Any likeness of your suggestions to the ideas of the other man will impress him agreeably. He will be pleased to find the points of resemblance, and they will help to gloss over a possible prejudice in his mind against you. The association of your similar ideas on a subject will suggest to him imaginative pictures of your association with him in his business. "Like breeds like." He will place you mentally in a situation where the likable qualities he has found in you might be employed to his satisfaction.
Inside the Door
Then you will be safely inside the door of his interest. Without realizing it, your prospect would like to bring about the condition he has imagined. He is beginning to want you in his employ; though as yet he has no deep-seated desire for your services. Objections to you may spring up in his mind, but you certainly have been successful throughout the processes of getting his response to your knock, and of securing for your ideas his invitation to come into his thoughts for a better acquaintance with your purpose.
Unwelcome Guests
After admitting your ideas to his mind, he may wish he had not welcomed them. He may find objectionable things in you or in your proposal. Sometimes a man responds to a knock on his door, and becomes sufficiently interested in the caller to invite him to enter the house; but regrets afterward that he extended the welcome. This change of heart and mind is usually due to something done by the visitor after his admittance. However, we are not considering just now any step of the selling process beyond winning a welcome. In later chapters we will study how to make the most effective use of hospitality and the things to avoid that might impress the host as abuses of the privileges of a guest.
Ideas have been called "the furniture of the mind." We have already seen that they are the developments of repeated sense impressions. A particular mind center is partly or wholly furnished with ideas in proportion to the man's use of his sense avenues to bring in ideas from outside himself. The doors of the mind swing inward most readily when the new mental furniture brought along a sense avenue matches the ideas already in the mind center. Doubtless the young man who lost the interest of a great financier by wearing a soft collar would have been able to hold it if he had dressed according to his prospect's ideas.
One Likable Thing Helps
If there is one thing about you that another man dislikes, it disproportionately tinges his entire attitude of mind toward you. On the other hand, if you have one especially likable feature, it tends to lessen the disagreeable impression of things about you that the other man does not like.
So, when you come to a prospect as a salesman of your best self and have gained his attention, avoid making disagreeable suggestions to his mind, and have at your command a number of sense appeals you are sure he will like. You certainly will secure his interest if you follow this selling process.