Joe Girard – The Greatest Salesman in The World

The Guinness Book of Records named him “The World’s Greatest Salesman” an astounding 12 times. Here is the true story of Joe Girard.

Joe Girard sold 13 001 new cars and trucks at the Merollis Chevrolet dealership in Michigan, USA between 1963 and 1977. That is an average of 2 ½ cars per day. And he only sold one vehicle at a time: just new cars and trucks, at retail prices, no fleet deals, to working class people. “Face to face, belly to belly” as he called it.

In his very first year, Joe sold 267 cars, on average more than one per working day. By his fourth year, he sold 614 cars and trucks; this was the year that he became the number one retail car and truck salesman in the world. And every year since, until he hung up his gloves on 1 January 1978, he remained at number one, increasing his business by more than 10% per year, and in some years by as much as 20%.

Joe, who came from extremely humble beginnings and battled through a traumatic childhood, achieved this extraordinary feat through good times and bad, including recessions, layoffs and long strikes. When he retired from selling cars in 1978, Joe spent most of his time on writing books and columns, giving motivational lectures, appearing at sales rallies, and consulting.

He passed away on 28 February 2019.

How did he do it?

Joe was a master in the art of relationship building. His methods are set out in his book “How to Sell Anything to Anybody”. In essence, Joe would relentlessly keep in contact with all his prospects, individually, at least once per month, until he sold them a car. And from that moment onwards, he would continue doing this indefinitely. There are, of course, more details to the success of his system. Still, this disciplined method of really knowing his prospects and customers well and communicating with them indefinitely underpins his phenomenal achievement. A customer would literally have to leave the country for Joe to stop contacting him – one customer actually said as much, and Joe took it as a compliment!

Joe likened this regular, relentless keeping in contact to “planting seeds now in order to reap the harvest later”. We now call this method CRM, or “Customer Relationship Management”. And like I always say, the magic lies in the “R” – it’s all about RELATIONSHIPS.

You’d think that the world’s greatest salesperson (verified by a placement in the Guinness Book of World Records) would have a complicated sales funnel and multiple systems to reach these heights of sales excellence. Perhaps even a team of people working for him and a strong online marketing campaign to build his prospect list?

Not quite.

Joe Girard has worked as a car salesperson his whole life. For the past 14 years Joe has worked for Chevrolet dealership and in that time he sold over 13,000 cars and averaged 6 vehicle sales per day. In his best month sold 174 cars. This secures him the title of the ‘World’s greatest salesperson’ in the book.

His number one source of business? Referrals.

Why Joe loves referral business

Joe has built his mini car sales empire on the back of referral business from previous customers. This is powerful for several reasons – It makes you virtually unshakable – customers will buy whatever YOU are selling as they want to work with you personally. Your prospects and leads scale exponentially over time as you work with more people. It makes predicting future revenue and commissions easier and so takes some of the risk out of sales.

Joes 5 steps to more referral business

Joe uses a simple 5 step system to build his referral base and increase his sales numbers over time.

1) Follow up

Within a week of closing a deal Joe will call the prospect to see how the car is doing and to make sure they’re happy with their purchase. If things are going well, he’ll ask for a referral, otherwise he simply does his best to solve any problems and to make the customer happy.

2) Keep front of mind

Every single month Joe sends out greetings card to his customer list. He knows that they will want to buy another car at some point in the future and so wants to be top of mind when that time comes around. Importantly Joe doesn’t send sales messages inside these cards, instead he gives the recipient value in the form of a local news story, a book review or birthday greeting.

3) Upsell

Joe used this continuous communication to let his customers know about other products the dealership could offer them. He understands that it’s far easier to sell to someone who has bought before than it is to attract new customers.

4) Keeping it personal

Sending these cards doesn’t sound like too much work for the first 10 people you sell to, maybe even the first 100. After this point however it’d be tempting to just start sending out mass mailers to everyone for the sake of convenience. Joe knows the value of personalization and keeps a file with information about each customer including names of children, birthdays, and professions so he can personalize his messages. This is key.

His customers know that they are dealing with an individual person who deeply cares for them, not a big chain car garage with a sales quota to hit that are trying to flog them more products.

5) Ask for referrals

“Only when the time is right” Joe will ask the customer if they have any friends or colleagues that he can help serve. This is the most important part of the whole system, if you don’t ask, at the right time, the rest of the steps are pointless.  Joe’s referral system is simple but time consuming. Most salespeople are looking for hacks, software, and tools to do their work for them.  A lot of the time it’s worth sucking it up and doing these simple tasks yourself, by hand and really emphasizing that personal connection with the prospect – it can come back to you many times over.

There is now a wide variety of tools which can assist you with the CRM process, as information technology has changed and improved vastly since Joe’s working career.

Always remember, the magic lies in the “R” . . . It’s all about Relationships.