The Giants of Sales: What Dale Carnegie, John Patterson, Elmer Wheeler, and Joe Girard Can Teach You About Real Sales Success

Chapter 14. Thinking and Buying

To understand the genius of what Wheeler wrote and to see why it still has relevance, we need to take a little detour into a field that probably seems about as unrelated to sales as anything could be: linguistics. But hang in there. It won’t take long, and when we emerge on the other side, you’ll see how relevant it is for professional sales. In fact, I think you’ll be surprised at how much insight it gives us into the best ways to use language to make a sale. (As a side note, Wheeler seems to have had a pretty clear intuition of all this. His first book, published in 1932, was titled Tested Selling Sentences: The Language of the Brain.)

Brains and Words

For most people, the magic and mystery of language comes home ...