Sales, whether you’re working as an insurance sales agent or an online entrepreneur, is integral to keeping a business afloat.

Below is a hand-picked selection of insightful sales quotes to help you bring home the bacon. 

Is sales a part of your current job? 

The lifeblood of maintaining a thriving business is profit.

The only way you can earn that profit is to sell.

As a result, being a salesperson can come with tons of pressure.

Getting customers to trust in you and put their money where their mouth is, is very difficult. 

Below is a curated selection of quotes about sales to help you through the ups and downs of being a salesman.

Topics discussed in the below quotes include the importance of hard work, how to handle failure, and how to succeed in sales. 

Check out all of the business-minded, intelligent quotes below!

Don’t forget to also read these marketing quotes to boost your business.

Sales quotes about business

1. “I have always said that everyone is in sales. Maybe you don’t hold the title of salesperson, but if the business you are in requires you to deal with people, you, my friend, are in sales.” – Zig Ziglar

2. “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

3. “In sales, a referral is the key to the door of resistance.” – Bo Bennett

4. “If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.” – Henry Kissinger

5. “Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too – and a lot of companies either don’t know how or forget to act on it.” – Stewart Butterfield

6. “The ability to take another perspective has become one of the keys to both sales and non-sales selling. And the social science research on perspective-taking yields some important lessons for all of us.” – Daniel H. Pink

7. “So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.” – Dorothea Brande

8. “Scarcity is a good sales tactic if you are selling something people want.” – Katie Hopkins

9. “There’s no lotion or potion that will make sales faster and easier for you – unless your potion is hard work.” – Jeffrey Gitomer

10. “Profit or perish… There are only two ways to make money: increase sales and decrease costs.” – Fred DeLuca

11. “I ask people what they do in sales, how much money they made last year, what their cost of sales is, and they don’t even know. If you don’t know your numbers, you’re going out of business. I don’t care how good your product is.” – Tilman J. Fertitta

12. “Really good customer service will deliver sales. You are training salesmen to give the best possible advice and then to achieve the sale. People actually like you to ask for a sale because it shows you value their business.” – John Caudwell
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of customer service quotes to inspire you at work.

Sales quotes about success and hard work

13. “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

14. “There is no prize in sales for second place. It’s win or nothing. The masters know this and strive for – they fight for – that winning edge.” – Jeffrey Gitomer

15. “Success looks a lot like failure up until the moment you break through the finish line.” – Dan Waldschmidt

16. “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.” – Vince Lombardi

17. “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Stephen King

18. “Outstanding people have one thing in common: An absolute sense of mission.” – Zig Ziglar

19. “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

20. “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” – Henry David Thoreau

21. “I don’t know the word ‘quit.’ Either I never did, or I have abolished it.” – Susan Butcher

22. “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.” – Steve Jobs

23. “You wanna know what scares people? Success. When you don’t make moves and when you don’t climb up the ladder, everybody loves you because you’re not competition.” – Nicki Minaj

Sales quotes about competition

24. “The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort.” – Colin Powell

25. “Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.” – Sam Walton

26. “Number one, cash is king… number two, communicate… number three, buy or bury the competition.” – Jack Welsh

27. “As humans, we have evolved to compete… it is in our genes, and we love to watch a competition.” – Peter Diamandis

28. “Taste the relish to be found in competition – in having put forth the best within you.” – Henry J. Kaiser

29. “Believing that your competition is stronger and better than you pushes you to better yourselves.” – Simon Sinek

30. “Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.” – Herbert Hoover

31. “It’s competition that forces companies to get out of their complacency.” – John Mackey

Sales quotes about salespeople

32. “Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.” – Harvey Mackay

33. “We have this idea that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance – that is, how many times the cash register actually rings – the correlation’s almost zero.” – Daniel H. Pink

34. “Salesmanship is limitless. Our very living is selling. We are all salespeople.” – James Cash Penney

35. “Great salespeople are relationship builders who provide value and help their customers win.” – Jeffrey Gitomer

36. “Salespeople are in the decision business. Their livelihood depends on the decisions of others.” – Mark Goulston

37. “Salespeople are the most important people in any organization. Until a salesperson gets an order, nobody in the company has a job.” – Chris Gardner

38. “I still remember the five points of salesmanship: attention, interest, conviction, desire and close.” – Annette Bening

39. “The best of merchandise will go back to the shelf unless handled by a conscientious, tactful salesman.” – James Cash Penney

Sales quotes about failure

40. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford

41. “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John R. Wooden

42. “Every problem is a gift—without problems we would not grow.” – Anthony Robbins

43. “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.” – Barack Obama

44. “Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it.” – William Durant

45. “Taste the relish to be found in competition – in having put forth the best within you.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

46. “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” – C.S. Lewis

47. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” – Truman Capote

48. “The wisest of the wise may err.” – Aeschylus

49. “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” – Woody Allen

50. “Sometimes the best gain is to lose.” – George Herbert

More sales quotes and sayings

51. “Challenge your sales force, but above all, set your salespeople up to succeed, not to fail.” – Yuri van der Sluis

52. “You can take and nail two sticks together like they’ve never been nailed together before and some fool will buy it.” – George Carlin

53. “We’re all somebody’s prospect; we’re all somebody’s customer.” – Chris Murray

54. “Focusing on Earning the Right will have an incredible effect on the success of every single sales call that you will make from this day on.” – Chris Murray

55. “No business is just a one-man’s job. You need sales, you need operations, you need partnerships, you need even customer and brand loyalty.” – Pooja Agnihotri

56. “Stop assuming the fail and start assuming the sale.” – Rob Liano

57. “Retailing is the art of making habits and the business of maintaining habits.” – Sijin Bt

58. “Closing sales is a different process altogether. It is as important as marketing. Marketing can bring you the leads but the last step of turning those leads into customers decide the fate of all your efforts. This is known as closing sales.” – Pooja Agnihotri

59. “When you take care of your customers, they will reward you with increased business sales and increased profits in return.” – Pooja Agnihotri

60. “Perfect balance in sales is combining a sense of urgency to close deals with great patience to listen, understand and act in a customer’s best interest.” – Yuri van der Sluis

Sales Quotes on how attitude plays an important role in its success

61. “Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Their needs and wants impact every aspect of your business, from product development to content marketing to sales to customer service.” – John Rampton

62. “Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.” – Stephen Hawking

63. “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

64. “Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman – not the attitude of the prospect.” – W. Clement Stone

65. “In any competitive environment, whether you’re in sales or marketing or whatever it is, you have to know your competition, understand who they are, do intelligent analysis on them and then you have to know yourself – who you are and what you’re capable of doing.” – Edwin Moses

66. “It is not just disposable income but whether people feel good about their immediate future that drives sales. It is this feel-good factor that drives the purchases more and more than mere economic wealth.” – Johann Rupert

67. “After-sales service is more important than assistance before sales. It is through such service that one gets permanent customers.” – Konosuke Matsushita

68. “I told our employees several times, ‘Let’s focus on the end user, let’s focus on committing to society, and focus on the crisis and doing the right thing, show our corporate social responsibility.’ Don’t focus on marketing and sales. That’s horrible culture.” – Eric Yuan

69. “I don’t pay that much attention to sales figures or awards. To me, the big question is: ‘Did you influence the next generation?’ That’s my goal.” – “Stephan Pastis

70. “Basically, you’re selling a world as an actor, right? I mean it’s like any sales person: if you believe in your product, you know your product, you sell it a lot better.” – Paul Walker

Sales Quotes To Achieve Sales Success

71. “Sales success comes from the right balance of quality human interaction as well as appropriate use of supplemental tools.” ― Deb Calvert

72. “Customers don’t care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business. It’s easy to forget this in the heat of a sales cycle.” ― Aaron Ross

73. “You’re only as good as your last sale, so you put your all into something and just hope that from that you can get your next job.” ― Josh Peck

74. “In high-productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, rather they fulfill it.” ― Aaron Ross

75. “Sales success comes after you stretch yourself past your limits on a daily basis.” ― Omar Periu

76. “If you harness the power of innovation, you’ll surely convert sales complexity into a brutal competitive advantage.”― Tim Sanders

77. “The trust that a customer has in your company and in you strongly outweighs the techniques you use to sell. Establishing trust is better than any sales technique.” ― Mike Puglia

78. “You have to drop your sales mentality and start working with your prospects as if they’ve already hired you.” ― Jill Konrath

79. “Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.” ― Brian Tracy

80. “On any given Monday I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a millionaire.” ― Larry D. Turner

Are you a good salesperson? 

The art of selling isn’t just important for salespeople to master.

It is a key tool for every person to have in their toolbelt.

You may not have been aware of it, but you probably have stepped into the salesperson role many times throughout your life. 

Have you ever written a persuasive essay for one of your classes?

You were selling the validity of your idea to your teacher or professor. 

Have you ever applied for a job?

You were selling your skills and experience to an employer. 

Learning how to be a good salesperson can open doors for you and connect you to opportunities that you never knew existed. 

Which of these sales quotes and sayings were you drawn to the most?

Tell us your thoughts below!