Most employers buy the expected services of men and women in order to satisfy their own desires for particular capabilities.  Few will buy against their wishes.  In order to sell your qualifications with certain success, you first must make the other man genuinely want what you offer.  Almost always mind vision and heart hunger must be stimulated to produce desire.  Therefore the most skillful salesman of himself does not use the words, tones, and actions of argument.  In preference to cold reason and logic he employs the arts of mental suggestion and emotional persuasion.

[Sidenote:  The Force of Suggestion]

Suggestion is especially effective in producing desire; because an idea that is merely suggested, and not stated, is unlikely to provoke antagonism or resistance.  A suggestion is given ready access to the mind of the other man.  Usually it gets in without his realizing that a strange thought has entered his head from outside.  When he becomes conscious of the presence in his mind of an idea that has been only suggested to him, he is apt to treat it as one of his own family of ideas and not as an intruder.  Naturally he is little inclined to oppose a desire that he thinks is prompted by his own thoughts.  However, he would be disposed to resist the same wish if he realized it had been injected into his consciousness.

All of us know the great force of suggestion; but there are very few people who so use words, tones, and movements as to make the most of their power of suggesting ideas in preference to stating them.  Probably no tool of salesmanship will be of more help in assuring your success than fully developed ability in suggestion, which is the skillful process of getting your ideas into the minds of others unawares.

[Sidenote:  Words Are Doubted]

The words we use are intended to convey pretty definite meanings to listeners.  If we are entirely honest in our words, we expect whatever we say to be taken at its face value as the truth.  Yet each of us knows that his own mind seldom accepts without question the statements of other men, however well informed and honest they are reputed to be.  You and I mentally reserve the right to believe or to doubt the written or spoken words of someone else; because they always enter our minds consciously.  We know that the words we hear or read come from outside ourselves.

The skillful salesman proceeds on the assumption that his words will be stopped at the door of the prospect’s mind and examined with more or less suspicion of their sincerity and truth.  Therefore the selling artist employs words principally for one purpose—­to communicate to the other man information about such facts as cannot be introduced to his consciousness otherwise.  Some facts can be told only in words.  But a master of the selling process uses as few words as possible to convey his meaning.  He depends on his suggestive tones more than on what he says.  He reenforces his speech with accompanying movements and muscular expressions, to get into the mind of the other man by suggestive action the true ideas behind the words used.