Posts

How it Began

Image
  Edward Bernays is the father of modern sales, marketing, and public relations.  Those three separate fields are interconnected because they come from the same two roots; Sigmund Freud and Joseph Goebbels.  Of course, there was no direct connection between Freud and Goebbels.  Freud was Jewish, and Goebbels was a Nazi.  It took Freud’s nephew and protege, Edward Bernays, to synthesize the two approaches into a master blueprint for manipulating the public. Freud’s most remarkable talent was as a salesperson.  He fooled generations of women into thinking they were jealous for not having a penis.  He started as a legitimate researcher, but his original work was too controversial.  He discovered that what he called “female hysteria” was caused by molestation and familial incest.  The backlash against this was so severe that it threatened Freud’s professional and financial future. Faced with ostracism for telling the truth, Freud redirected his i...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Right Stuff

Image
  In the last post, I told you that your customer has to feel loved and special. In the previous post, I mentioned that your customer also needs to be afraid. Sales and public relations bring Fear and love together in the most elegant way. If the customers love you, they trust you. If you tell them they have something to fear, they will be afraid of it. If you like it, they’ll love it. If you hate it, so will they. Just like politicians, salespeople have to present themselves as authority figures. And if you have The Right Stuff, you can use sales and marketing principles to rise to the million-dollar round table or leader of the free world. And when I say “The Right Stuff,” I mean The Right Props. Sales and political campaigns are run by the same PR and marketing firms. So the props you’ll need to sell, well, anything, will be the exact same props you’ll need to get elected to public office. Your primary prop will be clothing. Clothes create the impression you want to...
Post a Comment
Read more

All You Need Is Love

Image
  Face it, customers are only ATMs on two legs. Your presentation is the PIN and Ka-ching! Only customers are much more complicated than an ATM. It doesn’t matter if you manage a retail store or sell complex investments; you must make the customer feel special. Otherwise, that ATM on two legs will turn around and march away. So you have to make your customers feel special for them to keep giving you money.  Imagine how customers feel if they walk into a grocery store and all the clerks treat them like crap? This happens to me frequently because I rely on a service dog. In one case, I told a store manager to be a good little drone, put my groceries back, and walked out of the store, never to return. I spend my grocery money where the staff is trained to help disabled people. This makes me feel as if my business is appreciated. And if you’re looking to sell them something costly, you have to make them feel like one of the elite.  If you read my last post, you’ll remember ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Scare Your Customers For Fun and Profit.

Image
 We'll look at two case histories and see how they're related. The first case history is taken from stories I heard from eyewitnesses to the Nazi rise to power. The other is compiled from things I witnessed professionally. And the only thing that links them together is fear. Pay attention to Horst and Sam because I'll often refer back to them in future posts. Horst is your average German for his day. And a really decent guy. He has no problem with Jews, but he's steamed at the Communists for a few solid reasons. The Commies really screwed up after the Kaiser fell. All of Germany is feeling the Treaty of Versailles and the infrastructure damage from the failed German-Soviet Revolution. Inflation is out of control, and Horst can't really afford the one beer he's enjoying before going home. A friend is reading from the newspaper that the government will devalue the mark again! After that, beer was going to be out of the question. Horst has a wife and two sons, and...
Post a Comment
Read more
Image
  Welcome to Bill's Sales Seminars, where a retired salesperson teaches you how the top professionals do it.  I'll share the secrets of such professionals as John Connor, former Secretary of Commerce.  Gary Kinder, Master of infomercials.  Ken Bohannon, King of the 412(i) tax-free trusts.  And Ed Zucker, who created the anti-abortion campaigns for the Catholic Church.  None of these people want me to share their secrets with the general public.  So you better read this, print it out, and save it before they have their lawyers make Blogger take it down. See?  I hit you with as many sales tricks as a Trump campaign commercial.  First, I implied secret knowledge.  Everyone from Mega-Churches to Scientology hooks you by promising you secret knowledge.  Of course, they don't have any secret knowledge, and that's where the "Emperor's New Clothes" effect kicks in.  The cult leaders pretend all their followers have that secret knowledg...
Post a Comment
Read more