driveway two doors down from theirs and I’d show them before-and-after pictures and they’d call their neighbor to check – and boom! I’d sell a whole neighborhood like this,” he says. “I called it Magical Transformation.” When the Magical Transformation approach failed, Har- rington would ask for a minute of the homeowner’s time to show them the cracks in their driveway. Most were stunned by this question. What cracks? they’d ask. “I’d show them,” says Harrington, “and I’d explain that, when water gets in there and freezes, it expands and, by spring, the cracks will be three times as big. They’d say, ‘Oh my gosh. When can you seal it?’” Bam – another sale. Not surprisingly, the driveway sealing business was highly successful. But Harrington has never been one to rest on success. He is always looking forward – look- ing for smarter, better ways to do business. When he read Ziglar’s advice to think bigger and longer term, he re-examined his asphalt company with fresh eyes. “It was a mindset shift,” says Harrington. “I realized I only had a summer business and I wanted something year-round. I asked myself, What’s year-round? Oh! Heating and air conditioning! So I started a heating and air conditioning company right out of high school.” This was 1975, before the days of licensing – when anyone could get into the business. Harrington bought lists of new homeowners and he’d call them and say, “Congratulations on the purchase of your home. Would you like a free safety check and cleaning of your furnace?” Most would gladly take him up on the offer. And, after the work was complete, the technician would say something like, “You just invested all this money in your home but you don’t have central heat and air conditioning? Let me give you a price on that.” And that’s how Harrington built his business. Not even a year out of high school, he was running a company that operated six trucks, employed 25 people, and brought in a million dollars a year. But he was just getting started.
Bigger and Bigger
Harrington was headed straight up. In the early 1980s – flush from his success with the heating and cooling company – he invested $25,000 and launched Quantum International, which grew into a $500-million-a-year busi- ness on the New York Stock Exchange. He also discovered a knack for leveraging underutilized assets. While watch- ing the Discovery Channel one night, he realized nothing was being shown after normal broadcast hours. Long story short: He struck a deal with Discovery to use those hours for what came to be known as the infomercial. Eventu- ally, he formed a joint venture with the Home Shopping Network, called HSN Direct, which grew to hundreds of millions in sales. Here, too, Harrington traces his success to Ziglar’s influence. “We were selling the Ginsu Knife set – selling a couple knives for $20 – but 50 percent of the people who
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called didn’t order,” remembers Harrington. “We called them back and asked why they didn’t buy. They told us, ‘We asked ourselves: two knives for $20 – was it really worth it?’”
Harrington recalled something he’d read in Secrets of Closing the Sale. “Ziglar said that, if the value is below the selling price, you’ll have a tough time making a sale. You have to bring the value above the selling price,” says Harrington. “So we added, ‘But wait! There’s more! We’ll throw in six paring knives,’ et cetera. Once we went to a value-stack sale, we went to 80 percent close and went all over the world. After that, people were bringing their products, their ideas, and it created a global business.” It also created a global catchphrase. The line “But wait!
There’s more!” not only became an infomercial icon; it become synonymous with infomercials themselves. Harrington was making deals around the world – and leveraging the brilliance of Ziglar to get them done. He recalls flying to Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s to try to sell infomercial content to a sheik who owned five TV channels. “I’m super nervous, wondering how I’m going to close the sale,” says Harrington. “But I’m reading one of Zig’s books and I put all his closes on three-by-five cards so I could flip through them to see if there is one that is right for this sale. I come across Fear of Loss.” Bingo.
Harrington goes in to meet the sheik, shakes his hand, and – after the initial pleasantries – he goes straight to his Fear of Loss close. Harrington tells the sheik: “I want to disclose one thing to you because I don’t want to get to the end of the meeting and have it be a deal-breaker. I want you to know I’ve also been talking to [your com- petitor] as I want to make sure I have the right partner for this venture.” With those two sentences, the deal was done. “The sheik pulled in his CFO and other key players and they spent their time selling me on why I shouldn’t partner with their competitor and why they should be the one to invest in my business idea,” says Harrington. “They contributed $25 million in financing. We launched the business with 75 employees and built a huge business there – all because the sheik’s fear of loss had been so strong.”
Resurrecting Ziglar Harrington’s life is chock-full of stories like these – stories of great deals, smart closes. In every one, he can see Ziglar’s influence. When Ziglar died in 2012, Harrington – like mil- lions of others – felt a sense of loss. But he also sensed a powerful opportunity. He knew there was material in the Ziglar vault that had never been publicly released – mate- rial Ziglar had developed while writing Secrets of Closing the Sale but had not included in the book. “There were thousands of tapes he recorded and one video he did for a private group. It was dozens of hours of amazing new content,” marvels Harrington. His keen eye
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