How to Sell Anything to Anybody

The Bag of Groceries

It is 1963, and Joe Girard is sneaking home through a Detroit alley because his car is about to be repossessed and his creditors are circling. He owes sixty thousand dollars. He has a wife and two children and no idea how to feed them. His house-building business has just collapsed because a salesman told him the city would run sewers to a parcel of land that the city never had any intention of touching, and Joe believed him. He is thirty-five years old, has held about forty jobs in his life, and his father — an illiterate Sicilian immigrant who used to tie him to a pipe in the cellar and beat him with a razor strop — has been telling him since he could walk that he is no good, that he will never be anything, that he should have been choked at birth.

When his wife asks him what the kids are going to eat, something snaps. He drives to a Chevrolet dealership on Detroit's east side and begs for a job. The sales manager warns him that the other salesmen will riot if a new hire takes their floor traffic. Joe makes him a deal: no floor time, no draw, no demonstrator car. Just give me a phone and a desk. That afternoon he rips four pages out of the Detroit telephone book — two white, two yellow — and starts dialing strangers. Before closing time a man walks into the showroom. Joe does not remember his name and barely remembers the car he sold him. He only remembers what he saw when he looked at the customer's face: a bag of groceries on a kitchen table. That was the only sales psychology he had. It worked.

He drove home with a commission check. The fridge had food in it that night. From that day until he retired in 1978, Joe Girard sold cars at a pace nobody in the history of retail has matched: thirteen thousand and one units, one at a time, belly to belly, with no fleet deals and no shortcuts. About six sales per day on average. A record certified by Deloitte and Touche and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for twelve straight years. The reason *How to Sell Anything to Anybody* has stayed in print since 1977 is not that it teaches you tricks. It teaches you what a sale actually is, and where the energy to make one comes from when you have nothing else.