HOW SALESMEN SELL THEIR MEMORIES FOR CASH - Part 1

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· HOW SALESMEN SELL THEIR MEMORIES FOR CASH - Part 1

· HOW SALESMEN SELL THEIR MEMORIES FOR CASH - Part 2

A salesman should find infinite value in the use of the Mental Filing System, for all sales points and routine can be filed with it and remembered just as easily as the shopping list in the last chapter or the list of the world's largest cities. He may know his product thoroughly, but many a sale has fallen through because the salesman was not able to present all the principal sales points to a potential customer.

The manufacturer of a well-known make of oil burner asked me to give a talk to his salesmen and see if I could suggest anything to improve their selling technique. I opened my talk with a question: "Can any of you tell me the ten selling points of your oil burner?" No one—not even the sales manager— could oblige. They carried all kinds of literature explaining these ten points in detail, and admitted they had tried to memorize them. Yet frequently they would forget from three to six of them when a customer confronted them. Several of the salesmen said they had lost important sales through omitting one or two points. One told me he had once called back to get an order from a man he considered sold on the oil burner only to hear, "I bought another furnace because yours didn't have the safety feature." The salesman protested that his product also had that feature and tried to explain it, but the prospect had already signed an order with the man who had remembered to bring it out in his sales talk.

I asked the sales manager to get his list of sales points and read them through to me once. I knew them cold in five minutes. The Mental Filing System had helped me do in that brief period what the salesmen had been unable to learn in several months.

This is the list of ten sales points about the oil burner that these men were supposed to have at their finger tips:

1. Dependable..., 2. Economical..., 3. Continuous hot water..., 4. Trouble-free..., 5. Even temperature..., 6. Clean..., 7. Safe..., 8. Long life..., 9. Compact..., 10. Attractive

This is how I hooked the sales points on to the key words so the salesmen could present their argument smoothly and in correct order:

1. Dependable (alarm clock). Nothing is more dependable than your alarm clock. You depend on your alarm clock to keep accurate time and you depend on it to go off at the time set. Good old dependable alarm clock. The oil heater is as dependable as an alarm clock.

2. Economical (trousers). You keep all your money—all your economic wealth—in your trousers pockets. You have only one pair of trousers because you are economical, and your tailor cut them short to be economical with material. They are economical trousers.