On another note, I found a disc labeled MANUSCRIPTS in the attic of a local junk shop. Here's an excerpt from a book on that disc titled How to Sell Shit to Anybody by Victor Cassidy.
(This is the introduction of the chapter entitled "The Biology of Sales.")
The Biology of Sales
During my second trip to Central Florida in the early nineties, I gave a seminar entitled "The Biology of Sales." It dealt with the relationship between the salesman, the mark, and basic elements of survival. In this chapter, I will attempt to reproduce the message of that seminar.
Everybody comes from the same soup. It doesn't matter if you believe in the Christian God or loony forest elves. At the end of the day, we're all human and we all need to eat. Because of that, a salesman is able to appeal to the basic needs of everybody, regardless of specific background. Don't get me wrong: background is important. Showing the mark that you are a human being and not a salesman is one of the most important things you can do. However, the purpose of this seminar is to demonstrate the key points that works with everybody.
Let me ask you all a question: when you wake up in the morning, do you think about buying a car? Is “shucks howdy, I sure would love a beach condo for one week out of the year” an integral part of your morning experience? Do you look at your cream of wheat and think about buying insurance for your yacht? Do you even know yachts exist when you stare at your alarm clock? Odds are you're looking at your alarm clock and thinking “how the fuck am I supposed to wake up this early?” You don't want to wake up, so you turn to your wife, snuggle up with her because it's warm, and snooze it for another ten minutes. If you're a go-getter like you should be, you wake up, shower, and eat breakfast. Either way, the last thing on your mind is going out to buy something that isn't food. You're probably wondering why I'm mentioning all of this stuff and I'm about to tell you why I used this example. The point is this: at any given time, our survival comes first. Our survival comes first. Let me hear you all say it! Our survival comes first. We don't want to buy a car or a house or a timeshare in the morning! We want to eat! We want to go back to sleep! We want to shower and get dressed! We want to get out there so we can work to survive. As I said before, we all come from the same soup and we're all here to serve the purpose of perpetuating our own existence. We are born, we live, we reproduce, we die. Everything we do is tied to that basic path and everything else is frivolous.
What does this have to do with sales? You all paid your thirty bucks for the seminar, so I'll let you in on the secret. As a salesman, you are not only marketing your product and yourself, you are providing a service that will become essential to the mark's survival. Does the dude in front of you need a beach condo in order to live his life? Fuck no! Does he need to replace his reliable old 4-banger for a brand new car with GPS and a robot voice? Fuck no! Does he really, truly need to get a cell phone plan with video messaging, ringtones of all the songs the media told him to listen to, and pictures of hot girls to use as his background? Fuck no! That's why we're here! See, at some point in your pitch, you need to ease into the mark's brain. You have to relax him, get him to see that you are exactly like him. All of you know that stuff, so I won't cover it. What I'm about to tell you, though, is guaranteed to increase your throughput by 200% or more.
The key is simple. The key is this. Make your mark ask himself this question: if I don't have this product, will I die? Don't have him wonder it in such blunt terms. Make him wonder on a deep and subconscious level. The product should eat away at his soul and create a void that wasn't there before. He needs to realize that there's a gap in his life. He should question his very existence. He should dive into his psyche and realize that his life has been empty without your product. You as salesman need to realize that you are not creating need. You are not telling him that he needs the product. You are opening his eyes and his soul to the fact that he has been without your product for his entire life. By doing that, you transcend being a mere salesman. You become, in essence, a prophet. A messiah. Your words cut through him like a machete through a college student in a horror flick. The product becomes your mark's morning cream of wheat. It becomes the oxygen that he breathes every day. It becomes an outlet of happiness for him and his family. The product becomes the source of life itself. Once you harness that, you will be ready for anything.
