The Art of Selling

The Art of Selling

By: James Birchfield

   The topic of this post will focus on the power that singular words can have on the reaction to a statement or even toward another person.

   One of our opening assignments this week was to analyze the effect that an adjective had on the implications to the surrounding sentence. For example "The man sighed hugely." At its face one might say that this man sighed with exaggerated motions to make his sigh huge, or possibly he took a very deep breath so that the duration of the sigh was "huge", it is also a possibility that the man simply opened his mouth very wide and sighed with his mouth open. But now what if we changed the word "hugely", which was the focus of the assignment. If the second possible explanation is taken, then we can safely assume that with his deep breath he was also very loud, so that the sentence becomes "The man sighed loudly." But now what does this imply about the situation? Well, it could still mean that the man was just loud, not necessarily that he took a long time, but just loud. The sentence could also imply that the man was upset and needed to let the surrounding people know without saying it. The point being that our sentence and its meaning has just changed, possibly in ways that are not immediately obvious.

   This same principle applies to selling any product, let it be candy or a program at school. The sales person has a short amount of time to become friends with the customer and to sell them the product. For instance when selling candy one often meets people that don't have money. From past experience I can say that while they may not have the money on them, which they might, they usually have money around them, often in the form of friends. All that needs to be said after they turn you down by saying "I don't have any money." is simply "Yes you do." According to coppyblogger this happens because the word "You" addresses the person directly and builds instant report with them because they now associate the sales person with someone that they know. As opposed to saying "I'm sure he does." which is what you are trying to get them to think about on their own. This second sentence doesn't build that link between the sales person and their customer and instead can come off as pushy and rude by simply telling the target that they have money around them without focusing on them. It is almost the same as going up to a crowd of people, asking each person if they wanted candy, and moving to the next person immediately after you are rejected. Not so say that this would not work with time, but it will not be as successful.