Business Marketing Advertising

Probably few people have had more experience in selling to captains of industry than Isaac Marcosson, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post and the American Magazine. Marcosson’s job is to sell men who refuse to be interviewed on the idea of giving him the story of how they have accomplished the impossible.

One of his largest sales was getting James J. Hill to tell him how he had built the Great Northern Rail?way. Hill had for years resisted all efforts of newspaper men to interview him. He not only did not like publicity, but was violently opposed to it. Marcoson sold him.

In speaking of his accomplishment at a Sphinx Club dinner in New York, Marcosson said that he had been able to get the story by finding out beforehand what Hill’s biggest problem had been, and then going to Hill and talking with him about it.

Nobody is so reticent that he won’t talk about the things that lie closest to his heart. Hill wouldn’t talk about things that other people were interested in ? what he ate for breakfast, his rules for success, or any such matters?but he talked willingly and freely about the things that interested him.

The same is true in selling merchandise as well as ideas ? before you really try to close a reticent buyer it is a good plan to find out the one thing above all others that he is interested in.