The Psychology of Selling

The Psychology of Selling — Brian Tracy

The Salesman Who Almost Quit

Brian Tracy did not start out as a sales legend. He dropped out of high school, washed dishes, worked construction, and crossed the North Atlantic on a Norwegian freighter before bicycling and busing his way through Europe, Africa, and the Far East. When the manual labor jobs dried up, he took a commission sales job out of pure desperation. His entire training lasted about ten seconds: "Here's your cards, here's your brochures, there's the door."

So he hit the street. He knocked on every door he could find, talked as fast and as loud as he could, and treated selling as a numbers game that slowly curdled into a rejection game. After six months he was barely surviving, renting a tiny room in a guesthouse, wondering what was wrong with him.

Then he did one thing that changed everything. He walked up to the top salesman in his office and asked him, plainly, what he was doing differently. It turned out the man had spent sixteen months in intensive sales training at a Fortune 500 company. He didn't give speeches. He asked questions, moving from the general to the specific, and his last question was the close itself. Tracy wrote down every word, went home, and started asking instead of talking. His sales went up almost immediately. Then he read every sales book he could find, listened to audio programs in his car, attended seminars, and within a few years he was running a sales force.

That arc is the whole argument of this book in miniature. Tracy calls it the Law of Cause and Effect: "If you do what other successful people do, over and over again, nothing in the world can stop you from eventually getting the same results that they do." Selling is not a mystery reserved for the gifted. It is a set of learnable causes that produce predictable effects. And the most important of those causes, Tracy insists, is not technique at all. It is psychology — what happens inside your own head before you ever say a word to a customer.