Can you speak your sales letter? Yes, according to the late, great Gary Halbert. Here’s his solution on how to do it.
His solution – begin to record (with the other party’s permission) ll your conversations whenver you’re talking to one of your prospects n the phone. Keep doing this until you are able to forget you’re doing t so that you’re delivering your usual compelling sales presentation.
After you have a recording of what Gary calls you at ‘concert pitch’ take that recording and have it transcribed. After it has been transcribed take a copy of the transcription and number each one of the paragraphs. A paragraph is defined as one or more sentences that express a single idea or aspect of a subject.
Next, go over the paragraphs and give each of them another number that is based on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest. You’re ranking each paragraph as to how much favorable influence it has on your prospect.
Next, cut out all your paragraphs and divide them into 3 groups – those that describe the benefits of owning your product, those that tell interesting facts about your product, and those that don’t advance your sales presentation in any way at all.
Throw the third group away and arrange the other two groups in rank order from 10 on down. Throw out all paragraphs with a rating of 5 or less. Next, rewrite the remainng paragraphs to be ‘cleaner’ – but don’t change them much.
Then, forget you are trying to write an ad or a sales letter. Instead, concentrate on writing a memo. A long memo. Write it to someone you can easily visualize in your mind’s eye, someone who is a good prospect for your product.
Summarize your most interesting facts followed by your biggest benefits in memo format, interspersed by some short connecting paragraphs and you have the basis of an outstanding sales letter or advertisement.
Gary says ‘Selling is not yelling. Selling is not tricks. Selling is an impressive, forceful communication of facts and benefits.’ The model summarized above is a far cry from being the end-all and be-all of how to create advertising. However, that simple little process of recording your person-to-person sales presentations, and then, transferring them to paper works far better than trying to ‘dream up’ some award winning
vapidness.
