Death of THE Salesman

By Peter Nevland - Jun 30 , 2009

No one in the publishing world will mourn the death of Billy Mays. Famous, full-bearded, loud-voiced hawker of OxiClean, Mighty Putty, and other direct-sell infomercial products will probably only elicit an, “Oh, that guy died,” from most of us. After all, what relevance does an annoyingly effective salesman of novelty products have to the world of books? As it turns out, a lot.

Rule #1: Draw a crowd. Mays didn’t start his career in the public spotlight. It began on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, hawking products to passersby. “So I’d just start talking, even if there wasn’t a crowd. ‘You there, what are you doing? You want to help me?’” That same, penetrating bass voice that made millions either pay attention or change the channel could always draw a crowd. “It might be just a little girl with her mom. And I’d say, ‘You don’t have to buy anything. You just have to help me get a crowd together.’”

If nobody’s listening, you can’t be selling, whether it’s OxiClean or your book. If you want to have any success getting your writing out there, you’ve got to have an audience. Publishers know this. It’s one of the first questions out of their mouth when a manuscript makes its way into their hands. “How big is your platform?” “What’s your readership?” If you can’t draw a crowd, you’ve got no chance to move those well-written books off the shelves.

Rule #2: “Get them to agree or at least sympathize with you.” Whatever hand motions, thumbs up signals, or never-ending smile Mays used, enough people genuinely liked him to ring up billions of over the phone sales. Arm & Hammer, Taco Bell, ESPN, even iCan Insurance believed in his results enough to sign him up to add to their bottom line. He increased Discovery Channel’s ratings by 42% in the time slot his co-starred series, Pitchmen, occupied. Mays said that for every product he sold he turned down 100 or 150 offers to sell other products. That translated to a seeming bulletproof belief that whatever he demonstrated actually worked and was worth $19.99, even before the, “But wait, there’s more!” offer.

True selling of a product or an idea occurs not once or twice, but days, months and years on end. It’s the understanding of the crowd. What moves them? What do they really care about? The only way to get people to come around to your point of view, to agree that your book, your philosophy is worth incorporating into their bookshelf or mental space is if you genuinely believe it yourself. Repetition is the proving ground of your vision. Figuring out how to deliver your message in your audience language of heart occurs before ever attempting to make one sale. Until you get them to take the journey to your perspective, you’re just another annoying, loud-mouthed mover of air.

Rule #3: Sell to one person and then line up the other buyers. Billy Mays knew how to get a bunch of people’s attention at once, to make them feel like they were all in it together. But he also understood that the actual sale is a personal decision. It doesn’t involve just mental assent. People have to feel like the offer is specifically for them. After he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand, he’d take his pitch and point it at one single person: “Now what about you? Wouldn’t you like to put the power of the WashMatik to work cleaning your car?”

Once one person agreed, the rest of the crowd started lining up to buy. When a group of people witness a personal conversation between the salesman and one single person, it stops being a performance. Mentally, everyone in the crowd puts themselves in the shoes of the person getting the one-on-one conversation. It adds the emotional, vulnerable element that not only does this product make sense, but it feels right coming from a person who’s willing to sell it only to me. If you can do that in your writing, in your platform building, in your book hawking, you don’t just have an audience, you have a group of committed followers who will sell you and your ideas to everyone they meet.

Not everyone loved Billy Mays.

His everlasting smile and over-the-top sincerity turned off just as many people as it attracted. Passion always does that. It sets you up to be called foolish. They’ll use all sorts of words and justifications to prove that you’re unintelligent, lowbrow, or just a snake-oil huckster taking advantage of late-night mouth breathers. Who’s the fool if you find yourself avoiding something that simply works to try to find a method that makes you look intelligent and cool?

I may not ever have a voice or a fully-formed beard like his, but I’m not ashamed to take notes from the simply resounding success of a guy named Billy Mays.