Remember as you read that you are studying a completed process.  An unfinished sales effort is not a sale at all.  You will not be a certainly successful salesman until you perfect your knowledge and skill in all the steps of salesmanship.  You can learn only a single part of sales efficiency at a time.  The relative significance of each point, its full importance in the entire selling process, will not be comprehended until you have read at least once all there is in this set of books.  When you re-study the successive chapters, the details you may at first understand but vaguely in a disconnected way will be clear.  You will comprehend them as various elements of salesmanship which must be fitted together to complete the process of selling.

Thus far in the present chapter we have been considering principally the “goods of sale.”  We have been looking at our subject from the material aspect.  Now let us turn our attention to the mental view of sales.

[Sidenote:  Mental Nature of Selling Process]

In the effective selling process the skilled salesman is able to be the controlling party. He makes the other man think as he thinks.  As has been stated repeatedly, he sells ideas, not goods.  So the real nature of any sale is mental, not material.  You must “deliver the goods” to the mind of the man to whom you wish to sell your best capabilities.  You should use the same process as the professional salesman, who works to control the thoughts of his prospect regarding the line of goods presented.  Hence when you plan to make sure of getting a desired position, it is necessary that you know exactly how to put true ideas about yourself into the head of the person whom you have chosen as your prospective employer.  Further, you need to know precisely what psychological effects you can secure with certainty by using skillful salesmanship.

[Sidenote:  Three Sales Mediums]

Ideas of your best capability may be sold through three mediums—­advertising, correspondence, and personal selling.  Take advantage of all three, wherever and whenever possible, to gain your chance for success.  Use these mediums with real salesmanship.

[Sidenote:  Advertising]

If you advertise for a position, think out in detail the impression of your true best self that you wish to make on the minds of readers.  Put your personality into the advertising medium in such carefully selected language as will reach the needs of particular employers, and will not appear to be just a broadside of words shot into the air without aim.  Indicate clearly that you are not seeking “any old job so long as the salary is good.”  Analyze and know just what you suggest about yourself in print.  Many a successful business man has sold himself through the door of his initial big opportunity by real salesmanship in his advertisement of his capabilities.