In one sentence: Zig Ziglar’s enormous, warm, anecdote-driven sales manual argues that closing is a service you perform for a prospect who needs what you sell, then teaches more than a hundred named closes through stories, some of which still hold up and some of which work by embarrassment, guilt and manufactured urgency.
At a Glance
Author: Zig Ziglar
First published: 1984 (Fleming H. Revell)
Category: Business / Sales
Length: about 424 pages, about 155,000 words (Revell updated edition)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8007-5975-9 (Revell updated edition)
Summary reading time: about 12 minutes
Book reading time: about 10.5 hours
Notable adaptations: none, though the material was the backbone of Ziglar’s seminars and audio courses for decades, and the updated edition adds a chapter on technology written with Michael Norton
A note before you start. This book carries explicit Christian content, including a section on building a spiritual reserve and a close built on Jesus as the greatest salesman. Its default salesperson and prospect are men, and women appear mostly as wives, “salesladies” and stereotyped prospect types. Several techniques work by embarrassing, shaming or cornering the buyer, or by inventing urgency, and one has the seller offer a product that does not exist to flush out an objection. Statistics appear without sources throughout, including a claim about brain size that is not sound. Ziglar also plugs his own courses, recordings and seminars often, at one point selling a cassette inside the text. This summary reports his claims as his own.
Zig Ziglar sold vegetables door to door in Yazoo City, Mississippi, from the age of eight, then spent roughly fifteen years in direct sales, mostly cookware for Saladmaster under his first sales manager Bill Cranford. He was the company’s top cookware salesman in America in 1963, and from 1968 worked out of Dallas as a speaker and trainer, best known for See You at the Top. Ziglar says the book holds more than eight hundred questions, over a hundred closes and roughly a hundred stories, in seven parts running from the psychology of closing to a late chapter on technology. Every technique is taught inside a story, usually with reconstructed dialogue. He is a speaker, not a researcher, and the evidence is his life and his friends.
Read it if you sell face to face in retail, direct sales, cars, insurance or real estate, if you want to know where a generation of American sales culture came from, or if you want the warmest treatment of rejection in the sales canon. Skip the bulk of it if you sell to committees over long cycles, or if you want research rather than anecdote.
The Big Idea
Ziglar’s thesis rests on a preposition. If in your heart the sales process is something you do to the prospect, he writes, you are a manipulator and the book is not for you. If it is something you do for the prospect, you are in service. On that reading, a salesperson who believes in a legitimate, fairly priced product is being selfish when he fails to ask for the order, because the prospect loses the benefit. He calls the salesperson an assistant buyer and persuasion good advice given in advance.
He insists this is practical as well as moral, says he has never met a successful manipulator, and ties it to his signature maxim: you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want. The book then spends several hundred pages teaching techniques, some of which are hard to square with that test. The thesis is sincere, and the question is which parts live up to it.
Key Ideas
1. Closing is helping, if the product deserves it
Ziglar argues that the professional who fails to ask for the order is cheating the buyer, but he is explicit that this holds only when the product is legitimate, fairly priced and performs as expected. He mocks the seller who claims to sell out of pure love for people while cashing the commission check. Ego, a term he takes from H. M. Greenberg, makes the seller need the sale, and empathy makes him understand the buyer. Ego without empathy, he warns, leads to misrepresentation. Sympathy costs, he says, and empathy pays.
2. People refuse for five reasons, and the stated one is rarely the real one
Ziglar gives five reasons a prospect does not buy: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. The stated reason, he claims, is usually not the real one, so the job is to find the real one with questions rather than argue. His illustration is Mrs. Funderburk, whose “no money” turned out to be no desire. He insists a no is a request for more information, and that a prospect does not change his mind so much as make a new decision on new information.
3. Sell cost, not price
Price, Ziglar argues, is a one-time concern and cost lasts as long as you own the thing, so the seller’s job is to raise the value above the price rather than cut the price. His example is a cheap bicycle that had to be replaced against a dearer one that did not. The company line he repeats is that it is easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever. Alongside it sits the reduction-to-the-ridiculous technique, which he credits to a 1902 book and to J. Douglas Edwards: break the difference down per year, month and day, and sell only the increment.
4. Selling is a transference of feeling
Ziglar claims selling is essentially the transfer of a feeling, so the seller’s own conviction does most of the work. His emblem is Bill the cookware salesman, whose sales rose once he bought a set himself, and his rule is that closers own what they sell. He quotes Cavett Robert that the prospect is persuaded more by the depth of your conviction than by the height of your logic. Spectacular achievement, he adds, is preceded by unspectacular preparation: drill, rehearse, and turn drive time into what he calls Automobile University.
5. Selling isn’t telling, it’s asking
Ziglar’s Four Question close asks whether the prospect likes it, wants it, can afford it, and when he wants to start enjoying the benefits. The alternate of choice offers two yeses (“shall I ask the company to ship it as soon as possible, or would two weeks be better”), never a choice between something and nothing. For objections he teaches Cavett Robert’s four steps: act delighted, treat the objection as a question, get the commitment that it is the only question, and where possible turn it into the reason to buy. His talking pad, on which each objection is written and crossed off, is the physical version.
6. Refusal is not rejection
The chapters on self-image and rejection are the warmest in the book. Ziglar argues that fear of rejection disguises itself as procrastination, overplanning and desk-hiding, and his line is that people reject salesmen, desks don’t. The prospect has refused the offer, not rejected the person, and a no today beats a maybe. He confesses his own poor self-image and redefines persistence as belief. He pairs this with word pictures: nobody wants a quarter-inch drill, they want a hole, so sell the end result in color and in the present tense.
7. The sale begins after the close
Ziglar’s material on service is where his line that there is no such thing as a little sale belongs. He prescribes follow-up calls, handwritten thank-you notes, testimonial letters kept in a binder, referrals, and his rule to deliver more than you sell. His model of integrity is a bicycle-shop owner who refused a sale because the bike was wrong for the buyer, and his final key is sincerity, which he calls the most important of the eleven. An enthusiastic seller using a few closes, he says plainly, will outsell one who knows all of them and uses none.
Context and Analysis
The parts of this book that hold up are the parts the modern consultative tradition kept. The for-versus-to test is a real ethical standard, and Ziglar means it. Price versus cost is still the cleanest honest answer to a price objection. Questions over telling, listening, empathy paired with drive, ownership of what you sell, and the refusal-is-not-rejection chapters all survive contact with current practice.
The problems are serious and specific. A long list of his closes fail his own test. The Shame close has a shoeshiner guilt a customer into a dearer shine. The Embarrassment and Tightwad closes work on a prospect’s standing with his neighbors, in one case with the seller theatrically tearing up money. The Pressure Permission close turns a prospect’s anger at high pressure into license for more of it. The Hat in Hand and Mother closes pretend to leave, then restart the pitch. The Twenty-Nine-Day close offers a policy that does not exist to flush out the real objection. The Pedestal and Tennis Racket closes work a couple against each other, and the Reverse close tells a buyer the product is no longer available. Ziglar’s own showcase story has a saleswoman conceal the true price of a house and split the cost into a daily figure that leaves out interest, insurance and taxes, and he writes that he knew he was being had. The only guard rail is his instruction to be honest. The statistics are unsourced throughout. He states twice that the feeling brain is ten times the size of the thinking brain, which is not sound neuroscience, and his seven, thirty-eight and fifty-five split of communication misapplies Mehrabian’s research. He claims, without citation, that 63 percent of sales interviews end with no attempt to close and that 71 percent of buyers buy because they like and trust the seller. The salesperson is “he” throughout, the prospect taxonomy runs to Hostile Helen and Betty Bargain Hunter, cassette recorders are the central training tool, and the technology chapter, with its pagers and personal digital assistants, says nothing about buyers who research before they speak to a seller. The religious content is brief and flagged, but not incidental, and one close is a live pitch for a three-dollar tape.
On this site it pairs naturally with To Sell Is Human, Daniel H. Pink’s research-based successor, which replaces Always Be Closing with attunement, buoyancy and clarity. Read it alongside Influence by Robert Cialdini, which names and tests the psychological mechanisms several of Ziglar’s closes rely on, including scarcity, commitment and reciprocity.
How to Apply It
Five practices from the defensible half of the book.
1. Ask before you answer. Assume the stated objection is not the real one, and find the real one with questions. 2. Sell cost, not price. When price comes up, don’t cut it. Show what the cheaper option costs over its life, break the real difference down honestly, and sell only the increment. 3. Own what you sell. If you don’t believe in the product enough to buy it, fix that first. Conviction transfers, and so does its absence. 4. Treat a no as a refusal, not a rejection. The prospect declined an offer. Take the no today over the maybe and make the next call. 5. Deliver more than you sold. Send the handwritten thank-you note, follow up after delivery, and ask the happy customer for a referral.
Memorable Lines
“Yes, the sales process is something we do for the prospect and not to the prospect.” (Zig Ziglar)
“People buy what they want when they want it more than they want the money it costs.” (Zig Ziglar)
“The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.” (Zig Ziglar)
“We decided that it would be easier to explain price one time than it would be to apologize for quality forever.” (Zig Ziglar)
“You are the bridge over which the prospect must cross if he is to move from fearful prospect to confident buyer.” (Zig Ziglar)
“There is no such thing as a little sale.” (Zig Ziglar)
Should You Read the Full Book?
Verdict: Summary is enough
The ideas that have lasted, the for-versus-to test, price versus cost, asking over telling, conviction and service after the sale, fit comfortably in the pages above. The full book adds the voice, which is the real pleasure of Ziglar, a hundred stories and the self-image chapters at full warmth. Read it knowing that it is a period piece built on anecdote, that a good share of its closes contradict its own thesis, and that the author is selling you something on most pages, and keep only the half that passes the test he set himself.
The Secrets of Closing the Sale book page has the full details and where to get a copy.