The Oldest Incentive

by Graham Denton

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's greatest salesman is a former Detroit automobile salesman named Joe Girard. Joe retired in 1978 after a fifteen-year career in which he moved 13,001 Chevvies - one car at a time. That averages out, if anybody's counting, to 866 cars a year, or well over two cars every day. In How to Sell Anything to Anybody, the autobiography plus how-to manual he wrote with Stanley Brown, Joe explains that his rise to the top was preceded by a long string of failures, and that when he finally jump-started himself, just after World War II, it was because he was face-to-face with the world's oldest incentive: hunger.

Or rather he and his wife and young child were face-to-face with it. To make matters worse, his wife, with no money coming in for groceries, had recently posed that most agonizing of questions: "What are the kids going to eat?" For Joe, that did it. Shortly after he heard that question, as he sitting about as far away from success as anybody could imagine, he made the mental switch that changed his life.

It was toward the end of another no-sale day, and he was sitting, alone, in the auto dealership. The door opened, and in walked a man that Joe knew instantly was going to be his first paying customer. How did he know? Because he was desperate. Because he had nothing to lose. And - here's the mental imagery part - because as soon as the guy walked in, Joe saw him not as a person but as a bag of groceries.

"I remember two things about that first sale," Joe writes. "One was that he was a Coca-Cola salesman....The other thing was the feeling I had from the first time I saw the guy that there was no way he was going to get out without buying a car from me. To this day I cannot remember his face, and for a very simple reason. Whenever I looked at him, all I saw was what I wanted from him. And my want was a bag of groceries to feed my family."

The lesson here isn't that desperation works. Nor is it that you should see your customers simply as meal tickets. It's that the most powerful incentive in the world is personalized want, that is, a perceived lack of something that you believe should be yours. That something could be money, respect, achievement - or something as mundane and essential as groceries. Whatever turns you on, if you don't want it first, you're not going to get it. To "power your drive," begin by knowing exactly what you want to achieve.

Too simple? Maybe. But as Joe recalls, "it made me a salesman that first day. I didn't know from nothing except my own want and the fact that if I sold this guy, I would get those groceries. And I did it."