The Amazing Secrets of The Best Salesman in the World.

by Mike Brunel | Nov 7, 2022 | Sales

In this week’s blog, I talk about one of my favourite salespeople Joe Ades.

Sadly Joe passed away a free years ago, but this story is a great lesson for us all. We are all in sales, and Joe, the millionaire Potato Peeler seller, was just one.

A Showman Selling Potato Peelers on the streets of New York.*

“In the early 1990s, a man named Joe Ades began showing up in the bar at the Café Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week.

Joe was also a five-nights-a-week man, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne and was never alone. On most nights, he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis.

Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard.

He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments.

The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living.

“Holding his glass of champagne by the stem, ” Joe said simply, “I sell potato peelers.” The probers had a good chuckle over that. “Right,” they all said. “Now pull the other one.”

While walking the streets in the months that followed, some of the probers, who may have still doubted him, came upon Joe in the middle of a spiel with a crowd gathered around him at some busy corner.

He sat on a campstool, peeler in hand, and performed all manner of surgical wonders on carrots, zucchini, and Idaho potatoes. A long slab of Lucite served as his worktable, which rested on storage bins filled with all his produce.

The table and his campstool were so low to the ground that he worked from a perpetual crouch, like a catcher.

 Meanwhile, he kept up a constant patter, belted out at the top of his lungs in a scratchy, theatrical Cockney singsong.

 After three or four minutes—not before—he announced the price of his “machine,” as he called it, produced a wad of bills from his left coat pocket, and began dealing peelers as fast as he could to the outstretched hands flapping money in his face.

 As if all this weren’t astonishing enough, he had on his beautiful café attire, only now bits of potato peel flecked his lapels.

He bowed his head low over an operation; sweat from his brow coursed its way down the bridge of his nose and dripped onto the cuffs of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. Joe is still working the peeler in New York.

This past December, he turned 72, but unless there’s snow on the ground, he’s out pitching. Joe loves the peeler, which he sells for $5. “I love it for several reasons,” he says.

“It’s portable; it works; I never get a complaint. Never. When people first see it, they don’t believe it. They buy it sceptically and cynically. They can’t believe it will do what I say it’ll do, but they take a chance and buy it.

And during the sale, somebody will walk past—always do—and say, ‘I’ve got one of those. They’re great!’ And it’s true—they’re not shills. You don’t need a shill with something like this.” The Swiss-made article is a gleaming frame of stainless steel that fits in the palm like a carpenter’s plane.”

 Joe is the only one in the city who has it—a true boast he saves for that moment in the pitch when he names his price, and the wad comes out (in the street game, a moment known as “coming to the bat”). In private, Joe says,

 “The Company in Switzerland that makes the peeler will only supply people who can demonstrate the product. You have to buy a minimum number, and the minimum quantity is far more peelers than one store could handle in 20 years. If you saw the peeler hanging up in a store—for a dollar—you’d walk right past it. It has to be demonstrated.”

His selling locations have no fixed pattern. One never knows where Joe will turn up. “I like to be an event,” he says. “Boredom sets in when people expect you.”

In part, Joe is making a virtue of necessity. He has no license to do what he does, and he often gets moved by the cops, who all know him. “All of them have nicked me in the past,” he says. Joe pushes his gear through the streets on a hand truck, which he calls a trolley in his English way.

He and the trolley are often stopped by strangers, ready with a heartfelt line: “Sir, you’re the greatest salesman in New York!” He likes the recognition and is never ungracious, but privately he quibbles over the word “salesman.”

“I couldn’t sell one-to-one,” he explains. “I couldn’t sell real estate or cars, for example. What I like to do is a pitch to a crowd, draw a crowd together, and have them give me their money.” —Reprinted with permission from

“The Gentleman Grafter” by Howard Kaplan, Vanity Fair, 2009.

This is an inspiring story about being a professional conversationalist. A Salesperson. A potato peeler in New York selling $5 kitchen tools to a crowd of people on the street. He lives a full and wonderful life, where he dines out on the fruits of his profession with his beloved every evening.

Joe was not a salesperson but a performer. His stage was the street, and he worked hard. He knew people would buy it if he put on a dazzling show that solved their problems.

Never forget that selling your stuff can also be a show.

Sales take many forms, but we always do it one way or another.

Have a great week, and talk soon.

PLUS, whenever you are ready…here are ways I can help you grow YOUR business.

1. Join my free Facebook group

My favourite thing is to show you what’s working right now. It’s not as good as being a client, but it’s close.

2. Take advantage of a FREE 45-minute consultation

Need some sales support? Please make an appointment, and let me take you through the past, present, and future templates.

3. Work with me one-on-one.

If you want to take your product or service from face-to-face to virtual selling, then I have a product that may be able to help you. You can get started for as little as $250 a month. If you’re interested, email mike@mikebrunel.com and put ‘Virtual Selling’ in the subject line…tell me a little about your business, and I’ll get you all the details.

Do Open Questions Sell? Yes or No?

by Mike Brunel | Oct 21, 2022 | Sales

How do you coach your salespeople to have fun selling?

People can learn to ask open-ended questions. I do a great exercise with salespeople called “What’s in my pocket?” One of my best staff members, Stephen Pead, taught it to me.

You secretly put something unusual in your pocket during a training session. Be careful not to choose objects that are too easy to guess, like keys or a handkerchief. Instead, pocket something slightly out of the ordinary, like a wedding ring or a bottle top.

What’s an Open Question?

The setup clearly explains the difference between open and closed questions. Available questions invite discussion, while closed questions usually elicit a “no” answer.

The team is instructed to ask ten closed questions first to identify what’s in your pocket. You can only answer “yes” or “no” as a trainer. The team never guesses it this way.

Open questions are the next part of the exercise. Have the trainees ask ten available questions to ascertain the treasure you have hidden away.

What’s a Closed Question?

An example of a closed question might be, “What do you have in your pocket? Is it useful?”

The answer is either “Yes, it is useful” or “No, it is not useful.” That response doesn’t get you a lot of information.

An open question might be, “What can you do with the object?”

You can answer these questions any way you like. The salespeople usually get it right within five or six questions.

The answer to this type of question will give you more to go on. Just switching up a few words makes all the difference. Constructing good questions pays off, but people are reluctant to take the time to develop them.

Asking open questions might make some folks feel stupid, weak, or uncertain. My challenge to any salesperson is to assume leadership by asking the right questions.

Model it for your staff. Take the time to train your sales team. Your team must understand that the client is not always ready to buy.

Sometimes you have to have a conversation to get them alongside. Salespeople need to know—and practice—  the difference between open and closed questions long before the customer walks in the door.

For more content like this, please subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Have a great week, and talk soon.

PLUS, whenever you are ready…here are ways I can help you grow YOUR business.

1. Join my free Facebook group

My favourite thing is to show you what’s working right now. It’s not as good as being a client, but it’s close.

2. Take advantage of a FREE 45-minute consultation

Need some sales support? Please make an appointment, and let me take you through the past, present, and future templates.

3. Work with me one-on-one.

If you want to take your product or service from face-to-face to virtual selling, then I have a product that may be able to help you. You can get started for as little as $250 a month. If you’re interested, email mike@mikebrunel.com and put ‘Virtual Selling’ in the subject line…tell me a little about your business, and I’ll get you all the details.

What are you Scared of?

by Mike Brunel | Sep 7, 2022 | Sales

I understand people’s reluctance to think of themselves as salespeople. I had a love/hate relationship with sales myself when I was younger. I grew up on a small farm on the coast of New Zealand, a place I loved.

My father looked after the farm after his four brothers went to World War II. From the age of 15, he worked on that farm, developed it, and expanded it. By the time he was 35, it was clear that some of his brothers would never let him buy it, though; they wanted their share. In the end, sadly, my father had to sell.

Overnight, we moved to a new town and Dad travelled all the time for work. I didn’t know anybody at my new school. The new kid always gets bullied and picked on, and I was no exception.

I wasn’t happy, but I learned to adapt. I was forced to find a way to meet new people and create new friendships. That was probably the real start of my sales career.

I may have been a hesitant salesperson at age seven, but I was already learning how to open up relationships with others.

Life Lessons Learnt.

As a young man, I left a small town in New Zealand to live in Sydney, Australia. Perhaps 15,000 people lived in my hometown and at 18, I moved to a city that housed four million.

At 18 I was reasonably good at rugby—a national obsession in New Zealand—so I got to play in Sydney, where I also got a job selling stationery to newsagents. Every Sunday evening I would put all the goods that I wanted to sell into a big blue bag. On Monday morning, I’d throw it in the back of the car and drive from the suburbs into the city of Sydney.

I’d park my car and walk around, calling on my clients and also knocking on the odd door. I sold everything—rubber bands, ballpoint pens, books, and stationery—out of that big blue bag. I practised all the skills needed to be a strong salesperson. I was perfecting my craft.

On the Move

When I later gave up on sports and moved to London, I could not find a sales job, or so I thought. After six months spent cleaning carpets in upscale homes, I was offered an estimator’s position with the cleaning company.

I was a salesperson once again. There I was, in my early 20s, driving all over London, quoting jobs in the most luxurious homes imaginable. I met some amazing people and learned to negotiate and sell on a whole new level.

Sadly, I had to return home and ended up bunking with my brother. After several weeks of moping around his house, I let him convince me to apply for an advertising executive position for a local radio station.

I borrowed his suit and shoes for the interview. The suit was a little tight and the shoes a lot. I remember trying not to let the suit sleeve stay fixed on my elbow when I shook the interviewer’s hand.

Guess what? I got the job.

I had never sold advertising before, but I was willing to learn. I sold ideas to advertisers and small businesses for the next few years. I saw firsthand how small businesses ticked. I brought in entertainers to open stores, launched products, and ran promotions. I did every type of campaign that could be done.

The businesses loved it and I did too. The job taught me that I had to stop selling the air time itself and start selling the result of a promotion or event.

Eventually, I was recruited to manage a sales team for another media company a few hundred miles away.

There I met my first true mentor, Brian Duffy, who taught me to look at sales and management, and myself, differently.

Brian coached me to be a good manager and a good person. Oh, I made mistakes, but his guidance and support helped form beliefs that I carry with me today.

Mentors pave the way.

Mentors pave the way, and Brian mentored me long-term, into my next job and eventually into NRS Media. Brian’s guidance led me to media broking, where I met mountaineer Rob Hall, another great mentor.

As much as I enjoyed media broking, though—the perks were considerable, including good food, lots of socializing, and free stuff on top of excellent money—the seductive sheen soon wore thin for me.

I knew I should be doing something else, but I didn’t know what it was. I was not happy. I thought that maybe it was time to take more risks in my life; I knew something was missing.

I was looking for something to fill that space and then one day I got a phone call that would change my life forever. Opportunities often come to you unexpectedly if you make room for them. It was Brian again. “Mike, let’s meet for coffee,” he said, “I have an idea.”

Even today, I can see both of us sitting there in the café. He says, “Look, I’m moving to Australia, but I have clients here I want you to look after.

Join me and my partner in this future opportunity, but you’ll have to pay to get in.” It cost $5,000 to get into the business. It was a lot of money, but it was taken as a show of commitment.

They wanted me, but they wanted me to pay to get in? Was it worth the risk?

The partner’s name was Doug Gold. He had started a new media company called More FM. He also had a consultancy company with Brian that was called Persuaders Concepts. (Can you believe that name)

His More FM Network quickly became the second biggest media network in the southern hemisphere. It is now known as Mediaworks. Doug’s unique ideas influenced industries across the globe. I didn’t know that then, but I took a leap anyway and said “yes.”

Over the next 20 years, that yes became NRS Media.

A valuable lesson I learned is that opportunities do not come when you want them to…. be scared and afraid is part of the ‘doing’

Next week I will talk about how NRS Media became the powerhouse in media sales globally, with no start-up money, no investors, just luck, timing, passion and a great team of people.

Until then

Good selling

Mike.

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