There is some similarity between salesmanship and successful living. In a sense everybody is a sales person. When he or she does not sell goods or services, perhaps as a profession, they do sell ideas and make suggestions to their marriage partners, their children, relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Selling activity means influencing another person to a desired action. This involves a little psychology. The better we understand the psychological processes involved and apply the underlying principles, the more successfully we can sell and live. In selling the enthusiasm of the sales persons is more important than the price or quality of the product. Enthusiasm is an emotion, one of those strong feelings we experience deep down in our bodies. There are also other emotions. Some are good and others are not so good or outright bad. A partial list of these strong feelings may look somewhat like this, grouping them into positive and negative:
Selling activity means motivating the prospect to buy what you are selling. And while an engineer or a chemist worked on materials which cannot talk back, the salesman works on human minds, each of which is different and can react individually. It requires some knowledge of psychological processes on the part of the salesman. Basically of course all selling goods, you sell the idea that the prospect should buy what you want to sell him. The most effective way to do this is to arouse in him strong positive emotions of enthusiasm and love. Make him enthusiastic about your proposition, make him fall in love with it, and you have sold him. That is professional selling.
For the purpose, and on this everybody is agreed, you, the salesman, should be enthusiastic yourself first, so strongly that your enthusiasm, like an electric spark, jumps over to the prospect. Should you have salesman working with you, then you have to infect them with your enthusiasm first. Your enthusiasm, following the law of gravity, should flow down from you to your salesman to your prospects. Do not expect it to flow upwards. Do not expect your salesman to make you enthusiastic. The non-observance of this principle results in the failure of many sales organizations. Some of those companies are mortally afraid to hold sales meetings, because they feel they only create trouble and are an arena for complaints.
Thus it is easily understood that positive thinking is best weapon for successful marketing.
