TL;DR
7/10. Twelve and a half principles delivered at volume in short bursts, built on one line that does most of the work: people do not like to be sold, but they love to buy. Abrasive, repetitive, and more useful than its packaging suggests.
The format is deliberate and it is a choice, not a failure of taste. Red cover, short sections, bold type, exclamation marks, and a tone somewhere between a sales trainer and a man shouting at you in a car park.
The half principle is a joke that is also the point: he numbers it 12.5 because the last one is short and because the whole book is refusing to be solemn about a subject most people find excruciating.
The principles cover getting off your own back, preparing to win, personal branding, humour, creativity, referrals, and persistence, and the through line is that the seller is the variable and not the pitch.
What is the central idea?
People do not like to be sold, but they love to buy.
That single line reframes the entire job. It moves the work from persuasion, which is adversarial and which everybody can feel happening to them, to removal of obstacles, which is collaborative.
The consequence is a completely different set of actions. If you are persuading, you build arguments and handle objections. If you are removing obstacles, you find out what is standing between somebody and a thing they already want, and you address that.
For a ghostwriter this is directly applicable and it is why I keep the book. Nobody has ever been talked into a book. They arrive having wanted one for five years or twenty, and the conversation is about what is in the way: money, time, fear of exposure, uncertainty about whether the story is worth telling, or a previous bad experience with a writer.
Every one of those is an obstacle and none of them is answered by a pitch.
What does The Little Red Book of Selling say about referrals?
The strongest section after the reframe, and the least exciting, which is usually how it goes.
His position is that referrals come from having done work worth talking about and then asking, and that most people do neither and blame the market.
The doing is the harder half. Work that is merely satisfactory produces no referrals, because nobody mentions adequate. A referral requires that somebody had an experience they want to describe, which means the work has to exceed the transaction in some specific and memorable way.
The asking is the part people skip out of discomfort. Gitomer is blunt that a satisfied client will not think to refer you unless prompted, that the prompt should be specific and not general, and that asking who else has this problem is a better question than asking whether they know anybody.
He is also right that the moment to ask is at the point of delivered value and not at the point of invoice, which is a small distinction that changes the answer.
What is the personal branding material worth?
Less than it was, and it is the most dated part of the book.
Written in 2004, the specifics are about newsletters, speaking at chamber events, and getting into the local business press. Those are not wrong and they are a description of a media landscape that has changed considerably.
The principle underneath survives. His argument is that people buy from people they know about before the conversation starts, and that the work of becoming known is done in advance and cannot be compressed into a meeting.
Translate the tactics and the principle applies exactly. A prospect who has read three of your articles arrives as a different person from one who found you in a directory, and the difference is not in what you say to them.
Who will hate this book?
Anybody who dislikes being shouted at, which is a substantial proportion of readers and a reasonable position.
It is loud. It repeats itself deliberately, on the theory that repetition is how sales training works. It uses the word greatness without embarrassment. There are exclamation marks on most spreads.
If that register makes you close a book, close it. The ideas are available elsewhere in a quieter form, and reading something you are fighting the whole way produces nothing.
What the volume buys is memorability, and Gitomer knows exactly what he is doing. Six months later you will remember the line about being sold and loving to buy, which is more than most quieter books manage.
Verdict
Read it for the reframe and the referral chapter, skim the rest, and forgive the volume.
It is a book for people who dislike selling, and its central move, turning persuasion into removal of obstacles, is the thing that makes selling survivable for that kind of person. That was worth the shouting.
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