Continuous Sales Improvement by Eric Lofholm

Author:Eric Lofholm [Eric Lofholm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

MASTERING CLOSING

Elmer Wheeler was one of the most influential sales trainers of the 20th century, and one of his most important contributions was teaching the art of closing. Born in New York in 1903, Wheeler started selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door in Rochester at the age of fifteen. One barrier he encountered to making sales was dogs. Many yards had signs saying, “Beware of the dog”. Wheeler solved this problem by finding out the names of dogs before he approached their yards and calling them by name.

In high school, Wheeler became a reporter for the student newspaper. He was paid based on how much space his stories filled up. To increase his pay, he began creating newsworthy events he could write about.

Wheeler continued working on student newspapers in college. He took several jobs in the newspaper industry around the country, including newspaper advertising space to realtors in Los Angeles. There he began creating multiple versions of ads for each prospect. When presenting them he would ask, “Which of these do you like?” This was his first use of an important closing technique he would develop later, as well as the first time he tested different versions of the same ad, another important innovation.

Wheeler was working as a reporter when the Great Depression struck in 1929, costing him his job. His employer told him that he only needed sales representatives. At that point, Wheeler announced, “I am a salesman,” and he began focusing more on the advertising side of the newspaper business.

Newspapers depended on advertisements from local merchants, so one of Wheeler’s tasks was to create ads that got customers to visit advertisers’ stores. At first, Wheeler’s ads did attract customers to stores, but merchants complained that once customers got in the stores, they weren’t buying. Wheeler investigated the problem, and found that in-store sales representatives didn’t know how to sell. He began experimenting with sales scripts that he could teach store salespeople in order to get customers to buy.

This led Wheeler to create the Wheeler Word Laboratory, the first advertising agency devoted to testing sales scripts. Wheeler would develop scripts for clients and test them out to see which ones worked best.

For instance, gas stations at that time made extra money by offering oil checks to customers while they pumped gas and changing oil when needed. Texaco hired Wheeler to come up with a script to sell more oil checks. Attendants usually asked, “Check your oil today?” One of the problems with this script was that it gave customers the option of answering, “No.” Wheeler substituted a script that said, “Is your oil at the proper level today, sir?” This script made it more difficult for the customer to say, “No,” because they couldn’t answer the question accurately unless they had recently checked their oil. In most cases, the customer would need to get their oil checked simply to answer the question. This increased the likelihood that they would need an oil change. After one week of using this script, Texaco’s oil checks increased by 250,000.

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