101 Greatest Sales Quotes

I needed a little inspiration yesterday. So, I went looking for the greatest sales quotes of all time. Since it took me awhile to find them, I figured I’d share them with you today.

Every entrepreneur and sales professional needs a little inspiration at times.

Throw one of these sales quotes into your next presentation, webinar, or eBook. Tweet them, like them, poke them. Whatever you want, they’re all yours.

Here are the 101 greatest sales quotes of all time:

1. To me, job titles don’t matter. Everyone is in sales. It’s the only way we stay in business. – Harvey Mackay
2. Remember that failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night. – Zig Ziglar
3. Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life. – Mary Kay Ash
4. If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will. – Bob Hooey
5. Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect. – William Clement Stone
6. I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard. – Estée Lauder
7. People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts. – Robert Keith Leavit
8. A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one. – Mary Kay Ash
9. You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise. – Patricia Fripp
10. Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make. – William Bernbach
11. If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. – Josh Billings
12. How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
13. The secret of man’s success resides in his insight into the moods of people, and his tact in dealing with them. – J. G. Holland
14. Business is like riding a bicycle. Either you keep moving or you fall down. – Frank Lloyd Wright
15. Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. – Zig Ziglar
16. As you travel down life’s highway…whatever be your goal, you cannot sell a doughnut without acknowledging the hole. – Harold J. Shayler
17. On any given Monday I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a Millionaire. – Larry D. Turner
18. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. – Zig Ziglar
19. I have learned that trying to guess what the boss or the client wants is the most debilitating of all influences in the creation of good advertising. – Leo Burnett
20. The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at. – Don Marquis
21. It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive. – Nicholas Johnson
22. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge. – Jalal Uddin Rumi, Persian mystic and poet, 1207 – 1273
23. Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. – Karl Marx
24. Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops. – Thomas J. Watson Jr
25. The sale most often goes to the most interested party. – Steve Chandler, 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself
26. Use your CRM to retain customers. – Jeffrey Gitomer, 21.5 Unbreakable Laws of Selling
27. Every choice you make has an end result. – Zig Ziglar
28. McDonald’s is almost 50 years old. For 47 years we had a pretty consistent track record of being able to deliver admirable sales. – Jim Cantalupo
29. I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation. – Bo Bennett
30. A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market. – Jeff Koons
31. Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour day. – Zig Ziglar
32. Your business is never really good or bad ‘out there.’ Your business is either good or bad right between your own two ears. – Zig Ziglar
33. Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. – Stephen Hawking
34. In sales, a referral is the key to the door of resistance. – Bo Bennett
35. People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons. – Zig Ziglar
36. For small business people, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family. – Tony Abbott
37. A goal properly set is halfway reached. – Zig Ziglar
38. If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal. – Zig Ziglar
39. Success has a lot to do with luck, but it also involves a lot of real hard work. The thing about success is you really can’t gauge things by album sales. – Jerry Cantrell
40. My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics. – Lisa See
41. As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it’s been a huge promotional tool for me. – Al Yankovic
42. Most of my career has been in sales. I spend 50% or more of my time with customers and employees, and I can’t wait for it to be more than 50%. – Anne M. Mulcahy
43. A good ad which is not run never produces sales. – Leo Burnett
44. Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers. – Michael Korda
45. I didn’t really care about sales figures. I just wanted to get things off my chest. – Tom Cochrane
46. In the South, we tell stories. We tell stories if you’re in a sales position, if you’re in a retail position, you lure your customer by telling a story. You just do. – Tate Taylor
47. If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. – Zig Ziglar
48. One of the best predictors of ultimate success in either sales or non-sales selling isn’t natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections. – Daniel H. Pink
49. Sales may lead to advertising as much as advertising leads to sales. – Michael Schudson
50. One thing Della Valle taught me is the power to say no if something isn’t right. That mattered even over sales. – Ines de La Fressange
51. If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative. (via directcreative) – David Ogilvy
52. If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost. – Zig Ziglar
53. If you don’t see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner. – Zig Ziglar
54. For every sale you miss because you’re too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because you’re not enthusiastic enough.
55. Stop selling. Start helping. – Zig Ziglar
56. The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing. – Erle Stanley Gardner
57. There’s no lotion or potion that will make sales faster and easier for you – unless your potion is hard work.  – Jeffrey Gitomer
58. 62.   So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs. – Dorothea Brande
59. You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it. – Charles Robert Buxton
60. Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. –  Zig Ziglar
61. When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there. – Zig Ziglar
62. The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. – Vince Lombardi
63. The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed. – Henry Ford
64. The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph! – Marvin Phillips
65. Every brand isn’t for everybody, and everybody isn’t for every brand. – Liz Lange
66. The most unprofitable item ever manufactured is an excuse. – John Mason
67. Success is the culmination of failures, mistakes, false starts, confusion, and the determination to keep going anyway. – Nick Gleason
68. Most people think “selling” is the same as “talking”. But the most effective salespeople know that listening is the most important part of their job. – Roy Bartell
69. You don’t close a sale; you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise. – Patricia Fripp
70. If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will. – Bob Hooey
71. There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. – Beverly Sills
72. Life’s battles don’t always go to the strongest or fastest; sooner or later those who win are those who think they can. – Richard Bach
73. Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business. – Zig Ziglar
74. Timid salesmen have skinny kids. – Zig Ziglar
75. If we learn from losing, we become winners in the end. – Anonymous
76. If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. – Thomas Edison
77. Obstacles can’t stop you. Problems can’t stop you. Most of all, other people can’t stop you. Only you can stop you. – Jeffrey Gitomer
78. Leadership is doing what is right when no one is watching. – George Van Valkenburg
79. Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance. – Samuel Johnson
80. Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
81. Some men see things as they are and ask why…I dream of things that never were and ask why not? – Robert Kennedy
82. Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough. – Og Mandino
83. Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them. – Ann Landers
84. The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail. – Napoleon Hill
85. You can do anything if you have enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes rise to the stars. With it, there is accomplishment. Without it there are only alibis. – Henry Ford
86. Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. – John Wooden
87. Take risks.  If you win, you’ll be happy; if you lose, you’ll be wise. – Anonymous
88. The best sales questions have your expertise wrapped into them. – Jill Konrath
89. Make a customer, not a sale. – Katherine Barchetti
90. Tough times never last, but tough people do. – Robert Schuller
91. Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. – Dale Carnegie
92. Integrity is what we do, what we say and what we say we do. – Don Galer
93. Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. – Jim Rohn
94. He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. – Benjamin Franklin
95. Fear is the destroyer of dreams and the killer of ambitions. – Jeffrey Benjamin
96. The questions you ask are more important than the things you could ever say. – Tom  Freese
97. Excellence is not a skill. It’s an attitude. – Ralph Marston
98. Today is always the most productive day of your week. – Mark Hunter
99. Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor. – Brian Tracy
100. Try not to become a person of success, but try to become a person of value. – Albert Einstein.
101. Your competition is EVERYTHING else your prospect could conceivably spend their money on. – Don Cooper

What other sales quotes would you add to this list?

Ian