People only buy from those they like and trust. “Everybody knows that”, as they say in the GEICO commercials. But do salespeople know what to do to become more likeable?
Nearly 80 years ago Dale Carnegie released his world famous, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has sold 15 million copies worldwide! With that success it seems to me that he would be able to provide some pretty good insight into increasing likeability. So in today’s post I want to zero in on one simple suggestion he made in the book on this subject. Wait for it… “Remember that a person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
Carnegie once said, “If you don’t remember people’s names, you are headed for trouble.”
In the book Carnegie wrote this: After his father died by being kicked in the head by a horse, his oldest boy, Jim, was ten, and he went to work in a brickyard, wheeling sand and pouring it into the molds and turning the brick on edge to be dried by the sun. This boy Jim never had a chance to get much education. But with his natural geniality, he had a flair for making people like him, so he went into politics, and as the years went by, he developed an uncanny ability for remembering people’s names.
He never saw the inside of a high school; but before he was forty-six years of age, four colleges had honored him with degrees and he had become chairman of the Democratic National Committee and
Postmaster General of the United States. I (Carnegie) once interviewed Jim Farley, asking him the secret to his success.
He said, “Hard work,” and I said, “Don’t be funny.” He then asked me what I thought was the reason for his success. I replied: “I understand you can call ten thousand people by their first names.” “No. You are wrong,” he said. “I can call fifty thousand people by their first names.” Make no mistake about it. That ability helped Mr. Farley put Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House when he managed Roosevelt’s campaign in 1932.
During the years that Jim Farley traveled as a salesman for a gypsum concern, and during the years that he held office as town clerk in Stony Point, he built up a system for remembering names. In the beginning, it was a very simple one. Whenever he met a new acquaintance, he found out his or her complete name and some facts about his or her family, business and political opinions. He fixed all these facts well in mind as part of the picture, and the next time he met that person, even if it was a year later, he was able to shake hands, inquire after the family, and ask about the hollyhocks in the backyard. No wonder he developed a following!
For months before Roosevelt’s campaign for President began, Jim Farley wrote hundreds of letters a day to people all over the western and northwestern states. Then he hopped onto a train and in nineteen days covered twenty states and twelve thousand miles, traveling by buggy, train, automobile and boat. He would drop into town, meet his people at lunch or breakfast, tea or dinner, and give them a “heart-to-heart talk.” Then he’d dash off again on another leg of his journey.
As soon as he arrived back East, he wrote to one person in each town he had visited, asking for a list of all the guests to whom he had talked. The final list contained thousands and thousands of names; yet each person on that list was paid the subtle flattery of getting a personal letter from James Farley. These letters began “Dear Bill” or “Dear Jane,” and they were always signed “Jim.” Jim Farley discovered early in life that the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together. Remember that name and call it easily, and you have paid a subtle and very effective compliment.
Most people don’t remember names, for the simple reason that they don’t take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds. They make excuses because they think they are too busy.
If you think the topic of this post will be relevant in your business, you really want to get a copy of Sell is NOT a Four Letter Word, my book that contains 116 individual topics like this one. It will cost you 14¢ per topic, and I will ship if to you FREE … What do you mean you don’t think so?…Oh, p-lease. You mean you’d rather continue to have high sales turnover and miss your sales budget again? OK, whatever!
©2015 Robinson Training Solutions, LLC
Since blue collar businesses have very little initial “glamour” in the eyes of potential job applicants; electronic ads and website postings may not yield all the raw material you need. As a matter of fact, while the headlines have continually touted high unemployment numbers for the last several years, most companies never been able to attain their sales staffing budgets.
An old prospector was digging for gold without success, so he decided to head into town and have a few shots of whiskey. He tied his mule to the hitching post and headed inside.
good coaches and sales coaching programs available for these sales managers to employ. Yours truly is a 
Building on Cox’s data, University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth isolated two factors she thought were better predictors of outstanding achievement than talent or intelligence:
One of the keys to sales success is working hard, crafting and modifying account strategies and rehearsing sales calls even after you have done it a hundred times. Making that extra sales call on the internal champion who helped you during the last sales cycle, or insuring the data gets translated into the customer relationships management (CRM) system. And of course, putting in the time to complete that online course in order to update your selling skills.
William of Occam was a philosopher and a Franciscan monk who lived from 1285 to 1349, during the medieval age. He popularized a line of reasoning we now refer to as Occam’s razor, which boils down to three words; “simpler is better.” He asserted that the simplest solution is always the best solution. If you are wondering, it’s called a “razor” because it shaves away all the useless, nonessential junk.
The second tip (commercial sales) is to follow the same modus operandi as above at trade association gatherings. Googling the words, trade associations, will quickly show you every industry in the nation, small or large, belongs to one. Associations are desperate for content to fill their meetings, so make some contacts and get scheduled to speak to them. You might even get a free lunch!