Tested Sentences That Sell - Second Edition: Masters of Copywriting

Preface

TO UNDERSTAND ADVERTISING, you need to understand salesmanship.

Both are filled with mis-steps, gimmicks, and frauds.

Advertising is widely understood to be Salesmanship in Print. Understanding what makes a successful salesman then gives you the basics of what will make successful ads. By reading this tested collection of solutions, any person is well on their way to understanding human nature and how to approach prospects in order that marketing becomes routinely effective.

The average salesperson has a list of tactics that work. The outstanding salesperson is a constant student of the human condition and why people decide what they do.

Only when a salesperson (or any person) develops the lifelong habit of testing and re-testing everything they encounter in terms of advice, will they then find success routinely shows up for them. Because they weed out the conventional wisdom – which is at least 90% wrong.

This is Elmer Wheeler's approach. He formed his Word Laboratories and The Tested Selling Institute on 5th Avenue in New York City – just for this reason.

One of the most successful salesman of his day, he was also more concerned with teaching others than making a personal fortune with what he found.

We've chosen Wheeler's Tested Sentences That Sell to be part of the Masters of Marketing Secrets series – as a way to educate today's marketers on the why's and where-for's that make any salesperson a success.

About This Book

Tested Sentences That Sell, one the best-selling of Elmer Wheeler’s 20+ books was a result of testing over 105,000 words and phrases on more than 19 million people.

The book is based primarily on five Wheelerpoints to help choose the most effective words for sales presentations in any business.

Wheeler’s principles as powerful today as they were when this book was originally published in 1937. Even as things change, technology transforms, business evolves – human nature has stayed the same.

Don't think so much about what you want to say as about what the prospect wants to hear - then the response you will get will more often be the one you are aiming for. – Elmer Wheeler

About Elmer Wheeler

BORN IN 1903, ELMER Wheeler began his career in Baltimore as a newspaper ad salesman. A common complaint got him thinking. His retail customers complained that, while his newspaper’s ads got people in the door, they didn’t buy anything.

Painstakingly analyzing the situation, Wheeler concluded that the stores’ salespeople weren’t asking the right questions or saying the right words. That moved him in a new direction.

His success in helping his customers generate sales by altering the way they addressed customers eventually led to the establishment of his Word Laboratories and The Tested Selling Institute on 5th Avenue in New York City.

During 10 years of research, Wheeler tested over 105,000 words and phrases on more than 19 million people, resulting in, among other things the development of his 5 Wheeler Points and, in 1937, the publication of Tested Sentences That Sell.

Sources:

American Writers & Artists Inc. and scottfrothingham.com

A Foreword to the Reader

BY H. W. HOOVER - PRESIDENT, The Hoover Company

For the past ten years it has been the sole business of Mr. Wheeler and his staff of word consultants to survey and analyze selling words and techniques. I understand that to date they have tested over 105,000 words and word combinations on upward of 19,000,000 people.

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 a 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 twelve-cylinder motor under the shiny hood; smart looking upholstery, strong, sturdy tires, and a tank filled with high-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 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.

The Story Behind Tested Selling

Before giving you the Wheeler formulas, rules and principles for devising word combinations that make people buy, it may be interesting to you to learn how this Wheeler Word Laboratory was established and has become the first and only business wherein spoken words and sales techniques are developed and tested.

When Mr. Wheeler was an advertising solicitor some ten years ago on the Los Angeles Herald, and then on the Rochester Journal, the Albany Times- Union, and the Baltimore News-Post, he developed what to him was a fine sales presentation for retail merchants.

He would inform them, with considerable sincerity, and volumes of figures under his arm, that his newspaper had the largest circulation in town, and therefore more people who needed shirts, hosiery, umbrellas, needles and thread, and pots and pans would read the merchants’ advertisements in his paper and be down to their places of business the next day to buy.

A convincing sales argument, he thought, but Mr. Merchant would always shrug his shoulders and say, So what?

He would then point to the hundreds of people in the aisles of his store and inform Mr. Wheeler that perhaps he did represent a newspaper with plenty of circulation that brought people into his store – but people just didn’t buy. The merchant called them shoppers, lookers, and walk-outs.

This sales obstacle had Mr. Wheeler perplexed for many years, because as a newspaper representative his only job was to get people into the stores. Then one day it occurred to him that maybe this wasn’t the end of his job - but really the beginning.

Therefore he set about making a careful analysis of the merchandise sold to the stores by the manufacturers. It was the right merchandise, sold at the right price and at the right season.

On going over the store’s advertisements, he found that they were usually pretty effective. He then narrowed down the problem of why people came to stores and purchased so little to the salespeople themselves behind their counters.

Here was the weak link in the setup of the retailer, the manufacturer, and the newspaper.

Twenty Reporters Get the Facts

To get definite proof of this fact, Mr. Wheeler approached Erwin Huber, then director of advertising for the Baltimore News-Post. Together they selected twenty reporters and gave each of them five dollars with instructions to go to The May Company and buy as many of the men’s advertised dollar shirts as the $5.00 would purchase and the clerks would sell.

When the reporters returned from the store, fifteen of them hadn’t bought a single shirt, informing Mr. Wheeler that the clerks had made no attempt to sell them one. The five reporters who did buy shirts purchased only one each, explaining that the clerks did not suggest a second, third, or fourth shirt.

It was evident, according to the reporters, that the clerks figures that after all a man wore only one shirt at a time, so if he bought one, why try to load him up with several? Important Selling Evidence Armed with this important evidence, Mr. Wheeler then approached Mr.

Wilbur May, head of The May Company store in Baltimore at the time, explained what he had done, and produced his findings.

Mr. May was most interested. He realized that he had a million-dollar establishment, with a million dollars worth of merchandise on the shelves – yet the real control of his business was in the hands of his eight hundred salesgirls, whose only two worries (and we can’t blame them, either) were these:

1. When am I gonna get married and quit working!

2. Gee, I wish it was 5:30 – my dogs are aching!

Mr. May further realized that the most the manufacturer was doing was getting his goods up to the counters, the most the store was doing was teaching the clerks how to fill out checks properly and placing advertisements in the papers, and that the most the newspaper was doing was bringing the people in alive.

In the final analysis, the sales were consummated by the salespeople – and on what they say or do depends to a great degree just how much merchandise will be sold across American counters each day.

Wheeler Word Laboratory is Formed

Upon hearing this story and seeing the facts, Mr. May suggested that Mr. Wheeler be commissioned by his newspaper to go behind the counters and really make a study of salespeople.

This study, which has now been going on for ten years, resulted in the formation of the Wheeler Word Laboratory. The purpose of this unique laboratory is to measure the relative selling effectiveness of words and their sales techniques, to determine with a great degree of accuracy what formation of words and techniques makes the sale more accurate and faster.

Many stores and manufacturers have participated in supplying the Wheeler Word Laboratory with hundreds of selling sentences to be tested, and have opened their doors wide as a laboratory wherein Mr. Wheeler could get authentic tabulation of the scientific selling ability of words and techniques.

Sales Gains Recorded Everywhere

Wherever a salesperson is given a Tested Selling Sentence with its proper Tested Technique to replace a time-worn statement, sales gains are noted. For instance, a single sentence increased sales of a manufacturer’s hand lotion at B. Altman’s on Fifth Avenue from 60 per week to 927.

Another tested combination of words make sales 78 per cent of the times used at R. H. Macy & Company in selling their long-profit brand of coffee and tea.

On another occasion two Tested Selling Sentences completely sold Bloomingdale’s, Saks 34th Street, Abraham & Straus of Brooklyn, and William Taylor’s of Cleveland out of tooth brushes – a staple item – for the first time in the history of these important stores.

Stern Brothers, in New York, had Tested Selling Sentences tailor-made to reduce delivery costs, and according to William Riordan, president, the first six months’ use of the sentences showed a relative saving of close to $7,000 over the preceding year.

Ten years of study of salespeople – ten years trying out formulas, rules, and principles – casting them aside for others – have brought forth some sound, sensible methods of salesmanship, and Mr. Wheeler offers them to you in the following swift-moving pages.

Tested Selling Institute

New York City

The best-looking merchandise won’t sell itself; and the prettiest dotted line won’t sign itself, without the intelligent persuasion of somebody’s words.

The Five Wheelerpoints

1. Don’t Sell the Steak – Sell the Sizzle!

2. Don’t Write – Telegraph.

3. Say It with Flowers.

4. Don’t Ask If – Ask Which!

5. Watch Your Bark!

Three Other Wheeler Principles

1. The Law of Averages.

2. The X, Y, Z Formula.

3. The A and B Rule.

Chapter 1: Don’t Sell The Steak – Sell the Sizzle! (Wheelerpoint 1)

WHAT WE MEAN BY THE sizzle is the BIGGEST selling point in your proposition – the MAIN reasons why your prospects will want to buy. The sizzling of the steak starts the sale more than the cow ever did, though the cow is, of course, very necessary.

Hidden in everything you sell, whether a tangible or an intangible, are sizzles. Find them and use them to start the sale. Then, after desire has been established in the prospect’s thinking, you can bring in the necessary technical points.

The good waiter realizes he must sell the bubbles – not the champagne. The grocery clerk sells the pucker – not the pickles, the whiff – not the coffee. It’s the tang in the cheese that sells it! The insurance man sells PROTECTION, not cost per week. Only the butcher sells the cow and not the sizzle, yet even he knows that the promise of the sizzle brings him more sales of his better cuts.

For instance, let us take a certain modern vacuum cleaner and see how many sizzles we can develop to get the prospect saying I want! instead of Oh hum!:

1. Positive Agitation.

2. Time-to Empty Signal.

3. Dirt Finder.

4. Automatic Rug Adjuster.

5. Non-kink Cord.

6. Instant Handle Positioner.

7. Non-tangle Revolving Brush.

8. Grit Removers.

9. Lint Removers.

10. Dust Removers.

These ten big sizzles will make people buy this particular make of vacuum cleaner. The construction, the mechanism, and the prices are important, of course, but the I want points, as Paul Lewis puts it, are laborsaving, more leisure, cleaner homes and health.

Therefore, the vacuum cleaner salesman must advise himself:

Don’t sell the price tag – sell less backaches!

Don’t sell construction – sell labor-saving! Don’t sell the motor – sell comfort!

Don’t sell ball bearings – sell ease of operation!

Don’t sell suction – sell cleaner rugs!

Health, comfort, labor-saving, leisure, and cleaner homes are the sizzles in this particular vacuum cleaner; construction and mechanism the cow.

Are you beginning to see what is meant by first finding the sizzles in what you are selling, before even attempting to form the words to convey the sizzles to the prospect? Put on a pair of sizzle specs now and look at your own sales package.

Then write down the one, five, ten, or twenty sizzles you find – in the order of what at first blush you believe will be of importance to the prospect.

Then Learn to Have You-Ability

One BIG QUESTION is running through the prospect’s mind as you are showing your merchandise and telling your sales story, and that question is:

What will it do for me?

Therefore, almost everything you say or do must be said and done in such a way that it ALWAYS answers this important question! You must develop a NEED for your product in the mind of the prospect – for until he realizes a need, you will make little sales progress.

Now all of the sizzles you list for your product may create a need in the mind of the customer – but remember that although these sizzles may be of EQUAL IMPORTANCE to you, they may differ in importance to the prospect. If you have you-ability, you will be able to take your sizzles and fit them to each prospect with uncanny accuracy!

You-ability is the ability to get on the other side of the fence – to put on a pair of invisible sizzle specs and see your product through the EYES OF THE CUSTOMER. You-ability is the ability to say you, not I – and the ability to present the sizzles in the order that the CUSTOMER considers important.

Summary of Wheelerpoint 1

Buried in every spool of thread, in every row of safety pins, in every automobile, in every insurance policy, in every grocery, drug, or toilet goods item, are reasons why people will want to buy it.

These big reasons we call the sizzles.

Before you even start to see your prospects, you must line up, in your own mind, the sizzles they will consider important. You will then have a planned presentation, based on all the information you can get about your prospects and your selling package.

You will find that the use of the word you in your sales