How To Close Sales By
LETTER
PART V—WRITING THE SALES LETTER—CHAPTER 18
Suppose that your most obstinate "prospect"—a man in the next block on whom your cleverest salesman had used every tactic and had been rewarded only by polite turn-downs until he had lost hope— should call up some afternoon and ask you to send over a salesman. Would you despatch the office boy? Or would you send your star salesman? Yet if that prospect lived a hundred miles away and sent in a letter of inquiry, one out of two firms would entrust the reply to a second or third-rate correspondent—entirely forgetful that an inquiry is merely a clue to a sale, and not a result in itself. This chapter shows how to GET THE ORDER by letter
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The man who inquires about your goods isn't "sold" by a long ways. He is simply giving you an opportunity to sell him. Inquiries aren't results, they're simply clues to possible sales, and if you are going to follow those clues up and make sales out of them, you need the best men you can find and the best letters those men can turn out to do it. Inquiries of good quality are costly, frequently several times as costly as the advertiser figures in advance that he can afford to pay. Yet, strange to say, many advertisers will employ $50 or $100-a-week ability to write advertisements that will produce inquiries and then expect $10 or $15 men to turn them into sales. As a matter of fact nine times out of ten the hardest part of the transaction is to close the sale.
An inquiry is merely an expression of interest. The reader of the advertisement says, in effect, "All right, I'm impressed. Go ahead and show me." Or, if he hasn't written in reply to an advertisement, he sends an inquiry and invites the manufacturer or dealer to tell what he has. To get the highest possible proportion of sales from each hundred inquiries, requires that the correspondent be as skillful in his written salesmanship as the successful man behind the counter is with his oral canvass and his showing of the goods.
If the truth were known, it is lack of appreciation of this point that discourages most concerns trying to sell by mail, and it is the real secret of a large percentage of failures.
A clock manufacturer notified the advertising manager of one of the big magazines that he had decided to discontinue his advertising. "The inquiries we get from your magazine," he wrote, "don't pan out." The advertising manager thought he saw the reason why and he made a trip down to the factory to investigate. Reports showed that in two months his magazine had pulled over 400 inquiries, yet out of that number just seven prospects had been sold.
"Will you let me see your follow-up letters?" he asked. They were brought out, and the advertising manager almost wept when he read them. Awkward, hackneyed, blundering notes of acknowledgment, they lacked even the merest suggestion of salesmanship. They would kill rather than nourish the interest of the average prospect. He sent the set of letters up to the service bureau of his magazine and a new series of strong convincing letters, such as the clock deserved, were prepared.
On the strength of these he got the advertiser back in and the next month out of 189 inquiries, forty-six clocks were sold. Think of the actual loss that manufacturer suffered simply because he did not really appreciate that inquiries aren't sales!