Remember: The wooden Indian tattooed with selling words never sold a cigar. He merely brought customers into the store for a real, live-wire salesman to sell.
This fifth rule is simple: It is all in how you say it and the way you say it as well as in what you say!
If you will apply these five simple selling points, you will find that your sales are bound to be more accurate, more foolproof, and faster – for these five principles come fresh off the firing line, and are TESTED to make people respond to your way of thinking. We told you how when the Johns-Manville Housing Guild salesmen approach their prospects on front porches in cold canvass calls, their opening “Tested Selling Sentence” is “Here is your FREE COPY of 100 Ways to Improve Your Home.” This is how they solve the screen-door problem! We told you how the Texas Company used a single “Tested Selling Sentence” to introduce their New Texaco Oil two years ago, and how their 45,000 dealers got under 250,000 hoods in one week‟s time – exposing themselves to this much business! We told you how Mr. H. W. Hoover knows that the finest idea on his Hoover cleaner will be accepted as matter-of-fact by women unless that idea is dramatized in words that blaze themselves effectively across the minds of the prospects, and so each Hoover selling statement must be (1) easy to speak, and (2) have remembrance value. Therefore, the signal that tells the woman the bag needs cleaning is not called a “danger device” but the “Time-to-Empty Signal,” and the salesman says: “You may forget to clean the bag, but this new Hoover won‟t forget to remind you.” The headlight is called the “Dirt Finder,” and the “Tested Statement” that goes with this colourful description is, “It sees where to clean, and it‟s clean where it‟s been.” We have found after analyzing 105,000 such word combinations and techniques as the above exampled and having tested them on 19,000,000 people that the “canned” sales talk is not as effective as the “planned” sales talk which is made fool-proof through intelligent pre-testing in the field under normal selling conditions, to make the statements scientifically defensible.
“Word Magic” – Not “Magic Words”
Now I have given you these five points, the result of ten years‟ study of the sales words and techniques used by successful salespeople in many kinds of businesses, and you can apply them to your own business. Successful selling depends on many things, of course, but after all, it is the words you use and the things you do as you stand face to face with your prospect that make or break the sale for you.
There are no such things as “magic words.” But there is “word magic”!
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