The Giants of Sales: What Dale Carnegie, John Patterson, Elmer Wheeler, and Joe Girard Can Teach You About Real Sales Success

Preface

If Freud was right that our birth is our destiny, then I was destined to be in sales. Both my father and my grandfather—my mother’s dad—were salesmen.

Grandpa covered a territory in Nevada for the Shupe-Williams candy company. The area he covered was broiling hot in the summer, mighty cold in the winter, and desolate all year round. I can vividly remember how Grandpa would load his sample cases into the trunk and take off in his Nash Rambler (no air conditioning, of course) to make his rounds for a week or more, stopping at small grocers, drugstores, gas stations, motels—anybody who might carry candy near the checkout counter or on the shelves. He had been covering that territory for years and years, and he would come home with wild stories ...