Preface

By most people’s standards, I am highly successful. What success means to me, however, encompasses much more than professional success. It conveys a sense of balance. After all, if you are successful in sales at the expense of your health, your relationships, or your soul, what have you really achieved?

In this book, I present 52 lessons that I gleaned from my 30-year career in sales. Most of these lessons encourage you and show you how to achieve not only what I consider sales success but also how to lead a successful life. By putting these lessons into practice, you will be able to sell more and earn more while spending less time and effort doing it. You will be able to focus on what you do best—selling and serving your customers—and outsource the rest to people who are better equipped to play a supporting role. You will have more time to pursue your dreams, spend quality time with your significant others, and contribute to your community. Your life will become more rewarding and fulfilling.

I have written other books on the art of selling, including Advanced Selling For Dummies and Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman. During the writing of this book, I was also co-authoring Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies with my friend and colleague cross-cultural selling specialist Michael Soon Lee. I believe that all of these books are excellent resources on the how-to of selling. I believe that 52 Weeks of Sales Success is special, however, because it steps you through the process over the course of a year, providing bite-sized bits of wisdom that you can implement over time rather than getting overwhelmed by trying to do everything at once.

I practice these lessons myself, and during the time when my career was focused on selling homes, the strategies I describe in this book helped me boost sales from a previously unheard of 300 homes a year to an incredible 600 homes per year—almost a hundred times what an average Realtor does each 12 months. I quote these figures not to boast (after all, a lot of talented and dedicated people helped me achieve that mark), but to prove that the strategies I developed and present in this book really work.

This book is a product of my Monday morning meetings with my staff. During these meetings, I have always had the goal of teaching my sales staff a new strategy or technique. I figured if I could teach them one valuable lesson per week, by the end of the year, they would have all the knowledge and skills required to become top producers in our very competitive marketplace.

In essence, this book is the recorded version of a yearlong series of seminars that I conducted for my staff. Just as I took one important topic per week for them, I’ve decided to organize this book around a one-idea-a-week-for-52-weeks principle. You can read the book that way—one chapter per week—or you can read it all in one sitting and dip back into it when you need a refresher course. Or you can skip around to the topics that seem especially relevant to you. I’ve tried to make this book as flexible and as useful for you as I would want such a book to be for me and my staff.

Just as I introduced my staff to some of the nation’s top salespeople, I’ll let you meet some of them in these pages, too. For example, we’ll be meeting Stephen Hopson, a remarkable young man who has won every sales award for stockbrokers that Merrill Lynch can give. And Patty Klein, a super travel agent here in Metro Detroit. And Jonathan Dwoskin, who taught me how to transfer basic sales techniques to the world of the Internet. And many, many more.

It’s my goal to help all my readers realize that they, too, can be not only good salespeople, but great ones—true superstars. Sometimes people hear me speak and think that I must possess some magic elixir of success, or that I’m unnaturally talented. Neither is true. I started out in sales like many of you—a green 18-year-old kid with no college who had lots of dreams but not a clue how to make them come true. Thanks to some wonderful mentors and a lot of hard work, I’ve accomplished every one of my early dreams. Now I’m working on a whole set of new dreams—like changing the world one million people at a time. I know I’ll get there someday, and this book will help.

If you take one lesson away from this book, it should be this: Your dreams can become reality. Don’t be intimidated; don’t be discouraged. We all have bad days, but success is just a matter of following the step-by-step path of progress that others have already laid out for you. I truly expect that this book will teach you a lesson a week to help you come up to me and say, “Thanks Ralph, your book helped make me a superstar just like you!”