How to Sell Anything to Anybody

The Mooch is a human being. In Detroit's car trade, salesmen called the customer the Mooch, a contemptuous word for someone who wastes your time. Girard argues this attitude is self-sabotage. The buyer is not a different species. He is a working person parting with money that comes hard, frightened that the salesman will fleece him, ready to flee. Some leave a deposit just to escape and never return.

Girard reframes the encounter as a bloodless war where both sides can win: the buyer leaves with what he came for at a fair price, the seller earns commission and a friend. About 6 of every 10 of Girard's sales came from repeat customers or referrals. You cannot sell a scared person, because he senses your contempt. You can only sell a human being you have disarmed.

Don't join the club. Most salesmen spend mornings in what Girard calls the dope ring, swapping stories, flipping coins for coffee, debating where to lunch, then waiting for their turn at whoever walks through the door. Girard refused. He never took floor turns. Instead he treated selling like farming in a climate where things grow year-round: plant seeds constantly, harvest constantly.

His Ferris wheel image captures it. You fill every seat with a prospect, the wheel turns, sold customers step off, new ones climb on, and the cycle never stops. Cars get bought every three to five years, so Girard logged each buyer's car, finances, and timing, then called weeks before they were due. He worked phone-book cold calls, mailings, and referrals so people asked for him by name rather than gambling on door traffic.

Tools that print money cheaply. Girard's toolbox was unglamorous: telephone, index-card files, mail, and business cards. Where most salesmen used 500 cards a year, he burned through that in a good week. His cards carried his photo and went everywhere. He left them with oversized tips so every waiter remembered him. He even hurled handfuls into the air at football games during touchdowns.

The logic is pure probability. At roughly $20 per thousand, if a single card among a thousand reaches someone in the market, the commission dwarfs the cost. His neighborhood phrase was that if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, some sticks. Cards cost almost nothing, so saturating the world with your name and face turns the odds permanently in your favor.

Getting them to read the mail. Girard mailed his thousands of customers twelve times a year, once a month, each in a different size and color envelope with no business name on the outside. People could not tell it was advertising, so they opened it. Inside was a soft message tied to the month: a New Year greeting, a Valentine, each signed simply with his name and dealership. No clearance-sale pitch, just I like you.

He timed mailings to avoid the first and fifteenth when bills arrive. The result: his name entered each household twelve times a year as something pleasant, so when buying time came he was the first name recalled. In a mailbox stuffed with junk that gets tossed unopened, the real game is not delivery but getting opened, read, and remembered.

Hunting with birddogs. A birddog is anyone who steers a buyer to you for a reward. Girard paid $50 per resulting sale and paid it even when someone forgot to write their name on the card. His ironclad rule: never stiff a birddog. He reasoned it was better to pay 50 undeserving people than to cheat one who earned it and have that person bad-mouth him to 250 others.

His birddogs included barbers, mechanics, tow-truck operators, and especially bank and credit-union loan officers who were underpaid and rarely taken to lunch. One year he paid out about $28,000 to birddogs and got roughly 550 sales worth $150,000 in commissions. Loan officers could even tip him off to beat a rival's quote by $200, handing him sales already closed elsewhere.

Sell the smell, not the steak. Girard insisted the most powerful trigger in a new car is its smell, that unmistakable scent everyone recognizes blindfolded. So he made, not let, customers get in and drive. People resist because sitting in a new car makes them feel obligated, which is exactly the obligation Girard wanted to create, like breaking a seal.

During the demonstration drive he stayed quiet. The less he talked, the more the customer smelled, felt, and revealed about his job, family, and worries, intelligence Girard needed to close. He encouraged buyers to drive past their own home so neighbors and family saw them behind the wheel, making it harder to return to the old clunker. After the war, used-car dealers even sprayed a new-car-smell liquid into trunks, proof of how that scent sells.

Espionage and intelligence. Girard reframed qualifying the customer as spycraft: learn what he wants, what he can afford, and what he should buy. He grabbed trade-in keys not by asking do you have a trade-in, which invites games, but by saying give me your keys and we'll appraise it. Then he read the car like a book.

Clues he mined:
1. Odometer and service stickers revealed driving habits and care.
2. Brochures in the glovebox showed which rivals had quoted him.
3. Worn tires meant he was already near a new-car decision.
4. Fishing tackle, trailer hitches, and child seats opened conversation and revealed needs.
5. Whether the old car was paid off told him if price or monthly financing mattered most.

He never insulted the trade-in, since a man's car is like his wife: he can mock it, you cannot.

Truth in degrees. Girard preached honesty as the best policy, then qualified it: a policy is a tool, not a law. Never lie about anything checkable, like calling a six-cylinder engine an eight, because the customer will discover it and torch your reputation. But small, kind lies, praising an ugly trade-in or an unremarkable child, build the disarming warmth that makes selling possible.

He even refused full sticker price from naive rural buyers. If a man started writing a check for the window price, Girard would knock off $250 or throw in extras, because that buyer would show the car at his lodge, learn he overpaid, and feel cheated. Sacrificing a couple hundred dollars bought a lifelong friend who talked him up. A true fact, the sticker price, could still destroy trust.

Lock them up with spot delivery. Girard's close began not with asking for the order but asking for money: he would half-turn, extend his hand, and say give me $100 and I'll get the car ready. If the buyer had only $73, fine; a check, fine, which he rushed to certify. The deposit closed the psychological door.

His boldest move was spot delivery: letting a buyer drive the new car home before financing and registration were complete. Once a man parked it in his driveway and showed neighbors, he would not shop around to save $50, and the moral obligation of putting miles on a car that was not yet his sealed the deal. Girard claims he was never once burned, because he only did it with buyers he had thoroughly read and judged sound.

Winning after the close. Most salesmen turn their backs once they pocket the commission, even hiding when a buyer returns with problems. Girard did the opposite. He sent a thank-you the same day, fought the service department and factory on customers' behalf, and paid out of his own pocket, about $50, for repairs like wheel alignment that were not even covered. He turned lemons into peaches because a satisfied buyer is an annuity.

He phoned buyers weeks later just to ask how the car ran, stunning people who assumed no salesman cared. Each call also harvested referrals. He viewed every customer as a lifelong stream of sales: theirs, their family's, eventually their children's. By his peak he sold over six cars a day, nearly 1,400 a year, earning around $500,000, built almost entirely on people coming back and sending others.