Sell like crazy

Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Suby

At seventeen, Sabri Suby was the worst salesperson in a shipping container. Thirteen people sat shoulder to shoulder in that metal box outside Sydney, each making a hundred cold calls an hour, six hundred a day, asking small businesses to sell back their used ink cartridges. The job paid up to eighteen hundred dollars a week, but only if you could close. Suby couldn't. People hung up, told him to die, called him a fucking kid. After two weeks the owner gave him seven more days before firing him.

Something flipped that week. He stopped talking about ink cartridges. He stopped saying the company name. He treated every call like a game, every objection like a bullet that bounced off him. Within a month he was the top performer in the room. By eighteen he was making two thousand dollars a week and he had stumbled onto the one idea that would later make him rich: nobody cares about your product. They care about themselves. Once you understand that, selling becomes mostly listening, asking, and making it the buyer's idea.

That insight is the entire backbone of Sell Like Crazy. Suby has spent the seventeen years since that shipping container building King Kong, an Australian digital agency that the Australian Financial Review has twice ranked among the country's fastest-growing companies. By his own accounting, the system in the book has generated more than four hundred million dollars in revenue for his clients across one hundred and sixty-seven different niches. The book is his attempt to package what he learned, and it has the swagger of someone who built the system in real markets with real money on the line, not in a classroom.