[Sidenote:  Certain Success Methods]

We have seen how you can make certain of gaining your chance to reach the door of opportunity.  You can size up surely your prospect’s dominant characteristics and what he is thinking.  Likewise you can guarantee to yourself, first the attention, and second the interest of the man you have come to see.  It is necessary only that you use the methods of the master salesman to compel the opening of the door and to induce the extension of welcome to your ideas.

[Sidenote:  Our Old Acquaintance Again]

Here again we meet our old acquaintance, the discriminative-restrictive method.  You must discriminate between the process of knocking at the door of opportunity and the process of securing the invitation to come in.  Then, in practicing these related but different steps of the selling process, it is necessary that when you knock you restrict yourself to the use of the methods that are most effective in gaining attention.  Similarly you should restrict yourself to using the very different methods of securing interest, when you work to get an invitation for your ideas to come inside the other man’s mind and make themselves at home there.

[Sidenote:  Process of Compelling Attention]

Psychologists define “Attention” as “that act of the mind which holds to a given object perceived by one or more senses, to the exclusion of all other objects that might be perceived at that time by the same or other senses.”  A knock at a door attracts attention because it temporarily diverts the previous attentiveness of the mind to other things, and concentrates it on a new object of attention.  The sense of hearing is struck.  Whether or not the mind is willing to hear, it cannot help perceiving the sudden new sound.  Its attention is forced.  The instant the knock is heard, the mind is compelled to drop or suspend what it has been thinking about; though this exclusive new attention to the knock may last but a fraction of a second.

Our senses function under the control of the sub-conscious mind.  It is futile for us to will that we won’t hear, or see, or taste, etc.  We have to take in sense impressions, whether we want to do so or not.  Therefore, if you employ restrictively the sense-hitting method, you can force the man upon whom you call to give his attention to you or to the presentation of your ideas.

[Sidenote:  Inducing Interest]

It is necessary to discriminate, however, between the use of the avenues to reach the mind center of attention, and the use of very different ways into the mind center of interest.  If you start wrong, there is very little chance that you will arrive at the right destination.  The center of interest is wholly under the control of the conscious mind.  Your prospect can refuse to be interested, if he chooses, despite your determination to interest him. His interest must be induced.  Any attempt to compel it is apt to have a fatal result.  Nearly always such an effort to force interest develops antagonism, instead.