5 Sales Fundamentals That Haven’t Changed in 80 Years

How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling (HIRM) by Frank Bettger is worth reading if you sell anything.

Freelancers, consultants, agency founders, and fractionals must sell, whether we like it or not, and that’s who I had in mind when I pulled the five fundamentals below from the book. Creative folks who plod along “in sales” with great reluctance will want to pay attention to the book’s “long ideas,” a concept I’ll explain at the end, for a simple reason: Bettger published HIRM nearly 80 years ago, and it reveals what hasn’t changed about sales.

If you’ve got to be in sales, you might as well improve at it, and the 80% of sales psychology, strategy, and technique that has remained constant is what you should commit to studying, memorizing, and practicing. As long as we get that 80% more or less right, we can screw up the other 20% and still come out okay. HIRM can help us major in the majors, as Stephen R. Covey would say.

Before we wade in, I want to offer a disclaimer: Bettger published HIRM in 1947. The author’s assumptions and language reflect his post-war, male-dominated era in the United States. Powerful people are “big men.” The majority of Bettger’s illustrations and examples involve one man selling to another. When women make appearances, it’s as housewives, secretaries, and switchboard operators. If you’re willing to separate that packaging from the principles, ideas, and tactics inside, you’ll be richer for the effort—literally.

In fact, as I reached the end of HIRM, I was struck by the book’s enduring relevance and what that means for so-called “advances” in sales.

“The most important advance in selling for many years”

Every ten to fifteen years it seems, another sales school, training program, or book starts trending. As more and more people apply the latest elixir to their sales ailments, word spreads. “The best thing since sliced HubSpot!” they say. “Or babysitters even!” The first example that comes to mind is The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. It made a splash in 2011 when I was two years into my freelance journey.

Everyone loves a made-up genealogy of sales methodology, so here is one spanning 44 years:

• David H. Sandler founded Sandler Training in 1967. Presumably, sales leaders at companies wanted a teachable and scalable approach, and Sandler’s popularity grew for several decades.
• Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale arrived in 1982.
• SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham followed in 1988.
• Twenty-three years later, Rackham wrote the blurb on the first The Challenger Sale hardcover edition: “The most important advance in selling for many years.”

What was this “most important advance”?

The authors drew from a study of 6,000 B2B sales reps and identified five types of salespeople. Of the five, The Challenger type approached sales differently, and folks who fit that type closed more sales, especially in a complex B2B sales environment.

According to the authors, Adamson and Dixon, three specific practices make The Challenger better at selling (or rather, closing):

• They teach customers something new and valuable about their own businesses.
• They change their messaging or framing for different stakeholders so that it resonates.
• They drive the conversation, especially when it comes time to discuss pricing and make decisions.

The “advance” Rackham mentioned was The Challenger Sale’s use of data to demonstrate that The Challenger is more effective than the other four types. Such empirical research is helpful. It gives more weight and validity to the author’s findings, and it’s nice when a book offers a clear path to better results: “Show up like The Challenger and win more deals.”

However, The Challenger Sale itself doesn’t interest me as much as putting the book next to HIRM and seeing where the two agree and disagree. Get this: The pages of HIRM contain story after story of Bettger showing up like The Challenger type by teaching his prospects, tailoring his message, and driving the conversation.

The authors of two books about sales written sixty years apart and in strikingly different eras shed light on what has not changed. Charlie Munger was fond of saying, “Avoid common ways of failing,” and I suspect he would as quickly have said, “Adopt common ways of succeeding.”

In sales as in life, we set ourselves up to go least wrong by building on what won’t change. By sticking to the constants, or fundamentals, we give ourselves fewer opportunities to make mistakes. Fewer mistakes means better results.

This way of thinking became my filter for reading HIRM: “What are the only things I could focus on to sell effectively 80% of the time?”

Let’s look at 5 fundamentals and just for fun I’ll also add the corresponding failure in each case.

Fundamental #1: Enthusiasm

According to the manager of the Johnstown baseball team, Bettger got cut because he was lazy. Bettger disagreed, but he took the lesson to heart. After he got a chance to play with the New Haven team, Bettger resolved to be “the most enthusiastic ball player they’d ever seen.” His enthusiasm quickly caught everyone’s attention, and his pay shot up from $25 to $185 a month.

What’s fascinating is that Bettger didn’t become a better baseball player: “I got this stupendous increase in salary, not because I could throw a ball better—or catch or hit better, not because I had any more ability as a ball player. I didn’t know any more about baseball than I did before.”

“Let me repeat—nothing but the determination to act enthusiastic increased my income 700 percent in ten days!”

After his baseball career ended Bettger started selling life insurance. He realized that he needed to recapture that enthusiasm. Again, that commitment made all the difference: “I firmly believe enthusiasm is, by far, the biggest single factor in successful selling.”

When I first started freelancing in 2009, I couldn’t claim deep copywriting expertise or show a long track record of stellar results. Clients couldn’t buy experience or judgment implied by age because I was still young. They couldn’t buy my credentials, awards, or some other external form of proof because I had none.

I did manage to land enough projects to stay afloat, so what were those early clients buying?

Bettger helped me realize that they liked my enthusiasm. They could tell I cared a lot. I cared about them as people. I cared about their businesses and about the work itself. I hoovered up every scrap of knowledge I could and passed it on to them.

Bettger writes, “Enthusiasm is by far the highest paid quality on earth, probably because it is one of the rarest; yet, it is one of the most contagious.”

Once I stopped to think about the infectious power of enthusiasm, I noticed examples everywhere:

• Think about a restaurant where you asked the waiter for recommendations.
• Think about a complete stranger with inordinate passion for her water bottle, “I take it with me everywhere!”
• Think about a friend who gushed about Big Sur: “You have to go there! It’s the perfect little retreat spot for a writer like you.”

Their enthusiasm sways us, and the opposite is equally true: You can surely recall a time when you wanted to buy something, but the salesperson’s distractedness, ambivalence, or aloofness poured ice water on your enthusiasm.

“But what if I don’t feel enthusastic?” you ask.

Bettger has advice on that, too: “To become enthusiastic—act enthusiastic.”

You can get a lot of other things wrong in sales—like I did when jabbering way too much—yet you can still get the sale if you show up and generate a great deal of enthusiasm.

Failure #1: You don’t bring enthusiasm to the conversation, and you infect your prospects with your hesitancy instead.

Fundamental #2: Records

Ten months into his job selling life insurance, things weren’t going well. Bettger put in his notice, and just as he arrived at the office to pick up some personal items, a meeting with the sales team began. Bettger decided to stay until the end because he’d be embarrassed to leave in the middle. Good thing he did because the company president, Mr. Walter LeMar Talbot, made a short statement that changed the trajectory of Bettger’s career and life:

“Show me any man of ordinary ability who will go out and earnestly tell his story to four or five people every day, and I will show you a man who just can’t help making good!”

Then and there, Bettger swapped his resignation for two new commitments, the first being recording the number of calls he made.

“Without records, we have no way of knowing what we are doing wrong,” Bettger observes.

Even the more advanced freelancers I work with often don’t keep accurate records. Shoot, I haven’t kept accurate records at times! We don’t keep accurate records because, well, what could be more tedious? Yet, without accurate records we have no reliable, dispassionate way to diagnose what we’re doing right or wrong. We must rely on unreliable impressions and hunches instead.

Eventually, like Bettger, we all reach the crossroads where we must decide which form of discomfort we prefer, that of keeping good records or that of not generating enough revenue.

Once we develop what Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish calls “a taste for saltwater” and choose the more beneficial form of discomfort, generating predictable revenue gets easier.

Failure #2: You don’t keep accurate records.

Fundamental #3: Inputs

Bettger’s first commitment was record-keeping, and his second was a regular quota of sales activities, specifically seeing an average of four people each week day.

An early mentor of mine, Lance Cooper, helped to cure my wishful thinking by challenging me to track all my sales activities. He laid out the relationships in clear and simple terms:

• To get enough sales, you need to send enough proposals.
• To send enough proposals, you need enough requests for a proposal.
• To reach that point, you need enough appointments or discovery calls.
• To do enough discovery calls, you need to connect with enough prospects.

“You have to know your numbers,” Lance would say. “You may need thirty prospects to have fifteen calls to send five proposals and make three sales.” Prospects become appointments become proposals become sales.

Surely, it’s not that simple, I thought.

It was that simple.

Every month that I managed to scrounge up enough prospects I would hit my revenue target. The math would math as long as I hit my numbers.

Bettger reached the same conclusion a century before I did. His first commitment, record-keeping, turned up an uncomfortable insight: He needed to make a lot more calls. Scheduling twenty appointments per week would take more effort than he initially thought. He put in the effort, and after nearly quitting his job in October, he went on to sell more policies in the last ten weeks of the year than he had in the previous ten months.

All change starts with honesty, so be honest as you answer these questions for yourself:

• If you aren’t hitting your revenue target, is the market or your own math and effort to blame?
• Is it realistic to hit your target given the number of sales activities you have been logging?

The more money magic happens when, like Bettger, we combine sufficient inputs with good records and a bit of honest analysis.

That analysis may surprise you. For example, Bettger had been meeting with people a third, fourth, and fifth time, but after his records told him that 93% of his prospects bought within two appointments, he stopped pursuing the extra meetings. He instead spent that time finding fresh prospects.

Bettger contrasted his own experience with that of a different company where “75 percent of the business produced by their salesmen was sold after the fifth interview!”

You won’t notice what is or isn’t working for you and achieve a higher return on time invested if you don’t keep records, put in your sales activities, and analyze your results.

Failure #3: You don’t put in the effort required to get the desired output.

Failure #4: Focus

What’s the point of sales call or appointment? Most people would answer, “To sell something.”

Though that goal or focus seems obvious, it creates a mental block for many people who need to sell something. We don’t like being aggressive or pushy because we have distinct and unpleasant memories of high-pressure salespeople who manipulated our emotions and made us uncomfortable. Yuck, no thank you, sayonara, we think as we swear to never be “that guy.”

Perhaps you resonate with the way Bettger felt: “I had dreaded to go in to see people, for I feared I was making a nuisance of myself.”

The turning point came for Bettger when another, much older salesman named Clayton M. Hunsicker explained the real focus of a sales call: “The most important secret of salesmanship is to find out what the other fellow wants, then help him find the best way to get it.”

If you embrace this principle of “finding out what people want, and helping them get it” your experience will be the same as Bettger’s and my own:

• You don’t dread sales calls because you don’t view them as a pitch or audition but a “serve call” (hat tip to my friend John Meese for that phrase).
• You find that you enjoy facilitating a process of self-discovery for the other person because you know it’s helpful and valuable.
• Prospects will quickly realize that you’re being attentive and helpful, and their guard will come down.
• Once their guard is down, trust starts flowing, and they’re more open and honest with you.
• With clarity being the goal, you ask more probing and thought-provoking questions.
• The openness, honesty, and resulting clarity bring fresh insights.
• Those insights clue people in to what they want.

Once both you’ve earned the prospect’s trust and you’re both clear on what she wants, it becomes apparent to both parties whether or not what you offer overlaps with what she wants.

You both see that working together might be a good idea, and with that shared awareness achieved, it’s not all that awkward or difficult to “close” using the two questions from Michael Port’s book Book Yourself Solid:

1. “Would you like someone to help you with that?”
2. “Would you like that person to be me?”

You’ll recall the similarity I pointed out between The Challenger Sale and Bettger’s approach to sales. The most effective salespeople do three things on purpose: 1) teach prospects, 2) tailor messaging, and 3) drive conversations. Look closely, and you’ll see that all three of those things grow out of a genuine desire to serve first and sell second.

It just so happens that a service-first posture is also more effective for winning more sales! If you listen closely, people will tell you what they want to buy and how they want you to sell it to them. And once you know what they want, Bettger tells you to stick to the main issue: “Never try to cover too many points; don’t obscure the main issue. Find out what it is; then stay right on the beam.”

If you don’t believe me, believe Zig Ziglar: "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

Failure #4: During sales meetings you focus on selling what you have, not finding out what the prospect wants and helping her get it.

Failure #5: Habits

In HIRM Bettger shares specific habits and practices that enabled him to improve at sales and hit his goals. Here are nine that stood out to me:

1. Smiling until he felt like smiling
2. Consistent follow-up (already covered)
3. Generating enthusiasm (already covered)
4. Consistent inputs or sales activities (already covered)
5. Meticulous record-keeping and regular analysis (already covered)
6. Getting up earlier in the day, usually by 6:00am. You don’t have to like it, but try it and you won’t regret it.
7. Creating good outcomes by expecting good outcomes… “In bold type across the top of the card were these words: THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST INTERVIEW I EVER HAD.”
8. His “self-organization” day on Friday mornings: “You are already living on a schedule. And, if it’s not a planned one, it’s a poor one.”
9. Talking very little in the first half of meetings and using the Socratic method to get prospects talking, specifically about what they want and the deeper reasons they don’t want to buy. “A salesman cannot know too much but he can talk too much.”

Each of those habits and practices enriches the others. Drop any of them, and the others won’t benefit you nearly as much.

Now, I recognize this may be a brick-sized pill for you to swallow if your confidence in your own sales prowess is wobbly. I’ll let Bettger deliver some encouragement by way of the law of averages:

“Are you discouraged by your failures? Listen! Your average may be as good as anybody’s. If you fail to find your name on the list of makers-good, don’t blame it on your failures. Examine your records. You’ll probably discover the real reason is lack of effort. Not enough exposure. You don’t give old-man law of averages sufficient chance to work for you.”

Are you putting forth the effort? Are you getting enough exposure?

Lots of us have old, unhelpful habits getting in the way, and for winning exciting projects with dream clients to be a realistic prospect, you’ll need to upgrade one or more habits.

James Clear’s core strategy in Atomic Habits, the Four Laws of Behavior Change, comes to our aid here. Pick a beneficial sales-related or business habit you don’t have (for example, meticulous record-keeping) and do the following:

1. Make it obvious.
2. Make it attractive.
3. Make it easy.
4. Make it satisfying.

Meanwhile, to break the habit you no longer want (for example, sloppy and erratic record-keeping), do the opposite:

1. Make it invisible.
2. Make it unattractive.
3. Make it difficult.
4. Make it unsatisfying.

An acquaintance of Bettger’s, Richard W. Campbell, spells out the choice each of us has to make related to habits and self-discipline: “In this world, we either discipline ourselves, or we are disciplined by the world. I prefer to discipline myself.”

Failure #5: Keep the habits that are getting you the results you say you don’t want.

Collect and use “long ideas.”

How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling contains what I call “long ideas.” They’re not new ideas because, well, they’ve been around for 100 years. They’re not old ideas either because they're just as relevant today.

Long ideas endure a long time because they have intrinsic importance or relevance. They get passed from one generation to the next. They hop across distinct eras. Some of them are so time-worn, like old coins, that they stop resembling ideas at all. They seem more like a part of the landscape—for example, "What goes around comes around." "You reap what you sow."

My advice? Collect and use long ideas. Build your sales approach and business on what hasn’t changed. You may experience more discomfort at times, but you will build a thriving business, and with it, a more satisfying life.

When you’re ready, here are ways I can help you:

1. Free Money. A pricing and money mindset guide for freelance creatives. If you’re unsure about your freelance pricing, this is the book for you.
2. Morning Marketing Habit. This course will help you build an “always be marketing” practice, become less dependent on referrals, and proactively build the business you want with the clients you want. My own morning marketing habit has enabled me to consistently make 6 figures as a freelancer.
3. 1:1 Coaching. Gain clarity, confidence, and momentum in your freelance or consulting business.
4. Freelance Cake Community. Build the business you really want with people who really get it.
5. Clarity Session. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. I've done well over 100 of these 1:1 sessions with founders, solopreneurs, and freelancers who wanted guidance, a second opinion, or help creating a plan.