The New Salesmanship and How to Do Business
A revised edition of a Chicago sales manual from Laird & Lee, which bills itself as equal to a school course in salesmanship.
What it is
A revised edition of a Chicago sales manual from Laird & Lee, which bills itself as equal to a school course in salesmanship. Its method rests on phrenology: a chart of numbered faculties of the brain and three temperaments (mental, motive and vital) that the salesman is told to read in under half a minute and match to the goods he sells. It then lists twenty weapons of attack, from knowledge and suggestion to fear and persistence, and works through sixty-five buyer types, such as the buyer who loves to argue, the inflexible buyer and the suave buyer, each traced to a faculty and given a set handling. Later chapters cover four styles of presenting an argument, five rules for controlling it, the mail order business, stock paragraphs for correspondence, a printed series of follow-up letters for a gas heater, the retail clerk, and dress.
Why read it now
Read it for its format, not its science. Phrenology had no scientific standing even in 1911, and judging a buyer's character from head shape, jaw or build has no support in modern research. The chapter on the power of an idea also shows how close suggestion sits to deception: its own example is a salesman passing cotton off as wool. What still holds is the shape of the buyer chapter. Name a recurring buyer, give a visible tell, prescribe one move. Sales teams still build objection libraries this way. The retail advice is plain and testable: learn what the customer can pay before showing goods, and ask 'What else can I show you?' instead of a question that invites a no. The three follow-up letters, which repeat a thirty-day money-back offer and point to endorsements, are an early version of an email nurture sequence. To use it, pull five to ten buyer situations from your own call notes, write one tell and one response for each, and base the tell on what the buyer says, not on how he looks.
Passages worth keeping
Handling a buyer lies mostly in conditioning his mind for the selling argument.
معظم العمل مع المشتري يكون قبل الحجة نفسها، في تهيئة ذهنه لسماعها.
Any attempt to persuade this buyer by reasoning with him is only a waste of time and will increase his resistance.
مع المشتري العنيد لا ينفع الجدال المنطقي بل يزيده تمسكًا برأيه، والأجدى أن تزرع فكرة تدفعه إلى البحث بنفسه.
an experienced salesman invariably so words his inquiry as to awaken a positive suggestion.
البائع الخبير يصوغ سؤاله بطريقة تفتح باب الشراء، فيسأل عما يمكن أن يعرضه لا عما إذا كان العميل يريد شيئًا آخر.
Feeling sure that your inquiry was made because you were interested, we believe your failure to respond was purely an oversight.
أول رسالة متابعة تفترض حسن النية، فتعد صمت العميل سهوًا لا رفضًا، وتعيد فتح الحديث دون لوم.
The sole object of a salesman's dress should be to command respect, not to create admiration.
لباس البائع وسيلة لكسب الاحترام والثقة، لا لجذب الإعجاب أو لفت الأنظار.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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