Powerful Proposals

Chapter 4

SELLING THE BENEFITS

Customer-Oriented Proposals

GOLDEN RULE:

You have to sell the sizzle to sell the steak.

It’s hard to find heroes in the world of sales and marketing. The feats of the most prolific sellers are generally unknown except to those who pay their bonuses, and if they gain too much notoriety, the rest of us usually resent them.

Now and then, however, a folk hero emerges among that group of humans purported to be able to sell gasoline to a bicyclist. Recent sales heroes include Zig Zigler and Buck Rodgers of IBM. Back in the late 1940s and 1950s, the hero of selling was Elmer Wheeler, who advised his fellow salespeople to sell the sizzle, not the steak.

In a way, this is our story. Educated, in one case, in the liberal ...