It’s after 8:00 p.m. on a Friday and, as usual, Personal Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner is on the telephone. By this hour most East Coast businesses have closed for the weekend so Gerhard is taking advantage of the time difference to call customers on the West Coast. After spending 15 minutes negotiating with one potential advertiser, Gerhard closes the deal, wishes the customer a pleasant weekend and hangs up, smiling. Thirty years into a highly successful career as a salesman, sales trainer and publisher, Gschwandtner relishes the chase.

“I love to sell,” he beams, with genuine enthusiasm shining through his accented English. “Selling is seizing a fleeting chance to improve the lives of perfect strangers.”

In the manner of so many traditional American success stories, but this time with an Austrian twist, Gschwandtner has managed to parlay his love of selling into a thriving business. Today, 15 years after the publication began its run as an eight-page newsprint tabloid to promote an audiovisual sales training program, Personal Selling Power has become the highest circulation sales publication in America, recently surpassing the 185,000 circulation mark. In addition, PSP’s influence spreads across 5 continents, helping sales and marketing professionals in more than 34 countries gain valuable information, improve selling skills and revitalize flagging motivation.

Reviewing his success thus far, Gerhard is quick to point out that the slick, professional magazine subscribers see today represents the culmination of years of struggle, problem solving and old-fashioned hard work. Not surprisingly, Gerhard says his earliest recollections involve the learning process.

“I grew up in a small Austrian village 10 miles east of Salzburg known as Thalgau,” he explains. “We lived in my grandmother’s inn, which was the social center of town. Everyone in town came to her to transact business. She always knew who was selling firewood or who wanted to buy a cow. Watching her handle all these different personality types I learned to read people.”

At the end of World War II as the Allied troops occupied Austria the young Gschwandtner was exposed for the first time to Americans.

“I found the American soldiers very interesting,” he says. “When I saw that many of them had fishing poles, I showed them the best places to find fish. Then I hit upon the idea that I could dig up worms and sell them to the soldiers. Looking back, I see that convincing the Americans to buy worms from me was probably the first close I ever made.” Gerhard says that this experience gave him the first inkling that someday he would like to own his own business.

After graduating from business school in 1968 with a degree in business and accounting, Gerhard took his first actual selling job, working in Salzburg with the Austrian subsidiary of Poclain, a French manufacturer of hydraulic equipment. After 21/2 years, the company was so impressed with his performance and language skills that they transferred him to the Paris headquarters where he began to master the art of sales training.

One day Gerhard heard through the grapevine that the company’s German subsidiary was considering hiring an outside consultant to provide professional selling skills training. Seeing an opportunity, Gschwandtner took a risk and asked to take a crack at producing the training himself. Although he had no real experience with visual media he felt he could create a very effective training program utilizing the power of video.

“By this time I had traveled all over Europe with the company’s top salespeople,” he explains, “and I had taken notes on what they were doing. Just through observing I realized that they were more effective than others because they were using better scripts. So I saved those scripts, transformed them into video vignettes, hired actors, went into the video studio and created productions depicting successful selling situations. We had five different vignettes – one each for opening, analyzing needs, making presentations, handling objections and closing. Within each segment we had three examples – a good one, a so-so one and a poor one. Then we took that videotape, showed it to salespeople and said, ‘What are the skills that this salesperson is applying? Describe those skills and explain why they are effective or poor.’ That helped them improve their perception of professional selling skills.”

For the next step in the still-evolving Gschwandtner sales training program, Gerhard decided to add video role plays to the course. The results, he says, were impressive.

“That course became the most successful that Poclain had ever produced. The salespeople were crazy about it – and when sales increased, the company was crazy about it too. So they sent me to do the same thing all over Europe – in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and England,” says Gerhard.

The idea for role playing originated in his high school experience with amateur theater.

“During school in Austria I was in a theater group where I learned how to act and direct,” he explains. “I directed a number of plays and I saw the incredible transformation that took place in certain people who could step into a role or character, become confident in it and play that role accurately and genuinely. In essence I took the skills I learned from the theater and used them to show salespeople that instead of being sales impostors, they could be genuine and become true professionals by stepping into a role 100 percent.”

Specifically, Gschwandtner attributes the success of his training to one main focus: increasing awareness. “Unless they are convinced that they can improve, people will resist even the best selling skills,” he says.

“As a trainer, if you say, ‘Bill, I think you could become more effective if you tried something else,’ Bill is probably not going to pay attention to that. But if I create something to show Bill how the customer sees him that lets him evaluate himself objectively, then he has the instant motivation to do better because he won’t want to come across like that forever – he’ll want to improve.”

During his tenure with Poclain in Paris, Gerhard took one vacation in Switzerland, where he met a young American artist named Laura. One month after a whirlwind one-date romance the two were married and set up housekeeping in Paris. Although neither knew it at the time, the future executive board of Personal Selling Power magazine had joined.

A few months later, on the strength of Gerhard’s success training Poclain’s European sales force, the company transferred him to its American subsidiary to train the distributor organization. Upon arrival, Gerhard was pleased to discover that the United States offered a more friendly entrepreneurial environment than he had found in Europe. This move brought him one step closer to achieving his childhood dream of starting his own business.

“When I was in Paris,” he explains, “I came very close to starting a sales training company with a friend of mine but we didn’t have the capital – at that time there were a lot of obstacles to starting your own business. Here it was so much easier – everything favors the entrepreneur in this country if you only go out and do it.

“When I saw that the company I was working for was not going to make it financially I wrote some articles in different magazines about what I was doing. From those articles I received calls from Fortune 500 company sales managers and VPs of sales asking me if I could help them develop programs similar to what I had been doing with Poclain. This positive response from what amounted to a very impressive prospect list helped me make the decision to strike out on my own. I started in August of 1977 and within a week I had my first job. That first job led to another, and another, and soon I had a successful consulting business on my hands.”

Success in the consulting business, however, required that Gerhard spend a great deal of time on the road. In an effort to spend more time at home with Laura and their newborn twin daughters, he created an audiovisual course called “The Languages Of Selling” that he could send out to clients. On the strength of promising early sales of the course, Gerhard stopped traveling to dedicate his full attention to the fledgling business.

“To sell the course I had to produce a direct mail piece,” he says, “so I hired a copywriter and put together a very slick, four-color glossy brochure. Then I rented a mailing list and sent the direct mail piece out to 25,000 sales managers. The response was great, but I thought it cost too much money to produce.”

Inspired by another company’s newsprint tabloid advertising vehicle, Gerhard decided to replace the expensive brochure with an eight-page tabloid-style newsletter. Figuring that a tabloid could pull as well as the brochure at half the price, Gerhard modified the brochure into a two-page ad, then filled the rest of the tabloid with articles on body language and nonverbal selling. As the culmination of a seemingly haphazard chain of events that brought Gerhard from the village of Thalgau to Fredericksburg, Virginia, with stopovers in Salzburg and Paris, the first issue of Personal Selling Power was born with little fanfare. Mailings emanated from the Gschwandtners’ two-car garage, and despite the original success, the question remained whether the nascent publication would bring in orders for the video training course.

As it turned out Gerhard not only sold as many programs as he had with the slick brochure but he also filled orders for 3,000 additional copies of Personal Selling Power. That was in June 1981. Gerhard was so pleased with the results that two months later he tried again with another mailing. This time he received orders for 4,000 extra copies of Personal Selling Power volume 1, number 2.

At Laura’s suggestion, by issue number four Gerhard’s helpful selling tips were accompanied by an ad selling one-year subscriptions for $12. Considering that there were no guarantees that a fifth issue would ever materialize from the garage offices of PSP, this may have seemed like a bold move. Not surprisingly, Gerhard had a plan.

“I had a goal,” he explains, “that if I got less than 500 subscriptions I would refund the money. Within about 30 days we got 1,200 paid subscriptions. Then we repeated the process and by the end of 1982 we had 7,500 paid subscriptions. We ran bigger ads, expanded the publication from 8 pages to 12, then 16, and by early 1983 we were at 20 pages.”

After two short years in the publishing business Gerhard was hooked. But whereas experience had given him confidence to strike out on his own as a sales trainer, he knew precious little about becoming a successful writer, editor and publisher. As the first step in the learning process Gerhard needed to decide on the main focus of Personal Selling Power.

“Simply put,” he says, “my objective was to give the sales manager better tools. Ideally I wanted people to get the publication, read an article and immediately pick up the phone and tell three or four other people about it because they learned so much; or maybe they could learn something in the morning and close a sale in the afternoon. That was always our guiding philosophy, that the publication should be hands-on and action-oriented so people could immediately put what they learned into use instead of scratching their heads for two days then throwing the magazine in the wastebasket and not doing anything about it.

“The second philosophy that we developed was to focus only on the positive aspects of any story. We decided to surprise people with solutions and not trouble them with problems. And that positive slant has really helped us a great deal. To this day I’m struck by the fact that there are so many publications that still don’t understand that people can go a lot further with positive thinking than by dwelling on negatives.”

To learn more about the specifics of the publishing business, Gerhard became a regular at perhaps the greatest repository of learning on earth – the Library of Congress. Immersing himself in books and other magazines, Gerhard quickly became an expert on successful publishers in American history.

“I have always been fascinated by what people have achieved in publishing,” he explains. “At the Library of Congress I was able to feed my hunger for knowledge on the field. I read the entire history of Reader’s Digest and how it grew from something very small. I was fascinated by how B.C. Forbes – Malcolm Forbes’ father – started his magazine, so I read the entire first year’s worth of Forbes that began in 1917. I looked at other selling magazines that were started over the years, including Sales & Marketing Management, which began publishing 75 years ago. I read about Sam Spaulding who started a magazine at the turn of the century called How To Sell. It was published until 1929. I also spent a great deal of time in the Library of Congress studying other topics that were important to the growth of the business such as how to do interviews. In fact I got most of my education by going to the Library of Congress once a week for 10 years and studying over 2,000 books on selling.”

As little as Gerhard knew about the publishing business, he had as much if not more to learn about being a successful entrepreneur. Hoping to avoid the fate of many start-up businesses, 85 percent of which fail in the first five years, Gerhard sought advice from a virtual Who’s Who of entrepreneurial success stories. Because of the nature of Personal Selling Power’s editorial mission, Gerhard viewed these interviews as both an opportunity to teach readers the lessons of success and a chance to learn more himself. By publishing Personal Selling Power, he says, the need to build the business became the crucible sparking his own personal growth.

“When I started building the business,” he says, “the amount that I didn’t know was much greater than what I did know, so I deliberately interviewed some of the most successful entrepreneurs and CEOs I could find. I talked to Mo Siegel of Celestial Seasonings; Bo Pilgrim, the chicken king of the Southwest; Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay cosmetics; Ron Rice of Hawaiian Tropic and many more, and I asked them all questions about how to be successful in business.

“But entrepreneurs represent just one side of selling. Selling involves the whole person – it’s much more than just dollars and cents that make a business – the personal side is what’s most important. To me the world is a laboratory and every day you can learn something new if you just look for the learning lesson.To understand motivation and positive thinking I went to the experts – Zig Ziglar, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Dr. Denis Waitley. They taught me how to create a system to handle the adversity life inevitably throws at you, which has been extremely beneficial.

“The sports coaches we’ve interviewed, such as Lou Holtz, Pat Riley, John Thompson, Mike Ditka, are also all people I’ve learned greatly from about how to build a great team. The sports stars like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Mary Lou Retton, Fran Tarkenton and Terry Bradshaw – they’ve taught me a lot about persistence and doing the impossible, developing guts and going after something other people would be too scared to pursue. CEOs are in my opinion just as remarkable as sports heroes because when you climb up the corporate ladder and get to the top of the pyramid there are fewer and fewer spots. You have to be very shrewd, astute and smart to get there.

“In effect I used the cover story interviews for my own personal growth and for our overall business growth. And every one of those superachievers, coaches, athletes and psychologists has taught me a great deal about how to build a business that is healthy, profitable, growing, and people-oriented and where there is a total dedication to satisfying the customer.”

Doubtless the magazine’s readers have also acquired a great deal from the pantheon of experts and top performers to parade across PSP’s pages over the years. If not, there would likely be no anniversary issue in the first place. Gerhard agrees, and points to that customer-first focus that has characterized every aspect of the business from issue one as the key.

“We have always felt that if you give the customer top quality,” he says, “and give everything that you’ve got, it will come back to you. I’ve always had faith that if we give the absolute best we can, then people will sit up and notice us, but if we hold back then people will turn away from us. So whenever we had an extra dollar we improved the publication – we put more color in, we tried to get better cartoons, better designs, better paper, anything to enhance the readers’ benefit. We did one of the first articles ever on ethics and integrity in selling. We realized early on the important role computer technology would play in selling, so we were among the first to cover the high-tech market and how notebook computers and sales software programs could help people sell more effectively. In another area we collaborated with University of Massachusetts Professor Sy Epstein to make a scientific study of success that broke new ground in the field.

“And of course the major physical improvement steps were first in 1987 when we changed from newsprint to four-color tabloid format and then in January 1990 when we went from the tabloid format to the standard magazine format we have today. Every time we made an improvement our advertising went up and our circulation went up. For 15 years in every business quarter we have increased the circulation or the advertising. So we must be doing something right.”

Gerhard’s upbeat characterization of the magazine’s consistent growth and improvement belies the genuine difficulties he and Laura faced, especially in the early years. From the beginning they faced challenges too numerous to mention relating to the product, the market, the economy, customers, service, employees and sales. As soon as they achieved a modicum of success, competition became a challenge. Despite the diversity of problems they faced, the solutions almost always arrived in a similar form: through increasing their knowledge. To quote a phrase Gerhard coined: “Problems are just a wake-up call for creativity.”

Of course the most obvious problem Gerhard faced in trying to produce a top-quality magazine revolved around the language barrier. Although he felt confident he could write well in his native tongue, there was little market for a German language sales publication here. So while Gerhard plied his talents selling the magazine, Laura took over some of the magazine’s editorial duties in 1983, despite no formal training.

Since 1987 as editor-in-chief she has wielded a rapier-sharp red pencil over every column inch of copy to appear in Personal Selling Power, constantly asking, Does this help the reader and “Is this something PSP readers want or need to know? Laura is primarily responsible for making sure all the information that appears in the magazine is direct, focused and – most important – easy to read.

“We don’t want to make our readers work hard to get something out of the magazine,” she says. “They work hard enough as it is. Reading Personal Selling Power should be as enjoyable as it is helpful. When you put down an issue of PSP, you should feel better than you did before you read it and more able to go out and be successful. That’s our goal.”

In this, the magazine’s 15th year of publication, Personal Selling Power continues to grow, evolve and adapt to the changing needs of an expanding customer base. Reflecting what Gerhard calls the “trenchant triangle of success” the magazine is currently divided into three sections: knowledge, skills and motivation. To keep abreast of what the customer wants, Laura consistently surveys readers and organizes reader focus groups. The results of this extensive research drives editorial and stylistic changes. Office manager Mary Wood long ago replaced the company’s first postage meter – a small cosmetics box that held at most 100 first-class stamps – with the genuine article. In addition, the PSP product line has expanded to include over a dozen books, motivational booklets, sales posters and a cartoon calendar. Under Laura’s tutelage PSP has added a branch dedicated to publishing children’s books that focus on positive ways kids can contribute and grow. According to Gerhard, future changes will be driven by finding positive ways to meet challenges.

“I think one of the more remarkable aspects of our story,” he says, “is that every single day the top executives of the magazine have fundamental discussions about the direction of the business. We constantly question ourselves, asking, What business are we in? What are our customers’ needs? How can we provide more benefit to the readers? This reminds us to keep the customer at the forefront of all decision making, looking at the magazine from the customer’s perspective to find the right direction for the business.”

Regardless of what the future holds for Personal Selling Power, the world will unquestionably remain Gerhard’s learning laboratory, and he will continue to seek out the learning lessons in every negotiation, sale, interview and discussion. And as long as Gerhard stays focused on propagating the fruits of his learning labors on the pages of Personal Selling Power, salespeople and managers will want to be a part of it and readership will grow.

As the indomitable publisher hangs up the telephone receiver and turns to his laptop, art director Marc Oxborrow pokes his head into Gerhard’s office. “How about a game before calling it a night?” Marc asks, swinging a table-tennis paddle.

To provide employees with an outlet to release pent-up stress, in 1993 Gerhard had a ping-pong table brought in and placed in an unused office. Since then he has become the uncrowned office table-tennis champion.

“OK,” Gerhard responds, picking the telephone handset back up, “just as soon as I make one more phone call.”