The Language of Selling

The following advice on choosing your words wisely and well was written in the 1930’s. Although we think of that time as slower paced and less stressed, the fact is that selling was tough then – just as it is now. To help salespeople increase their results, this article, written by a top sales professional, recommends using words to get the maximum effectiveness.

The salesman is not just “a man of words.” He is, first and foremost, a man of persuasion. Most of his persuasive progress depends upon how well he can communicate with other people – move their minds or their feelings, or both. And that all boils down to the question: How capable are you in getting your meaning across?

All of your words, written or spoken, are but the vehicles of that meaning. Some words carry it well, others poorly. Others will not carry meaning at all. Communication of meaning depends upon the people on both ends of a persuasive discussion…how they think, how they feel about the words and the things the words appear to represent.

The salesman’s inclination to wade into his presentation without much thought about the other fellow’s ability to follow the intended sense is no small problem in selling.

The buyer has an obvious need for a product or service. The salesman’s proposal meets every requirement; yet, he fails to make the sale. Why?

The chances are that the salesman’s failure can be laid right in his own lap. He skipped an indispensable element in the building of a sale. He did not provide the information necessary to full understanding.

Context is a fine word to help identify and remember a most important part of the persuasive process. Context represents the whole field of information necessary to complete understanding of words. If our listeners don’t have that information, or have only a part of it, then our persuasive words fall on barren ground.

Fiction is another bright term we should add to our catalog of persuasive aids. Unlike most words, fictions do not point to any object or express a specific sense experience.

The language of selling is bloated with fictions – commercial fictions – words like quality, cheap, salability, ethical, guarantee, warranty, service, coverage, essential value and control – good words, without a doubt, but often recklessly and deliberately misused. They are overworked, too, sometimes to the point of absurdity when they tell about “new and improved characteristics, superior in every way, containing amazing ingredients for more efficient…”

The salesman always must be conscious that some words are farther from reality than others, and the farther they get, the greater their fictional quality. He must be on guard against fictions that would hurt him. He always must be ready to translate his own abstract persuasive statements into concrete terms.

There is no substitute for simple language in the art of persuasion. And that brings us to definition.

A sales story may be full of people, pictures and pretty stories; it may sparkle with personality and drip with emotion, but fundamentally, it must deal with factual ideas, unique ideas distinguished from other more commonplace ideas.

The salesman must lead the way, step by step, to acceptance of most ideas. The buyer must be guided along the road from what he already knows to something new the salesman wants him to know.

Professional selling thrives on proof of benefit, the upgrading of the buyer’s economic or personal welfare. New marketing methods, new products, cram our sales discussions and we have well-constructed sales stories to help propel our proposals along the way to a sale.

But when the salesman falls back on his own word combinations, as he certainly must, he is inclined to wander all over the verbal range trying to explain his way from one idea to another. When he meets a buyer whose mind does not keep pace with his progression of ideas, he often neglects to go back and find a common starting point.

When the persuadee cannot cope with an idea, he may be led up to it by different word combinations, other thought connections. Rephrasing an idea may twang a responsive chord, whereas retracing the same old definitive route will bring the prospect “cold stone dead” to the market.

There’s more to “definition” than meets the casual eye. A small but distinct chapter in the book of persuasion, it offers several helpful guideposts on the road to a sale. Hugh Walpole, in his book, Semantics, lists five main connecting routes on the road from one idea to another: 1) similarity relations, 2) part and whole relations, 3) casual relations, 4) space relations, 5) time relations.

This business of selling is a meeting of minds through words and pictures; through the senses – things touched, tasted, and smelled. But mostly, through words alone, do minds join together at a common goal. A little study of how words should be combined to reach that goal is in order for the man who makes his living at trying to lead people to it all day long.

Many years have passed since the salesman held almost absolute power to make or break a sale. With each passing day, more and more people are induced to make up their minds or to change their minds without his ever coming into the picture.

His job is tightly geared to an extraneous persuasive force, so the salesman must understand how people react to advertising and sales promotion as well as to the techniques of his person-to-person selling. If study of the meaning of words will benefit the practice of individual persuasion, then it will help the salesman to understand mass persuasion, to neutralize it as an enemy and use it as a friend.

The argot of the company and the industry is quickly learned by most salesmen, but few continue their verbal maturing throughout their careers.

“In no area of our maturing,” says H. A. Overstreet, noted writer-educator, in The Mature Mind, “is arrested development more common than in the area of communication. It is so common that it is not even noticed; it is taken for granted as natural. The person who is mature in his communicative powers is rated an exception to the rule. The person who is immature – halting, clumsy, obscure, rambling, dull, platitudinous – is the rule.”

Selling never can be reduced to an absolute science, and the controversy over relative values of natural aptitude and acquired skill will go on forever. But it is obvious to anyone involved in the complexities of modern, organized marketing that mental efficacy is growing in worth at the expense of personality and entertainment. Hours spent in study of the persuasive arts will pay dividends.

In the main, semantics – the study of the meaning of words and the relationship between words and people and meanings – has been the playground of the experts. Its teachings have found application in every science. That is not surprising, for whenever words are used in serious discourse, meaning becomes paramount. The surprising thing is that it has had so little application to one of the greatest sciences in the modern world: persuasion for profit.