This man who had a position paying $6,000 a year waiting for him spent two months at $9 a week preparing to write. A more conceited chap would have called it a waste of time, but this man thought that he could well afford to spend eight weeks and sacrifice nearly a thousand dollars learning to write letters and advertisements that would sell clothes by mail.
At the end of the year he was given a raise that more than made up his loss. Nor is he content, for every year he spends a few weeks behind the counter in some small town, getting the viewpoint of the people with whom he deals, finding a point of contact, getting local color and becoming familiar with the manner of speech and the arguments that will get orders.
When he sits down to write a letter or an advertisement he has a vivid mental picture of the man he wants to interest; he knows that man's process of thinking, the thing that appeals to him, the arguments that will reach right down to his pocket-book.
A man who sells automatic scales to grocers keeps before him the image of a small dealer in his home town. The merchant had fallen into the rut, the dust was getting thicker on his dingy counters and trade was slipping away to more modern stores.
"Mother used to send me on errands to that store when I was a boy," relates the correspondent, "and I had been in touch with it for twenty years. I knew the local conditions; the growth of competition that was grinding out the dealer's life.
"I determined to sell him and every week he received a letter from the house—he did not know of my connection with it—and each letter dealt with some particular problem that I knew he had to face. I kept this up for six months without calling forth a response of any kind; but after the twenty-sixth letter had gone out, the manager came in one day with an order—and the cash accompanied it. The dealer admitted that it was the first time he had ever bought anything of the kind by mail. But I knew his problems, and I connected them up with our scales in such a way that he had to buy.
"Those twenty-six letters form the basis for all my selling arguments, for in every town in the country there are merchants in this same rut, facing the same competition, and they can be reached only by connecting their problems with our scales."
No matter what your line may be, you have got to use some such method if you are going to make your letters pull the orders. Materialize your prospect; overcome every objection and connect their problems with your products.
When you sit down to your desk to write a letter, how do you get into the right mood? Some, like mediums, actually work themselves into a sort of trance before starting to write. One man insists that he writes good letters only when he gets mad—which is his way of generating nervous energy.
Others go about it very methodically and chart out the letter, point by point. They analyze the proposition and out of all the possible arguments and appeals, carefully select those that their experience and judgment indicate will appeal strongest to the individual whom they are addressing. On a sheet of paper one man jots down the arguments that may be used and by a process of elimination, scratches off one after another until he has left only the ones most likely to reach his prospect.