RED ANVIL BOOKS Copyright © 2010 Gayle Hickok and Bill Wilson All rights reserved.
RED ANVIL BOOKS is an imprint of
ELDERBERRY PRESS, INC. 1393 Old Homestead Drive Oakland OR 97462
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010930593 Publisher’s Catalog-in-Publication Data Adventures In Global Selling/ Gayle Hickok and Bill Wilson
ISBN-13: 978-1-934956-34-2 ISBN-10: 1-934956-34-1 1. Sales.
2. Adventure.
3. Russia.
4. Politics.
5. Beakup of the Soviet Union. I. Title
I Introducing This Book ....................................................9
II Introducing Gayle .........................................................11
III Getting Started in Making Big Sales ..............................17
IV Lemonade from Lemons and a Way to Successful Selling ..33
V Practical Selling and Practical Self-Improvement ...........55
VI Selling in Canada and an Invention I Couldn’t Patent ...69
VII Bernie............................................................................89
VIII In Mexico: Condos, Timeshares, and Big Jugs of Lemonade.107
IX To Russia, but Forget About Love ...............................129
X In Thailand and Mexico Again ....................................151 XI Gayle’s Nine “Bes” .......................................................175
The book you are about to read began a few years ago. One evening Gayle and Bill and some friends were enjoying a meal and a night out at a restaurant near La Paz on Mexico’s beautiful Baja peninsula.
Gayle asked Bill, “How would you like to collaborate on a book about my adventures, a book that would also include lessons from my experiences?” Bill replied, “Let’s do it, the idea’s a great one.” That’s how this book began. Bill’s interviews with Gayle form the book’s backbone. It’s fleshed out here and there with other sources, but the judgments are always Gayle’s. We think we’ve achieved a nice balance between recounting Gayle’s amazing adventures and drawing sales and marketing methods from them.
Each of us takes full responsibility for what you find here. That doesn’t mean we could have done the book on our own. We had a lot of help from others and we want to thank them for it.
Thanks to Kitty Wilson for her editorial skills.Thanks to Sukey Janes for drawing that “gate selling” diagram.
Special thanks to Jess Kellogg for giving us a lot to write about.
Thanks to Dave St. John and the staff at Elderberry Press.
Thanks to everyone else who made it all happen.
It was a bright, sunny day in July 1974. I was driving my new Maserati from my Toronto office east to the one in Montreal with my daughter Lisa, then a pert twelve year old but, you know, mentally going on thirty. We were cruising comfortably at a steady 100 mph, when I began a lecture on one of the several subjects that we single dads and their growing daughters have to deal with. The theme of my lectures was almost always the same, how growing daughters should benefit from the accumulated wisdom of their dads.
Lisa knew we were strapped in and she had no place of escape for at least three hours. I’d just launched my lecture when she interrupted.
“Hold it, hold it,” she commanded. “Wait a minute. I need to make you a deal.”
“What do you mean, make me a deal,” I asked. “I’m the boss here.”
“Well,” she went on, “you can just tell me the end of your lecture and I’ll let you know if I need to hear the beginning and the middle.” She was right, I admit, because she’d heard precisely the same thing many times before. After that, we had only condensed versions of our little talks, with an emphasis on fast forwarding to the focus of our discussion.
That conversation in my speeding coupe was just one more proof of the fact that we adults learn from our children, as I certainly have from all five of mine. Now I’m learning from my grandkids. I’m going to apply some of that knowledge by making three points with you.
First point: In keeping with Lisa’s concept, I’m going to begin my story with the ending, at least as my life has developed so far. I hope from that you’ll decide to explore the beginning and the middle with me.
• • •Second point: I’m a professional salesman, through and through, and damn proud of it. Oh, yes, I’ve been the manager, owner, vice-president, even president of various business ventures, but the highest compliment you can pay me is “You sure are a good salesman.” I’ve had fun selling. I love selling because it has opened me to new and exciting experiences.
Another thing. I highly respect sales people of both genders, but please excuse me for not referring to folks in our profession as “salespersons.” I love women. They are some of the best in the business. But “salesperson” is a clumsy word. After all, Arthur Miller didn’t name his famous play “Death of a Salesperson.” Sometimes “person” just doesn’t apply. I remember how the town of Woonsocket, Rhode Island was ridiculed after it renamed manholes “personholes” and manhole covers “personhole covers.” So I’ll refer to “people in sales” or “sales people” at times but always to myself as a “salesman.”
• • •Third point: Throughout my story I’ve sprinkled anecdotes and incidents which I hope will entertain you. Often I’ll be describing sales situations which illustrate an important lesson that I’ve learned, either from others or through my own experiences. Don’t worry, this isn’t another one of those hundreds of “how-to” volumes or “salesmanship” workbooks. My purpose is to stimulate, inform, and inspire you, and if I do those things, I’ll be really pleased that together we’ve accomplished something meaningful and worthwhile.
I’m a salesman. I’m beginning at what for now is the end of my selling story and I’ll tell it to you in one short paragraph.
I’ve worked and lived all over the world, and now I’m working and living in the best place on the planet, the La Paz area of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. I’m working for a first-rate development company, Lomas del Centenario. Here the air is clear and bright, the temperature is moderate for most of the year, the people are friendly, and the crime rate is low. By a little luck and some design, I arrived here several years ago and doubt I’ll ever leave.
Now then, find out who I am and how I got here. As I’ve told you, the highest compliment anyone can pay me is, “You’re a great salesman!” This book is about how and why I became a successful salesman and cheerfully gave my adult life to selling. You should read it because you and I are alike, we are in sales, along with everybody else. You think, wait a minute, I’m a teacher or a housewife or a doctor or any other occupation light years away from selling. In fact we are all selling.
Let’s face it, teachers are selling themselves and their subject matter to their students. Housewives are selling their husbands on repainting the living room and their kids on taking out the trash. Doctors are selling treatments to their patients. Employers, if they want to keep their employees, are selling themselves to their workforce. Employees, regardless of whether they want to stay with their employers or use their present jobs as stepping stones to other work, are marketing themselves to their employers.
It’s only when some of us become professional sellers that other people set us apart as folks who aren’t quite legitimate. Trust me, I’ve heard all the jokes, the jibes, and the stories about sales people. They make the male of the species out to be pudgy, pushy, and a blusterer. He’s dressed in a loud checked yellow jacket, a rumpled bright green shirt, brown houndstooth slacks ending about two inches above his ankles, argyle socks, and scuffed tan loafers with frayed tassels.
If this clown wears a tie it’s a bold pattern splotched with this morning’s breakfast. If he knows more than the minimum about the product he’s selling it’s an accident. Often he’s less than truthful about what he does know, because he’s too absorbed in making a quick buck, and then moving on to the real business of his life, fast cars, boozing, and chasing women. Our stereotype guy isn’t very bright or well educated. He mangles grammar, recycles a limited vocabulary, and mouths clichés, “Right,” or “You bet, baby.”
There may be, probably are, salesmen like the stereotype. If they are successful it’s in spite of their appearance and attitude. If they are successful it’s because they use selling methods that work. I’m successful partly because I don’t dress or act like the stereotype, but mostly because I and other consistent producers use proven methods. I repeat, this isn’t a methods book, though I’ll share with you some successful selling techniques and methods along the way. I pull together these methods under the heading of nine “Be’s” later on.
I’m really irked by the notion that people in sales are dim bulbs. That is not my experience with other people in sales. They are at least as intelligent, thoughtful, and well educated as the general population. Speaking for myself, I’ve written course outlines and notes, sales brochures, and other promotional pieces. I’m the author of the pamphlet, “The Five Myths of Mexican Real Estate,” which we distribute at our Lomas del Centenario company seminars in the United States and Canada. Later I’ll give you a condensed version of that pamphlet, my explanation of what Mexico really is, versus the “bandido” and drug-infested image promoted in the media.
I’m the author of a TV documentary script on the global crisis of overpopulation. I argued that unchecked population growth caused or worsened all the dangers bedeviling the experts. I related climate change, food shortages, the lack of clean water, soil depletion, the pressure on natural resources, and the conversion of cropland to housing to the need for population control.
I didn’t endorse coercive population control like China’s but appealed to enlightened self-interest. The script is complete with voice-over dialogue and descriptions of visuals. I wrote it during one of those rare instances in my life when I had some free time and friends in the TV production industry. But I got busy again and never submitted it. In any case the script demonstrates my literacy, and my concern for issues beyond booze, women, and fancy cars. Many people in sales share those concerns.
• • •Besides a knack for writing, I have the ability and ambition to operate successful businesses. Some I ran myself, others in partnership. Other companies demonstrated respect for my ability by hiring me as a consultant. I liked all those experiences, but they took me away from my first love, selling. I always wanted to return to selling. Whatever I do in the future, I’m determined to allow time and space to be on the front line in sales.
Selling is not just about selling, it’s about opening doors to other adventures and experiences. Look at my life. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of traveling all over the world and I’ve actually lived in Canada, Mexico, the Cayman Islands, England, Australia, Thailand, Russia, the Bahamas, and, of course, all around the United States. I’ve sold Fords, car washes, video games, country club memberships, houses, condos, timeshares, car wash franchises, modular homes, and tire recycling plants. I’ve even sold scientists who possessed dangerous skills on the idea of retiring rather than letting their knowledge fall into the wrong hands. In addition to being a consultant, I’ve been a motivational speaker described as a “walking enthusiasm generator.” My real estate sales course taught at least one member of the class “more in one day than all four years of selling experience.”
If success is measured by the accumulation of this world’s goods, I have my share. I own a respectable amount of real estate, and I have all the toys most men would want. Did I manage to get all this – debt free, in case you’re wondering – by treading the miser’s path to accumulation? Not on your life! I’ve always spent money to make a sale, have fun, or enjoy creature comforts. At one time during what I call my “look at me, baby” phase, I owned two Maseratis, a good thing because one or the other was always in the shop, and a Rolls Royce. Expensive suits were my trademark. Cheap hotels and apartments held no charms for me, and I went high-end as soon as I found my financial feet.
• • •Far beyond material goods, I value my family. I have a wonderful younger sister, Claudia, who lives in Palm Springs, California. Two marriages blessed me with five children. All of them are grown, and I have watched their development with loving interest over the years. Deborah, my oldest, is married to Phil, a successful realtor and the author of real estate sales books. Scott, my second oldest son, and his wife work with Deborah and Phil in the real estate business. Edward, my oldest son, has been an excellent salesman, too, and now lives with his wife in Hawaii. Steven, the youngest son, lives with his wife in Montana, where he works for Wal-Mart. Lisa, a housewife for most of her adult life, lives in Oregon. All together they’ve presented me with eleven grandchildren, and the grandkids have produced two great grandchildren. So I’ve made my contribution to the propagation of the race! And I’m not done yet!
I’m a contented man, not because of my possessions, or even because of my family. Success has made me happy, but what is success? Here it is: success is the progressive realization of meaningful, worthwhile goals. You can be as successful as I am, or more successful than I, by setting a series of worthwhile goals and moving toward them. Read what I have to say later about this program, then consistently, persistently apply the techniques I present there, and you will succeed. When you succeed in the way I’ll present, you will have something more precious than riches, and that’s peace of mind. That’s what success in life will produce, peace of mind.
Let me repeat this. Success in all the important areas of life will come to people who diligently move toward commendable, constructive goals. Sellers who succeed are almost always ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they have learned how to motivate themselves. Does having peace of mind free them from the minor irritations of life? No, but they realize that the irritations are minor and easily dealt with. Does success mean that they became perfect? No. Does my success make me perfect? Hardly. But I have worked hard to improve my approach to sales, as well as enrich other areas of my life. As a result I love selling more and more every day.
How much do I love selling? I’ve retired twice, grown colossally bored or mentally itchy in a few months, and returned to selling both times. I’m trying to retire again, to my new house with a smashing view of a lovely bay in Mexico. Will it work this time? We’ll see, but if selling lures me again, don’t be surprised. As I told you at the beginning, the highest compliment anyone can pay me is “You’re a great salesman.”
• • •Now a final word before we look at my life. I’ve had many adventures. Most of them were hugely rewarding, while some were memorable even without any financial or psychic gain, and one or two were terrifying, such as watching a friend’s head blown apart by a pistol shot. I tell all of them as I remember them. Someone else who was there could remember those incidents a little differently. I will tell these stories my way because it’s my life, the life of a salesman.
If you’re wondering when I began selling, keep reading. Before I could sell anything I had to be born, in Terry, Montana, in 1934. Terry is a small town on the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana, in fact the Yellowstone is on the north side, and now Interstate 94 is on the south side. Other than being the county seat and my birthplace, the only other thing Terry had to recommend it was where my father, Thomas, worked at my grandfather’s Ford agency. My father was a car mechanic, or as we would say nowadays, a technician.
I want to pause just for a moment to introduce you to my grandfather, Claude Wagner, a wonderful, talented man. Granddad gave me the inspiration, the security, and the helping hand up that even the best of us need at least once in our lives. He could help financially because he made a great success of that Ford agency.
You’d think that Terry would be too small to support a stand-alone, single make dealership. When I was born the Great Depression was going full blast and a Ford agency in a fairly isolated place like Terry was one of the few money makers around. Granddad’s agency dated from the days of the Ford Model T, the greatest all-time sales maker for one model until the original Volkswagen beetle finally beat its record. Model T sales slowed in the later 1920s, so Ford followed the Model T with the Model A in 1928. The A was an extremely popular car until the really hard times came in 1931.
Then Ford produced the first low-priced V-8 for the 1932 model year. It was a marvel of power and speed, and sold despite the Great Depression. The V-8 was such a hot car the gangsters loved it. John Dillinger, the FBI’s Public Enemy Number One for a time in the 1930s wrote Henry Ford, “Hello Old Pal. You have a wonderful car. It’s a treat to drive one.” Clyde Barrow, the notorious outlaw of Bonnie and Clyde fame, went Dillinger one better. He wrote Ford about how “I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one.” Barrow’s statement wouldn’t pass muster with the grammarians but he got his point across. So Granddad’s agency handled three of the hottest automotive sellers in a row. His location and his ability paid off for him.
Back then, people stayed loyal to their local dealer. They almost had to. People thought highways were great if they were graveled and had two-lane bridges. You just didn’t wander fifty or a hundred miles from home to buy a car, because most roads weren’t good enough and the low-priced cars, at least, weren’t that comfortable. Most people worked long hours and didn’t have the time, so if you had to have some repair work done that you couldn’t do yourself, you went to the nearest dealership.
With twenty or twenty-five percent of the workforce unemployed and many of the employed working for peanuts, most people couldn’t afford a new car. The Great Depression forced a lot of folks to keep their Model Ts or Model As, or other old cars long after they would have traded them. Granddad made money on his service department, keeping those old cars running, even when new car sales slowed.
• • •World War II saved me from growing up in Terry. My parents – my mother was Alice Hickok – moved in 1942 to Missoula, Montana, briefly, then to what was a little, forested town, Woodinville, not far from Seattle. They were shipyard workers in nearby Kirkland, a Seattle suburb that looks west into the city from across Lake Washington.
After the war my dad became something of a rolling stone. We moved to Port Angeles, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Then we lived in Sequim (pronounced Skwim), near Port Angeles, then back to Port Angeles as Dad worked at different mechanic’s jobs. I bounced around from school to school but got through a year of high school before Mom split from Dad.
Then we – my Mom, sister, and I – moved in with my maternal grandfather. By then he had sold his dealership in Montana but earned money from leasing the building and from his active commercial real estate agency. He specialized in apartments and business buildings. He had a nice house in the Hawthorne Hills section of northeast Seattle with enchanting views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains. He was really the major father figure of my life. For years he drilled into my head, “Go buy corner lots in growing cities,” and “you gotta go into real estate. Go to the University of Washington, study business administration, learn all you can about real estate.”
Granddad’s enthusiasm and purpose in life were responsible, ultimately, for my life in real estate sales. He was an outgoing guy, an outdoorsman who made hunting and fishing trips to Alaska. He was a dedicated patriot who flew the flag on national holidays, but was too old for the service when World War II began. He wanted to do something for his country so he closed his real estate business and took a job as a uniformed guard at Boeing aircraft, where they produced the great B-17 bomber. He was proud of that uniform. After the war he reopened his real estate business.
Now you’re thinking, this is where Gayle goes into sales and makes his millions, if he isn’t making them already. I’d like to tell you that was true, or that I just needed a little grandfatherly advice to get off my newspaper route into something bigger. I’d like to tell you stories similar to those in some salesmen’s autobiographies, for instance that I was selling before I could walk. Would you believe that I took the sheets off my crib mattress and sold them to expectant moms in Terry? No? How about my standing on a street corner at age four hawking the Saturday Evening Post in deep snow while a Montana blizzard howled around me? Or that I was such a super salesman that I repeatedly sold out and ran barefoot through the snowdrifts for more magazines? Huh?
I thought so. Sales had to wait awhile. I graduated from Roosevelt High School, north of Seattle’s University District, in 1952. Then I entered the University of Washington, majoring in business administration. Anyone who went to the University of Washington with me in the years 1952 to 1955 who returns to the campus today discovers more change than continuity. Most former students on the “upper campus” will orient themselves on the magnificent Collegiate Gothic façade of the Suzzallo Library.
The original Suzzallo is much the same but the cool, green plaza in front is gone, replaced by a red brick paving on top of a vast underground parking garage, today’s “Red Square.” Blocky buildings enclose “Red Square,” covering much of what was open space then.
In my day Collegiate Gothic buildings dominated the campus. Many of them went up in the teens, twenties, and thirties. Sure, there were a few buildings in contemporary styles but they didn’t compete for architectural control as they later did.
The feel of the campus was more spacious, relaxed, and at the same time more intimate. The intimacy wasn’t because of the many fewer buildings. There were only about 16,000 of us students, compared to more than 40,000 now. I couldn’t have imagined that kind of growth in the intervening years.
Not many of us concerned ourselves with the university’s prestige. I certainly didn’t. I was a local boy going to the nearest local university and that was about it. In 2008 the university made much over its ranking of 11th among the national public universities in the U.S. News and World Report ratings. It didn’t move up in the 2009 rankings, so scarcely mentioned them. It did celebrate its second place in the Sierra Club’s list of environmentally conscious universities. Greenopia put it on the top of the heap among the “greenest” universities, another cause for celebration. Ratings like that didn’t exist in my day and I doubt that they would have made much difference to me if they had.
In any case I wasn’t a joiner or a big man on campus. Working my way through the university took too much time. By then Granddad had taught me how to play the piano, a skill I supplemented by reading and applying books on chords and practice exercises. My piano playing helped to pay my way through the university. I formed a trio with two classmates, a bass fiddle player and a drummer, and we played calm, gentle, “old ladies” type music for the luncheon meetings of a women’s club. Old ladies! I’ll bet I’m older now than most of the women were then! We thought of them as ancient but the perspective of young men changes as they age.
Music has always been part of my life from my piano playing days. I even enrolled in music appreciation while at the university, not your typical course for a major in business administration. Now I have a nice keyboard and play for parties with friends here in Mexico. But, to go back to my university days, I never graduated. I got married and had to get a job working in a supermarket.
• • •The so-called Cold War with the Soviet Union and its allies was in full swing then, and I was a prime candidate for the military draft. I didn’t evade the draft but avoided it because my wife and I began a family. In those days if your draft board had a good supply of young unmarried men or young men who were married but without children, the board called them first. The other thing I did was join the Navy Air Reserves at the Sand Point Naval Air Station on Lake Washington. The Navy could have called us up individually but it didn’t.
I was an Airman First Class, not a bad rating, and I didn’t have a bad job, but the job I did have convinced me that I wasn’t made for a military career. I was the flight engineer, and sat between the pilot and co-pilot of our squadron’s first aircraft, the PBY. It wasn’t exactly flying first class and it wasn’t meant to be. On one training exercise I had the flu and couldn’t fly. Another airman took my place. On that exercise the pilot decided to shoot a water landing because he was tired of waiting for a long line of planes to land on the field. In anticipation of a field landing, he’d put the wheels down. Nobody, not the pilot, not the co-pilot, not the flight engineer, not the control tower, remembered or noticed that the landing gear was down. The wheels hit the water, pitched the plane forward, it sank, and the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer were killed.
We had a much more exciting but thank God not fatal episode after the squadron graduated to the PB 442, the Navy’s version of the B-17. One time we were going out on a practice bombing with fifteen recruits on their first flight, tanks full of gas, and bays loaded with bombs. We’d just become airborne when the tower notified us that our starboard landing gear wasn’t up. The hydraulic system had failed, and the landing gear was just flapping around loose.
I went back into the belly of the plane to try to crank the landing gear up manually but it wouldn’t go. Now the problem is, if you try to come in on one good landing gear, the plane will tip, spin around, maybe even cartwheel. The only solution was to try for a belly landing, but first we had to fly out to Puget Sound, jettison our ammunition, and dump all our gas until we had just enough gas left to get back.
The pilot raised our good landing gear, knowing that the bad one would collapse on impact anyway. It was quite a show. We came in as low and slow as we dared. The ground crew laid down fire suppressant foam on the runway, the fire trucks and ambulances were out there, every emergency siren was wailing, and almost everybody at the station was lining the runway. We hit the runway, made a terrible grinding racket, but the plane stayed on the runway and there was no fire. Those fifteen recruits, mostly eighteen-yearolds, sure had a memorable first flight. They were scared green, which isn’t to say that the rest of us considered it a picnic.
After that incident we refused to have the same number, 203, on our replacement plane but that didn’t help us much. I wasn’t on board for this one, but it was at least as big a deal because the plane landed just short of the runway and broke in two. Nobody was hurt but the ground crew was a good month cleaning up the wreckage. Our squadron was rather infamous. By the time of the third wreck I’d decided that the military life wasn’t for me. I got out when my time was up.
• • •At any event I was only what they called a “weekend warrior,” and I needed more than the scanty air reserve pay and my income from clerking in a supermarket to raise a family. So I asked my uncle, Eugene Wagner, for a job in his Ford dealership in Burien, Washington. Burien is in the Seattle metro area, just south of Seattle. My uncle put me in the parts department where I worked for a time. There was nothing wrong with the parts department work, and I learned a lot about the complexities involved in keeping a car dealership functioning, not to mention keeping cars on the road. But a lot of it was routine and less than exciting.
My mind kept returning to what Granddad said about sales, not real estate sales especially, but selling in general. I remembered what my supermarket manager said, after watching me help customers and point out things they might buy.
“You know,” he said, “you’re a natural-born salesman.”As you’ll discover later
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