Tom Hopkins

The great salesman must have at heart the interests of his customer, for no business can develop except as it promotes the interests of those who use its goods or its services.

In selling, the greatest possible unselfishness is the most enlightened selfishness.

My experience has taught me that the effort to make a man buy something he does not need, in the long run defeats its own purpose.

The supersalesman will not only study the immediate needs of his customer, but he will provide against those needs even before the customer realizes that they exist.

One of the greatest elements of skill in a salesman is to create in the customer’s mind the thought that the salesman’s company will be able to produce the goods which the salesman is trying to sell. The samples may be fine, but the customer must know that the man in the factory behind the samples will also do his part to the uttermost.

The great salesman must be a man, furthermore, who can not only make the customer want to buy, but who can also make his own producing organization equally enthusiastic to deliver the goods. This is something new in salesmanship.

Good salesmanship means getting a good price for good material. He is not always the best salesman who sells the greatest quantity at the best price.

Success in selling is largely a matter of personal integrity well directed. For unless you can sell yourself, you will never have the opportunity to sell something else. And the biggest possible personal selling point is integrity. Therefore I say cultivate integrity; cultivate and cherish and develop it.

If you are in a line that does not give you pleasure, you are wrongly placed and you had better start afresh. Go to that which you delight to do and you must succeed. Be sure that you lean backward in your endeavor to establish a reputation for honesty and right doing.

The super-salesman is a man true to the interests of the customer, and whose supreme purpose is to quicken his customer’s imagination and make him see the true virtues of the goods that you are selling to him.”I learned a long time ago,” says ultra successful sales trainer, best selling author, and motivator Tom Hopkins, “that selling is the highest paid hard work – and the lowest paid easy work I could find. I also learned that the choice was all mine.” Hopkins decided on the hard work path and his efforts have paid off handsomely for himself and for the thousands upon thousands he has helped to do the same. On average he trains about 100,000 salespeople a year both in the U.S. and abroad, while he earns a cool $10,000 every time he sets foot on stage to do his thing.

What he does is worth it. Covering every conceivable aspect of selling from Applied Presentation Skills to Closing Zeal, Hopkins mottos “Money is good” and “Champions love people and use money, not the other way around” are like initiation rites, rally style. “My goal,” explains Hopkins, “is to change the image that most people have of the salesman who just wants to cram his product down the prospect’s throat. The average American today is more sophisticated, and wants to buy from someone with understanding and warmth.” “No one wants to be sold,” he goes on philosophically, “but they do want to own things.”

In Hopkins’ view, salespeople can relate to him because of all the downs they may have had, he has had at least as many, maybe more. “Self-motivation is one of the salesperson’s most important tools,” he claims, explaining “there is no substitute for product knowledge and sales technique, but without a positive self-image, all is lost.” Hopkins believes that salespeople in particular must learn to benefit from adversity and failure. He sums up what he has learned about success by saying, in characteristically positive tones, “I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed. And that is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.”

PSP: How do you define motivation?

TOM HOPKINS: To me, motivation is the ability to get people to stretch farther than they are accustomed to in order to reach their goals.

PSP: Is motivation the same for everyone?

TOM HOPKINS: No. Motivation is different for different types of people. Some people are self-motivated. They have the ability to reach within themselves for the strength to do what they really don’t want to do, but may have to do in order to reach their desired goals.

PSP: What are some of the other types of people?

TOM HOPKINS: There are others who need someone on a periodic basis to sit down with them and review their goals and achievements and to give them praise and recognition to further motivate them. Then you also have a certain number of people who don’t want to change. Motivation for them becomes a negative force.

PSP: How do you mean that?

TOM HOPKINS: You cannot change people who do not want to change. You can only effect a change in someone who is ready for it. If you try to change someone who is not ready, they will resist, producing a counterproductive force to motivation. They will use all their energies in a negative way.

PSP: Would you agree that people who do not want to change will get short-changed?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes, I would. I also find that people have to be at a certain point in their lives. The ones who have done their best in a self-motivated environment have something to prove to somebody, even if that person is the individual himself.

PSP: In your view, what do they have to prove?

TOM HOPKINS: They have a tremendous desire to either prove themselves to others or to themselves, or to accomplish something they haven’t done before. They have an innate need to grow beyond their present parameters.

PSP: Who motivated you at the beginning of your career?

TOM HOPKINS: I think I fall right into that category we just talked about – I had something to prove.

PSP: To yourself?

TOM HOPKINS: Both to myself and to my father. He wanted me to be a famous attorney and I only lasted for ninety days in college. When I quit, I came home to tell my father and he was very disappointed and said, “I will always love you even though you’ll never amount to anything.”

PSP: How did you feel about that?

TOM HOPKINS: To me this was a tremendous emotional and psychological motivator because I told myself, “OK. I’m going to prove I can become a success.”

PSP: How did you accomplish that goal?

TOM HOPKINS: I went into construction and although I was making a pretty decent wage at the age of seventeen, I still wasn’t satisfied. At eighteen, I decided to try sales. Even there I had a problem. I had to take the real estate exam twice.

PSP: What was your motivation at that time?

TOM HOPKINS: I wanted to win. If there was any kind of a contest, say for a trophy, that meant more to me than the money. If there was a vacation contest, I went after that. And then, all of a sudden, my life became a series of little victories because I began to win – to reach my goals.

PSP: Was there a big growth step that happened at some point?

TOM HOPKINS: In 1968 I set a goal to sell more homes than anyone else had ever sold in one year. When I reached that goal, I started thinking about management.

PSP: How do you sum up the effects of this desire to prove something?

TOM HOPKINS: If a person doesn’t have something to prove, or doesn’t have a tremendous need or desire, it’s easy to just coast along.

PSP: Your example with your father is a good one. Did he use that same technique to motivate you when you were younger?

TOM HOPKINS: He started out like a lot of parents. He always would say that if I didn’t get a degree I wouldn’t amount to anything. He was kind of a perfectionist.

PSP: So he would exert a slight pressure by informing you of the consequences of a certain action or lack of it?

TOM HOPKINS: Sure. The greatest motivator is either the fear of losing something, or of having something bad happen to you. A lot of good managers use fear properly to motivate people.

PSP: Who or what motivates you now?

TOM HOPKINS: Well, now I feel almost an obligation to help other people realize their goals. We’re all motivated by different things – money, achievement, recognition, security, acceptance of others, love of family, self-acceptance or becoming our own person, and feeling satisfied with life.

PSP: What demotivates people?

TOM HOPKINS: People who are demotivated are suffering from things like self-doubt. They may fear that they won’t be able to achieve their goals, or they may be listening to negative voices from outside themselves. This can affect a person’s mind and attitude.

PSP: So fear of failure can be a demotivator?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes. Some people are so afraid of falling that they won’t even try. They’ve been defeated before they attempt anything – defeated by their own lack of confidence or loss of sense of security. They won’t take any risk at all and the last step of demotivation is the immobilization that comes from their inability to change.

PSP: For many people there has been a significant experience with or because of some hero that has been a motivating factor. Did you have a hero who motivated you?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes, I did. His name was J. Douglas Edwards. I consider him to have been the father of American selling. When I was 19, I spent the last $150 I had to go to a five-day training that he was conducting.

PSP: Why did you decide to do that?

TOM HOPKINS: Well, you see, I had failed miserably when I started in selling. It goes back to the fact that I hadn’t had any training. Now, J. Douglas Edwards’ intensive five-day training literally taught me what I call the art of closing the sale.

PSP: And what did you learn?

TOM HOPKINS: I learned all the steps to go through to qualify a prospect and sell the product.

PSP: Did Edwards’ course make a great difference in your professional life?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes, it did, and he became my hero. I found that I wanted to become a top producer and I also wanted to earn his esteem. He became one of the main forces in my life.

PSP: And later in your life were there other motivating forces?

TOM HOPKINS: After Edwards I really didn’t have another hero for a long time. But, I read an enormous amount – authors like Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Zig Ziglar. These people have really done such a tremendous job for the world. I studied the art of selling, and, after I sold the real estate office I had managed, I decided that I wanted to teach. It’s been very motivating working to help others realize their goals the way Edwards helped me realize mine.

PSP: What suggestions do you have for sales managers or trainers who want to motivate others to realize their goals?

TOM HOPKINS: I think the first important step is to help other people set their own goals. These goals have to be better than what the person is currently doing, but they still have to be believable.

PSP: How does the manager do that?

TOM HOPKINS: Well, every manager should sit down with a new salesperson and ask him or her questions right in the beginning; not just talk, but actually ask specific questions, such as “I’d like you to answer some questions – would you like me to help you reach your goal?” And then, “Let’s outline a couple of goals that would make you happy – what kind of a car would you really like to have in the next year or two? And the manager should write that down in this salesperson’s folder. They should do it together and then outline other goals like the kind of house this salesperson might want to be living in over the next two or three years and so on.

PSP: How many goals should the manager help the salesperson set?

TOM HOPKINS: I think about five or six. Other goals would include what income for the first year’s work would make the salesperson feel he or she had done a really good job. Get the salesperson to commit himself to specific and measurable goals and make the two of you partners in that effort.

PSP: What would you do then?

TOM HOPKINS: Then I would ask, “Do you want me to help you reach those goals?” I would get a commitment.

PSP: Is there a step after the commitment?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes, you must get that person’s permission, an indication that he or she is ready to have you help him reach those goals in very specific ways by showing him what he is doing right and wrong – by helping him improve his professional performance. That’s the tough part. You say, “If need be, would you allow me to sit down with you and make suggestions, critique and advise you on what you need to do to reach the goals we’ve just outlined?”

PSP: You got permission to act as a mentor?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes, and also as a disciplinarian if necessary. I then go a step further. I think the manager has to write down two agreements. One is, “I hereby agree to do whatever is necessary to help John Smith reach the outlined goals.” Then I sign my name. Then I ask John Smith to write down that he agrees to let me do whatever is necessary to help reach those goals.

PSP: So you make a countercommitment to the goals that you’ve set together?

TOM HOPKINS: That’s right. Now, if John Smith is sitting around down in the dumps three months later, the manager can say, “Look, you’re not making enough calls and contacting enough people. You’ve got to do more prospecting.” Now both the salesperson and the manager are interdependent and have made a commitment in writing to work together so it’s unlikely that the salesperson is either going to resent the manager’s advice, or feel threatened by it. He is more likely to act on it and to succeed in his profession.

PSP: So a good manager acts as a guide, a disciplinarian, a mentor and a teacher?

TOM HOPKINS: That’s the way I see the manager’s role. But, also, a manager should do some research into the past of the new salesperson. He or she should know what that salesperson was making before and what he already has in terms of lifestyle. Most people don’t make drastic lifestyle changes. If someone is driving a $10,000 car and says he wants to be driving a $40,000 car in a year, the manager’s role is to help that person define a more realistic goal that is reachable and reasonable and maybe put the higher goal down the road a few years. Most people grow gradually and that’s healthy.

PSP: How about the superstar who comes in and really outperforms all the manager’s expectations?

TOM HOPKINS: That happens, but it’s only about one in a thousand. For the rest of the salespeople out there, goals that are unrealistic can lead to a despondent attitude and that’s very demotivating.

PSP: Big fantasies can end up in big disappointments?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes. You’ve got to have a work plan and the best time to complete it is the night before. That way you’ll wake up motivated and you won’t be floundering around for half a day just defining what you want to accomplish.

PSP: What would be another technique?

TOM HOPKINS: Don’t get in a rut. I tell people to vary their routines – maybe not to wake up at the same time every day, not to drive the same way to work or to their territory. In other words, don’t confine yourself. New things to look at and new ways of dong things lead to new ideas, and new ideas lead to an expanded horizon. Expanding your horizons automatically leads to bigger success.

PSP: What do you do to stay motivated in your own life?

TOM HOPKINS: I am a strong believer that you have to live what you teach. I do all the things we’ve talked about here. Plus, I believe, as they say in show business, the show must go on. If I’ve flown from one time zone to another, and I’m tired, I still go ahead as planned, and I find that once you get up there in front of people who are looking to you for help, you have to give the best you’ve got. When you’re giving your best, like a salesperson talking with a customer, and you’re not feeling that good, you start faking it and suddenly, you’re actually making it. Your adrenaline kicks in and you really do feel good, and you’re doing a good job.

PSP: What do you think about the negative aspects of selling – like rejection?

TOM HOPKINS: You can’t take rejection personally. That’s the cardinal rule. The only way you can manage your feelings about rejection is to change your attitude towards the word no. If you have to talk to five people to get one order, and you earn $100 every time you get an order, then each no is worth $25 because out of five you’ll get four nos and one yes. Instead of getting depressed each time you hear no, you say “thanks” for the $25 and make the next call.

PSP: Do you teach any other mental attitude boosters?

TOM HOPKINS: I ask students of my courses to memorize certain things like: “I never see failure as a failure but only as a learning experience,” or, “I never see failure as failure but only as the negative feedback I need to change course in my direction.”

PSP: What do you call these?

TOM HOPKINS: I call them the Attitude Towards Failure.

PSP: Are there more?

TOM HOPKINS: Yes. I never see failure as a failure but only see the opportunity to develop my sense of humor, or only as part of a game I must play to win. The last is, selling and business and life are all a big percentage game.”

PSP: What was your most demotivating experience?

TOM HOPKINS: When I was just starting out I sold four homes, all contingent on one of them going to a close. I worked for three months on that transaction. They all fell through and I made nothing, absolutely zero.

PSP: Then what happened?

TOM HOPKINS: After my second year, my income started to increase and things began to improve. I changed strategy. I started to train others, and the challenges got bigger and I was able to meet them with success.

PSP: What was your most motivating experience?

TOM HOPKINS: Oh, when my book, How to Master the Art of Selling, hit the bestseller list, without a doubt.

PSP: Why was that such a great thing for you?

TOM HOPKINS: Well, when I dropped out of college after ninety days, and then wrote a book that people thought worthwhile enough to buy so many copies that it hit the bestseller list, that was really motivating. Then I was invited to speak in front of 150 college professors on how to motivate students – a college dropout on motivating students. I did a three-hour session on how to help students out of a study slump. I wrote the whole session for the professors. To have them sit there and take notes and then give me a standing ovation when I was done was the highlight of this college dropout’s life so far.

PSP: So for you motivation comes from helping other people to grow?

TOM HOPKINS: I had 10 or 15 letters recently from people who went out and increased their incomes after going through one of my courses, but I had one letter in particular. A woman wrote that she had just come out of the hospital after suffering a stroke. Half her body is paralyzed, but she went out after the course and in the first year made almost $50,000. Stories like that motivate me to spend 95 percent of my time travelling from seminar to seminar teaching my students how to become “champions.”

PSP: What is your measure of success?

TOM HOPKINS: My measure of success is to reach fulfillment in four areas. Number one is financial accomplishments, based on my own self-image and goals. Number two is emotional stability and the ability to control emotional handicaps in my own life. Number three is physical fitness and feeling good physically. And number four is maintaining my spiritual awareness and my personal relationship with a higher power. If you can do all four of these, you’re a successful human being by my measure of success.

PSP: There’s always a tendency to go out of those bounds every day.

TOM HOPKINS: Certainly, and it’s a constant struggle, isn’t it?

PSP: Thank you.