The Greatest Salesman In The World

The Greatest Salesman In The World is a business classic that will help you become better at sales by becoming a better person all around.

One of my favorite writers about love, Kris Gage, says love is an action, not a feeling. The emotional state of being in love comes and goes, but the choice to love? That’s always available to you. So when Mandino suggests you should “love everything and everyone,” it’s not romantic infatuation he talks about. It means approaching everyone you meet with kindness, appreciation, and understanding.

It’s not hard to see how this makes you a better salesperson because it’s simply a way of improving all your relationships. These relationships and the trust we form in them will determine how willing people are to buy from us. Or to invest in us. Or to hire us. And so on.

Even the people who don’t like you can’t help but be startled when you approach them with love. At the very least, their toxic behavior towards you will eventually fade. How you best adapt this idea is up to you. You could use affirmations, reminders, or a talisman. As long as it reminds you to be kind, it’ll help.

Mandino was a big believer in taking action. In one of the later scrolls of the book, he repeats the phrase “I will act now” 18 times. The hardest part of sales, maybe in life altogether, is getting rejected. But you never know which attempt is the last time you need to try in order to succeed. That’s why persistence is always a good strategy.

However, there’s one important part of making it work: taking breaks. It’s easy to get inspired when you read motivating words or watch an awesome video, but the process Mandino describes in the books isn’t about brute force. Rather than just always attack, he suggests you pause when you first encounter an obstacle.

In that moment, you’ll notice an urge to give up, to run away. Resist that urge and reframe the obstacle as a challenge. Once you’ve done that, you can try tackling it. If you fail, you can simply retreat to that initial state, observe from afar, recover your energy, and try again with a new, positive frame of mind.

The two big components of success in anything are self-awareness and emotional control. If you know how you function and how to best manage your impulses, it’s gonna be hard to stop you. But if you constantly react based on your feelings, you’ll have a hard time. The sales example here is the frustrated door-to-door salesman, who blows his last appointment of the day because he hasn’t sold anything before. If…