The biggest single mistake people who are trying to become successful make is that they try to do it by themselves. That represents the hard way of trying to become successful. The smart way is to get people to help you and the more help you get, the faster you’ll get there. Joe Girard got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s “Number-One New Car Salesman” by selling 1,425 cars in one year. What a phenomenal individual accomplishment! The question is, how did he do it?
For some insight, let’s take a look at the breakdown of Joe’s sales for the year he got into the Guinness Book of World Records. Joe is very proud of the fact that 65 percent of the cars he sold that year were to repeat customers. In addition, the remaining 35 percent were to customers who had been referred to him by his repeat customers. So, the year that Joe Girard got into the Guinness Book of World Records, how many cars did he actually sell? The answer amazingly is “none!” His customers sold them for him. Joe was a master at working smarter, not harder.
When people heard of his selling 1,425 new cars in one year, they all wanted to know, “Joe, how did you do it? What’s your secret?”
Joe would always come back with something like, “There are no secrets, you just have to do certain things right. First of all, you’ve got to know your customers. I sell Chevrolets. Who buys Chevrolets?” In Joe’s own words, it was your “average Joe,” the person who goes to work every day.
He found that once you get to know your average Joe, you quickly find out that they don’t want to pay the cheapest price for a car that they possibly can. Now, they do want to pay a fair price, they don’t want to feel they’ve been taken advantage of. But Joe found that the most important concern to the average Joe when it came to buying a car was that they wanted to buy it from a salesperson they could trust.
So give the customer what the customer wants. To accomplish this, Joe said, “I stand in front of my product as well as behind it.” This meant that before you could buy one car from Joe, you first had to buy Joe. He would not let you out of his office until he turned you into a friend. Then, after you bought a car from Joe and you had a problem with the service department, Joe would fight on your behalf with the mechanics, the dealership and even the factory to make sure you were treated fairly.
Working smarter not only put Joe in the Guinness Book of World Records, it also made him a very wealthy man.
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