You don’t have to be a psychic to predict the future. We know with absolute certainty what’s going to happen with virtually every customer we encounter. We know what their concerns and fears are and I know exactly what they’re going to say and how I’m going to respond to it.

We know for example that a large percentage of our customers will say “I’m just looking” or its twin “I’m not buying today.”

We also know at some point they will ask about the price of a vehicle.

You know too. How you react to these things may be variable for you. It might depend on their tone and inflection or their body language. The truth is that we should respond exactly the same way each and every time.

 “While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.  You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.  Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.  So says the statistician.”  ~Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

Elmer Wheeler from the 1930s up until his death in 1968 was considered “America’s No. 1 Salesman.” He coined the phrase “Don’t Sell the Steak,Sell the Sizzle”.

In his “word laboratory” he developed selling phrases for many products for most of America’s large corporations. Over one hundred thousand “Tested Sentences That Sell” were tested on over twenty-three million customers. The simplicity and elegance of some of these phrases and gestures resulted in absolutely phenomenal increases in sales and profits.

My very favorite example involves Walgreens drugstore and eggs.

During the depression, Walgreens, like all drug stores at the time had soda fountains in their stores. They could buy eggs for ten cents a dozen and sell them for five cents per egg, a substantial profit margin. Increasing the sale of eggs became a priority and they hired Elmer Wheeler to develop a “tested selling sentence” for them.

A very popular item at the soda fountain were milkshakes. If a customer desired a particularly rich and creamy milkshake they would add a raw egg to it. So the practice was that when the customer ordered a milkshake the soda-jerk would ask “do you want an egg in that”?

Elmer spent some time observing these customer and soda-jerk interactions and came up with the phrase for Walgreens. This phrase was implemented and all soda-jerks were required to use it when a customer ordered a milkshake.

The result was Walgreens sold an additional 29,000 cases of eggs per week. That’s four million one hundred seventy-six thousand eggs, at a nickel a piece, every week. $10,857,600.00 per year in additional sales revenue. During the Great Depression.

The phrase? “One egg or two?”

Simple tested phrases in the dealership can work just as well. A handful of simple phrases used in response to those things we know are going to happen can be counted on to deliver results with mathematical certainty.

Many that would have said, no egg were suddenly choosing to have one egg and many order two. Far superior to the "ya want an egg in that"?

Use the phrases that have been “tested” and proven effective in hundreds of dealerships with thousands of customers. If you don’t know what they are I can help with that.

You can get a free copy of Elmer Wheeler’s book “Tested Sentences That Sell” at www.elmerwheeler.net

Mike Stoner

(206) 715-8662