from Chevrolet and, back then, Plymouth. So I met the purchasing people at Boeing and took them to dinner a few times. That didn’t hurt. Knowing Rossellini didn’t hurt.
Naturally we discussed business in an above-board way. The purchasing people dropped a few hints about the features or extras they wanted on their cars, so I had all the options covered in my bid. Service was important. I convinced them that we were close enough to handle that, and that we were capable of buying and doing the make-ready on all those cars. Naturally, price was the first consideration, but my extra knowledge was important, too. The Ford Times carried an article on the sale and it sure was a big deal for me. Soon after I’d won the bid Murray and I were having lunch, celebrating the delivery of those cars.
“Murray, our wreck was kind of a funny way to meet a guy, but I sure have enjoyed our acquaintance.”
“Yeah, I can see why.”
Lots of lemonade came from that big lemon.
• • •
After the big sale, I moved on to working with Success Motivation Institute, a transforming, life-changing event for me. Before we get into that, however, let me tell you where the rest of this chapter is going. First I want to explain what SMI was doing and how I became involved with it. Next we’ll look briefly at three books that influenced me. All three have important messages, but it was the SMI training that opened my mind to them. Then I’ll describe how my SMI program worked and how it led me to join forces with a truly remarkable man, Eric Berne, the author of Games People Play.
Paul J. Meyer, an authentic genius, founded SMI in 1960. At the time I’d never heard of Paul Meyer and certainly not of SMI. I was still in the car business, but was reading motivational books and sales books, as they were a dime a dozen. They were a mix of realistic instruction and some notions that were pure pie-in-the-sky, such as visualization unaccompanied by a plan for getting whatever was being visualized.
Still, I was intrigued and beginning to think in terms beyond the Ford dealership. A friend who was on the same wavelength told me, “I went to a meeting the other night, run by a representative of Success Motivation Institute. I think you’d be interested in that. It sounds like it’s right up your alley.” So I called the head office in Waco and I was lucky enough to talk to Paul Meyer himself. He encouraged me to come on down. I took a leave of absence, got on an airplane, went to Texas, and signed up for the program.
Paul and others had worked out the basic motivational program and developed successful sales methods. SMI was then connected with Baylor University in Waco. It’s still in Waco and may still rely on Baylor people for some courses. It is now called Success Motivation International. Paul has more than 50 million copies of his work in print worldwide. Fifty million!
While at SMI and Baylor I took courses loosely grouped around the subjects of psychology, motivation, and public speaking. Then I became a divisional manager in Seattle, responsible for getting the SMI materials out to the public through sales talks and motivational speaking, I took on Uncle Gene as a partner. Later he went on to write books on leadership training and sales psychology.
Back then the materials consisted of a study manual, workbooks for the student to chart his or her progress in improving areas of his or her life, and spoken motivational books on those large 33 1/3 vinyl records, some read by the authors themselves. There were wire recorders and tape recorders then but they were big and boxy, clumsier to handle than a small record player. Paul had the right idea, using the most current technology of the time and using records that the student could repeat over and over again.
The repetition was much more effective than trying to cram everything into somebody’s head in one sitting. After all, the Grand Canyon wasn’t made in a single stroke. The Colorado River ran down there for hundreds of years, carving out the canyon. That was Paul’s idea, take things slowly with lots of repetition. Dr. Cliff Williams of the Baylor psychology department did a whole album on parts of his lectures. One of the first records was from Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Of course the technology changed over time, to a small player that you could carry in your car with you, then to various types of small tape recorders, and it’s probably on IPod now.