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How did Joe Girard use the 'Magic' word to become the world's greatest retail salesman?

Guest post by: Neil Howe

Article Overview: This magic word made Joe Girard the world's best retail salesman for 12 years in a row. You too can easily use this magic for your business.

How did Joe Girard use the 'Magic' word to become the world's greatest retail salesman?

Joe Girard became the world’s greatest retail salesman for 12 consecutive years, according to the Guinness Book of Records, by using the magic word.

Born in the deplorable ghettos of Detroit, during the depression, Joe managed to become a success.

How successful did he become?

Joe was a car salesman and people used to line up to meet Joe every Saturday morning and buy a car from him. Joe sold more cars individually in his lifetime than most dealerships sell total. Joe sold an average of 6 cars a day during his selling career which amounted to over 13,000 by the time he was done. He sold them all at retail.

What was his secret?

He built and maintained relationships. Joe used to send 13 cards to his prospects and clients every year. One each month and one for Christmas. He created a place for himself in the brains of his prospects and clients by keeping in touch with them. So, when it came time for them to buy a car, they automatically went to see Joe as there was a relationship established.

Joe Girard followed up with his clients even when there was no reason to.

Today, we can do that by capturing people’s information via a capture page and keep sending messages about your products or services via auto responder.

But, be careful. A well known company went bust by doing this.

You may remember CDNow.com. They had a hugely loyal following and were bigger than Amazon.com before the millennium.

They owed much of their success to a newsletter that went out to their subscribers once a month showing them new features and special offers. They were so successful that they were bought over by media giants Bertelsmann for millions of dollars. The new managers saw how effective the newsletter was and decided to send it out twice a month instead of just once. The response and sales increased. Excitedly, they figured if they sent it out once a week, the response may go up again. Guess what? It did. So they thought maybe once every three days will get even better response…. They went out of business!!

What happened here was their message went out too often and their customers started to ignore them completely and sales plummeted and they went out of business very quickly.

Moral of the story. The magic word REPEAT can be very powerful and get you a ton of business by putting yourself in the front of your clients and prospects minds, but if abused, it can cause disaster.

How often are you following up with your people? Do you have a system in place that does it for you? A marketing system is a must for any business to make money. The quality of the system will determine the output of money.

Have fun using your new found magic word!

Related Articles
  Overcoming Objections
  The One Secret of All Top Sales Performers
  Live Blogging: Joe Girard - World’s #1 Retail Salesperson
  Required Reading for Success
  The Entrepreneur As Systems Thinker: Getting Down to Basics

Article Tags: auto responder, car salesman, collapse, color 000000, font weight, ghettos, guinness book of records, joe girard, magic word, orphans, sending messages, span class, span style, style color, times new roman, times new roman font, white space, widows, word spacing, year one
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com



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