Chapter 11. Memory Improvement Tips For Salesmen

A salesman should find infinite value in the use of the Mental Filing System to learn memory improvement tips, for all sales points and routine can be filed with it and remembered just as easily as the shopping list in the last chapter or the list of the world's largest cities. He may know his product thoroughly, but many a sale has fallen through because the salesman was not able to present all the principal sales points to a potential customer.

The manufacturer of a well-known make of oil burner asked me to give a talk to his salesmen and see if I could suggest anything to improve their selling technique. I opened my talk with a question: "Can any of you tell me the ten selling points of your oil burner?" No one—not even the sales manager— could oblige. They carried all kinds of literature explaining these ten points in detail, and admitted they had tried to memo­rize them by employing several memory improvement tips. Yet frequently they would forget from three to six of them when a customer confronted them. Several of the sales-men said they had lost important sales through omitting one or two points. One told me he had once called back to get an order from a man he considered sold on the oil burner only to hear, "I bought another furnace because yours didn't have the safety feature." The salesman protested that his product also had that feature and tried to explain it, but the prospect had already signed an order with the man who had remembered to bring it out in his sales talk.

I asked the sales manager to get his list of sales points and read them through to me once. I knew them cold in five minutes. The Mental Filing System had helped me do in that brief period what the salesmen had been unable to learn in several months.

This is the list of ten sales points about the oil burner that these men were supposed to have at their finger tips:

1. Dependable		6. Clean
2. Economical		7. Safe
3. Continuous hot water		8. Long life
4. Trouble-free		9. Compact
5. Even temperature		10. Attractive

This is how I hooked the sales points on to the key words so the salesmen could present their argument smoothly and in correct order:

1. Dependable (alarm clock). Nothing is more dependable than your alarm clock. You depend on your alarm clock to keep accurate time and you depend on it to go off at the time set. Good old dependable alarm clock. The oil heater is as dependable as an alarm clock.

2. Economical (trousers). You keep all your money—all your economic wealth—in your trousers pockets. You have only one pair of trousers because you are economical, and your tailor cut them short to be economical with material. They are economical trousers.

3. Continuous hot water (chair). Hot water runs continuously over the chair, A spigot is attached to the chair, and the water is so hot the chair is continuously bathed in clouds of steam. When you sit on this chair you are in continuous hot water.

4. Trouble-free (table). There is no trouble to this table at all. You can take it apart and put it together without trouble. It's a trouble-free table. See a big smiling face painted on the table top. The table is trouble-free, just like the oil burner.

5. Even temperature (newspaper). The weather report in this newspaper says, "Tomorrow: Even temperature," See a thermometer lying on the newspaper with the mercury always at 72 degrees, an even temperature.

6. Clean (automobile). Picture a spotlessly clean white automobile. You are washing the automobile so clean that it shines. The automobile, like the oil burner, is clean.

7. Safe (policeman). The policeman is the symbol of safety. He is sitting on a safe, keeping things safe for you. He holds up a sign, SAFETY. Or you see the policeman play­ ing baseball and he slides into home plate—he's safe.

8. Long life (revolving door). The revolving door is lying on its side, and it looks very long. Inside the revolving door are stacked piles of life-insurance policies printed with large letters LONG LIFE. The revolving door itself is made out of four giant-size red copies of Life magazine.

9. Compact (mailbox). Your mailbox is very compact. You open up your mailbox and a cloud of powder envelops you from a lady's open compact. Your mailbox is packed with compacts.

10. Attractive (general-delivery window). There are tracks leading up to the general-delivery window. The tracks bring you to an attractive girl sitting in the general-deliv­ery window. You say, "I was attracted to you. I followed your tracks." Look at her again. Doesn't she look attractive sitting there in the window?

Of course, knowing these ten sales points is of no practical use to you, but memorizing them in this way will be valuable practice hence it is one of the best memory improvement tips. The fact that they are so extremely abstract will help you when you come to filing points of your own. If you are a salesman, a few minutes of applied application will fix in your mind the sales points you want to retain about that automobile, refrigerator, insurance policy, or whatever it is you are selling. So, for the sake of practice, I strongly recommend your reading over the associations I made for the oil-burner salesmen until you know them well enough to attempt the following test:

6th sales point……………….	3rd sales point……………….
1st sales point……………….	2nd sales point……………….
10th sales point……………….	5th sales point……………….
8th sales point……………….	7th sales point……………….
4th sales point……………….	9th sales point……………….

When you come to apply the Mental Filing System to the attributes of your particular product, make your pictures large and as unusual as you possibly can. You will be able to remem­ber any number of items. Take your time. They are facts you can use all year long, and it will pay you dividends to go over them until you are sure of them. At the next meeting of sales­men, you will probably be the only one to surprise your sales manager by reeling off all the new sales features without an omission by utilizing these memory improvement tips.

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