What Can a 90-Year-Old Book Teach You About Modern Sales?
Turns out, everything—if you’re serious about winning more deals through genuine connection.
In today’s fast-moving sales world, it’s easy to overlook timeless principles. But the most influential sales leaders know that mastering human connection never goes out of style. In this episode, we explore the powerful, practical lessons from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People—and how they can transform your team’s ability to connect, influence, and close.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
- Why building genuine relationships still drives the most consistent sales success—and how to do it better.
- How small, intentional actions can instantly strengthen customer trust and loyalty.
- Practical, repeatable habits from Carnegie’s playbook that modern sales leaders can use right now.
Press play now to uncover the simple relationship-building shifts that can dramatically grow your sales in 2026.
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Episode Transcript
Ben Wright:
In this episode, we will explore how the age-old book of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is so impactful in growing our sales.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.
Ben Wright:
In this episode, we’re going to discover how Dale Carnegie’s award-winning and classic book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, has some very practical lessons that we can roll out for us as sales teams and what we can do to implement that into our business moving forward.
Dale Carnegie first wrote the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in 1936. I did not realize it was that old when I first started doing research for this episode. We’re coming up on 90 years since this book was written, and it is still a strong driver globally on how we think about communication, influence, and leadership. It has classic principles that are still applied to today. In fact, Dale Carnegie, he was able to build an institute, which is the Dale Carnegie Institute, and no prizes for creativity, but certainly prizes for the legacy that it’s created because he was able to create this legacy or this institute that has trained millions of leaders worldwide, millions of leaders and salespeople and managers around the world, which in the end has resulted in tens of millions of success stories coming from that.
It’s still a core principle that is taught globally and really emphasizes how human or interpersonal relationships and effective communication is so important in not just the sales field, but general life.
Dale was successful, this book was successful, and the lesson here for sales leaders is because it understood that building genuine relationships, they’re at the heart of effective selling because if we build genuine relationships, what comes from there is authentic influence. It’s not about tricks. It’s not about manipulating people, but it’s about understanding them and making them feel really valued. It’s that mantra around working with people or people like to work with people that they know, like, and trust, which is built from creating genuine relationships. I have no doubt that as a leader, we’ve heard the importance of building relationships, but the lesson I think to come from Dale’s book is around how we could perhaps be better at building those relationships . Could we be asking more questions? Could we be spending more time at the start of our engagements with customers on understanding what they need? Could we be a little bit less short on the phone when we’re busy and leads come in? Could we take a little bit of extra time to prioritize what our customers need? Could we be repeating back what’s important to them, showing a genuine interest into their families, bringing something, a small gift for them when we’re quoting that helps us build that relationship? What are the areas that us as leaders could be doing either ourselves if we’re carrying the bag or through our teams that will help us really drive relationships or help our teams really drive relationships? One of my favorite go-tos is a small gift when I go to see customers, not because I want to use it as bribery, but I actually want to show them I care because genuinely, I actually do. I really want to see great results come from the people that I work with and I’m prepared to invest time in them. A small gift whilst not being the reason that people work with me is a nice little way to open up those doors and begin to build that relationship because as we take small steps to build relationships, we get one step closer to being someone that is known, liked, or trust and that our customers will place their confidence in when we do deals.
Great book, almost 90 years old. I’m staggered by that. It still floored me when I first read that. However, the key message here for us as leaders and sales professionals is to invest the time to build genuine relationships because 90 years or closing in 100 years later, it hasn’t changed. Success in sales is still about building genuine relationships, creating value, and amongst a number of other things. Leaving today, I’d love you to have a real think about is there something you can be doing, one or two small things in your business to be creating better relationships with customers? Is there something you’ve wanted to do from a customer experience point of view for a period of time now that haven’t been able to? Is there something your team could do better with? Start to have a think about what being a little bit more customer focused around genuine relationships looks like and go out there and make it happen.
Grateful for you to be here today. Another short, sharp profile of people in history who have helped us as sales professionals today. Super grateful you’ve joined us today. We’re dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and really focusing on how we can be 1% better each and every day because without question, it will make all the difference. Bye for now.
Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you’ve reached the sales ceiling, are involved in every deal or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that’s you, that’s exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams programme to help you get month-on-month sales growth with less stress.
In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25% to 30%. That’s just week one.
For the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we’ll offer you a bonus one-on-one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster, which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales.
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