I
know that in the Hoover Company certain words and techniques used by our
salesmen have proved fundamentally sound. In case after case I have seen them
work with almost mathematical precision.
Your salespeople can be the
strong or the weak link in your company’s sales chain. If one link of the chain
will hold fifty pounds, another thirty pounds, and another six pounds,
altogether the chain can support only six pounds – the “holding power” of the
weakest link.
It
is like building a beautiful $20,000 automobile. You can have the finest steel
body that engineers can create; a powerful 12 cylinder motor under the shiny
hood; smart-looking upholstery, strong, sturdy tires, and a tank filled with
higher power gasoline, yet the automobile will fail to start if some
comparatively insignificant part in the ignition system fails to
function.
So
it is with a manufacturer, distributor, or retailer. He can employ high-salaried
executives to direct his business; he can staff his organization with the best
creative, merchandising and advertising brains, yet his ultimate success is in
the hands of his sales organization.
It is the salesman who is
the real boss – the real cog in the machine. What he says and does as he faces
his prospects and your customers is vitally important to the success of your
business. And his success depends, to a great extent, upon the words he uses in
the field of selling.
The
best looking merchandise, as Mr. Wheeler says, won’t sell itself – and the best
looking dotted line won’t sign itself – without the intelligent persuasion of a
salesman’s words, backed up by sound selling techniques.
It
is Mr. Wheeler’s purpose in this book to help the salesman by showing him how to
add forceful sales words and techniques to his regular selling vocabulary so
that he will always have complete command over any selling situation that
confronts him.
This book is based on the
author’s “Five Wheelerpoints,” and in the pages that follow, Mr. Wheeler does a
fine job of explaining them to you in their relation to whatever you are
selling. Some of these Wheelerpoints may sound familiar to you; others you will
find brand new.
There is nothing mysterious
about “Tested Selling” – nothing to be learned for parrot recitation. Here is
simply the result of a man’s ten-year study of and thinking about what
successful salesmen, of all kinds are saying and doing to make more
sales.
As has often been said about Mr. Wheeler’s philosophy. “His Tested Selling Sentences are so simple that any one of us could have thought of them – but so original few of us ever did.”