Chapter 6

THREE LITTLE WORDS THAT SOLD

MILLIONS OF SQUARE CLOTHESPINS 

(The Law of Averages)

“While individuals may be insoluble puzzles, in the aggregate they become mathematical certainties.”

Sherlock Holmes

THIS STATEMENT means that you can never foretell how any one person will react to a given selling sentence, but that you can say with scientific accuracy what the average will do. This philosophy of Sherlock Holmes is the best defense I know for the underlying philosophy of this book: that single sentences can be so constructed as to make a majority of people buy.

Several years ago manufacturers began to distribute square clothespins, instead of their famous round ones. Like most people I became curious and went into the first small store I came upon and asked the clerk what the difference was between the square and the round clothespins.

“Three cents a dozen difference!” said the salesgirl, snapping her gum in my face.

I asked the buyer in the little store and his answer was no better:

“I sell so many gross of clothespins a week, and this time they happened to come in square – why I don’t know! But I do know I’ll get stuck with them – for what woman will spend three cents extra a dozen for square ones!” 

MANY REASONS FOR BEING SQUARE 

I went to the home office of this chain of small stores, and I was told by the merchandising division that these are the “sizzles” in a square clothespin:

1. They won’t slip out of wet hands so easily.

2. You can hold more in your wet hands.

3. They are polished and won’t tear delicate garments.

4. They won’t split on clotheslines.

5. They have knobs on the end so women can hold them in their mouths, especially if they have no teeth.

Everything about these square clothespins was scientific – except what the salesperson said to the customers. While I was hearing these “sizzles,” I accidentally dropped a clothespin on the floor, and a thought came to mind. I visualized a woman hanging up clothes. She has an armful of wash, clothespins in her wet hands and in her mouth as she starts across the kitchen floor. Suddenly a clothespin falls to the floor. Being round, it rolls under the stove. Like little dogs, clothespins love nothing better than to get under a stove and just lie there.

It may roll elsewhere. The woman fails to see it, and a few moments later she backs into it. Down goes the wash and the woman – and in comes the insurance adjuster!

Perhaps women would buy the square clothespins, I thought, if we told them this simple “sizzle”: A square clothespin won’t roll when it hits the floor; a woman drops one, she has only to bend down, pick it up, and go merrily on with her work. She would know at all times where the square clothespins were and would not trip up on them.

THE IDEA “CLICKS” WITH WOMEN

Taking this idea into our laboratory for polishing and smoothing, and then for tests behind the counters, we packed this selling point into a two-second “Tested Selling Sentence,” and instructed salespeople to say, when women wanted to know why they were square:

“They won’t roll!”

Three little words – yet they struck home across the busy counters, and customers began to buy them, showing again that what sells one woman often sells others! 

STORY OF INDIAN MOCCASINS 

Some time ago I was called into the Schulte-United Retail Stores to help devise selling language and techniques to sell Indian moccasins to small boys as an extra suggested sale to regular purchases.

Here is a composite sales talk used by the clerks in selling these moccasins to boys shopping with their mothers, with the “sizzle” buried in a long line of sales conversation. Can you pick it out?

SALESPERSON: “Madam, wouldn’t you like to buy a pair of real Indian moccasins for your little boy here? They have triple stitching on the back and can’t rip. The beads are put on with wire and will never break off. They have blunt toes instead of pointed ones; we call them our health moccasins, because your little boy’s foot will grow straight and healthy all the rest of his life.”

CUSTOMER (Usual reply): “Nope – just give me my package.”

But when the salesperson was instructed to take the Indian moccasins and place them in front of the little boy, saying, “The kind the REAL INDIANS WEAR, Sonny!,” sales increased!

That single sentence made the little boy’s eyes pop out. He became an assistant salesman and would start selling his mother on why he should have a pair. Did he care if the moccasins were healthy or unhealthy? No! Did he care if the beads would last five minutes or five years? No – all he visualized was that he could wear them up and down the street and make his friends envious by saying:

“Whoopee! The kind the REAL INDIANS WEAR!”

Basically we are all alike, and we all respond to the same “sizzles.” This one sells three out of thirteen times it is used!

SELLING WHITE SHOE POLISH 

Everyone of you at some time or other has gone into a store to purchase some white shoe polish.   You have heard many such selling statements as:

1. “It is liquid and spreads on easier.”

2. “It won’t rub off.”

3. “It isn't take form and last longer.”

4. “It keeps shoes white longer.”

5. “Was $0.25 – now $0.15.”

Which of these statements would influence you?   Which to think increase sales 300%?   Yes, you guessed it!   Sentence 2.

The Hecht Company in Washington, D. C., had the three hundred percent go to buy sales increase, and today several manufacturers are using these four words as their main headline in advertisements and on billboards.   All people want the white to stay on.   It is a basic appeal!  

THE STORY OF BARBASOL 

I was asked by the Barbasol Company, in the person of F. B. Shields, president, to find a good “Tested Selling Approach” to use unmanned shopping in drugstores and a toilet goods counters.

Going to Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Cleveland to set up our field word laboratory we soon discovered there were 146 statements that could be used in approaching a customer, yet one came to the surface is best.   It was:

“How Would You Like to Save Six Minutes Shaving?”

This a surefire leading question, for what man could honestly reply, “Not interest that I love to hang around the bathroom shaving!”

When the man asked how he could cut a shaving time, he was told:

“Use Barbasol Just Spread It on Shave It off Nothing Else Required!”

Sales in the Sears store increased 102%, with only one negative reaction.   A man with fuzz on his face said, my gracious it only takes me three minutes to shave anyway!

This answer gave us an idea, and the single sentence sales “opener” was changed to, “How would you like to catch your shaving time in half?”   When this even more basic approach was used at William Taylor store in Cleveland, sales increased three hundred percent, according to reports from Richard Roth, vice president.

And here is further proof that once a sentence or a sales appeal is sufficiently basic, it will sell as high as seven out of every 10 people on which is used properly.   The same sentence was sent to Benson, Smith & Company in Honolulu, and in three days sold fifty-one out of seventy-eight people, or all of the product on hand! 

Thousands of such a case histories are in our files, but these are sufficient to indicate there is something fundamental about Sherlock Holmes law of averages:

Basically we are all alike and respond to the same buying urges, and the same emotions of sold customers 20,000 years ago sell them today.

Now let us see in the next chapter what these basic buying urges are so that we can direct our Tested Selling Sentences at them and thus eliminate “blind selling.”

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