Chapter 21 How To Make Tested Sentences Sell In Door-To-Door Selling (The “Say -Something Formula”)
The best- looking dotted line won’t sign itself, as many a door-to-door salesman has discovered. And many a white-haired sales manager has discovered that the best- made product won’t sell itself.
THE MANUFACTURER can get the salesman and the product up to the door, but if the right ten-second words are not used, the salesman does not get in, and the product is not sold. Often four inches of threshold ruin or make many a product! The New York Sales Executives’ Club – to which I often like to refer, as its membership of some 700 men represents a good cross section of American business executives – asked me to give a presentation of planned door-to-door selling with “Tested Selling Sentences.” Therefore I asked Mr. W. W. Powell, training director of the Hoover Company, to help me build the following serio-humorous sales skit illustrating the importance of picking words and techniques in door-to-door selling of vacuum cleaners. The presentation was given before the club on January 25, 1937. “Tested Selling On Door Steps” WHEELER: “What makes people buy in the home? “Many of you gentlemen wonder if this “Tested Selling” principle applies to other fields of selling, and you ask me, ‘Do you believe in the “canned” sales talk?’ “Having analyse d close to 105,000 words, phrases, and selling processes and having tested them on close to 19,000,000 people, my feeling is against the ‘canned’ sales talk but in favor of the ‘planned’ sales talk. “Today, with the help of Mr. Powell I will illustrate t he difference between the so- called ‘canned’ sales talk and the ‘planned’ sales talk; and at the same time I will offer you a formula for building your own sales presentations – the ‘Say - Something Formula.’
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