How Sell Your Ideas

How Sell Your Ideas

Elmer Wheeler, the famous “sell the sizzle not the steak”, has some good advice about how to sell your ideas.

 

Have you ever approached your boss with a red-hot idea for increasing efficiency only to have him become resentful instead of enthusiastic?

Have you ever offered your wife or husband or the neighbor so-called good advice? If you have, you know what I mean when I say that people resent having other people’s ideas forced on them. 

When someone approaches us with a new idea, our instinctive reaction is to put up a defense against it. We feel that we must protect our individuality, and most of us are egotistical enough to think that our ideas are better than anyone else’s. 

But there are three tested rules for putting your ideas across to other people so as to arouse their enthusiasm. And here are the three rules. 

Rule one: Use a fly rod, not a feeding tube. 

Others won’t accept your idea until they can accept it as their idea. When you want to sell someone an idea, take a lesson from the fisherman who casts his fly temptingly near the fish. He can never ram the hook in the fish’s mouth, but he can entice the fish to come to the hook. 

Don’t appear too anxious to have your ideas accepted; just bring them out where they can be seen. You might say, “Have you considered this,” instead of, “This is the way.” “You think this idea would work?” is better. “Than here’s what we should do.” Let the other fellow sell himself on your idea, and then he’ll stay sold.

Rule number two: Let the other fellow argue your case for you. 

Now, he instinctively feels called upon to raise some objection to save face. Give him a chance to disagree with you by presenting your own objections. “Now the way to convince another,” said wise old Ben Franklin, “is to state your case moderately and accurately. Then say that of course you may be mistaken about it, which causes your listener to receive what you have to say and, like as not, turn about and convince you of it, since you were in doubt. 

But if you go at him in a tone of certainty and arrogance, you only make an opponent of him.”

Abraham Lincoln used the same technique in selling his ideas to a jury. He argued both sides of the case. But there was always this subtle suggestion that his side was the logical one.

Said an opposing lawyer about him, “He made a better statement of my case to the jury than I could have made myself.”

Rule number three: Ask; don’t tell.

 Patrick Henry, another famous idea-salesman, knew how to do this. In his famous liberty or death speech he asked, “Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we here idle? Shall we lie supinely on our backs? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”

Now if you try saying the same thing in positive statements, all you get is antagonism. 

Three rules for selling your ideas: One, use a fly rod, not a feeding tube. Two, let the other fellow argue your case for you by not being too sure. And three, ask; don’t tell. It’s good advice.

Tony Egba

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