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Magic Words That Increase Your Bottom Line
Maybe you've heard the expression "sell the sizzle not the steak." Well that's
Elmer Wheeler and his book"Tested Sentences That Sell" from 1937 reveals the 'tested selling sentences' that Wheeler uncovered by testing over 105,000 words on more than 19,000,000 people. Doing so he found conclusive evidence that certain words would produce incredible differences in results over other words. And I'll tell you all about them in a moment, but first it's interesting to know the way this all got started. When Wheeler was an ad salesman for several newspapers he developed a fine sales presentation for retail merchants. He would come in and tell the retailers about his paper's large circulation and how people who needed to buy shirts, hosiery, umbrellas, etc. would be done to their store to buy. But the reply he got was "So what?" The retailer would point to hundreds of people in the aisles of his store and tell Mr. Wheeler they come down here but they don't buy. Making a careful analysis Wheeler concluded that the weak link in the sales process were the salespeople behind the counter. He realized the sales were made or lost by the sales clerk in the stores. And to a great degree depending on what they said determined how much merchandise was sold. This is how Wheeler formed the "Wheeler Word Laboratory%u201D and his 10 years of research might just be profitable to you today. Here are a few great examples. At a pharmacy, the clerk would ask customers walking in "Are you on your feet much?" Then he'd hand them a shoe insole and say "This will ease your feet. It's made especially for people who are on their feet a lot." This sold hundreds of insoles every week. Or another testing selling sentence (of 100 tried) worked best to get 250,000 motorists to open their hood in one week. You know the worthless phrase "Can I check your oil?" This question makes it easy to say "no". The question Wheeler found to work best was "Is your oil at the safe driving level?" This worked 58% of the time. Then Wheeler also found that if waiters asked, "Would you care to order a red or white wine with your dinner?" It would double the sales of wine. Or how about this example? When a customer would ask for a drink the order-taker would normally ask "small or large?" The typical response was "I'll take the small one." Well, simply changing to an assumptive question, "Large one?" proved 7 out 10 people would say "yes"! Pretty impressive, huh? All with the power of words. So again, what's this all mean to your business? You're probably not a gas
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