SALESMANSHIP IN PRINT

In 1904 John E. Kennedy sent a note to Albert Lasker, a young manager at the Chicago agency Lord & Thomas. It said, in effect, that he could tell Lasker what advertising is. Lasker hired him, and Kennedy’s answer became one of the best-known definitions in the business: advertising is “salesmanship in print” Reported.

Advertising’s founders thought like salesmen

Lasker hired Claude Hopkins a few years later. In Scientific Advertising, published in 1923, Hopkins made the same point at length. “The only purpose of advertising is to make sales,” he wrote. Treat an ad as a salesman and “force it to justify itself.” And the line this book is built on: “Advertising is multiplied salesmanship. It may appeal to thousands while the salesman talks to one” Published.

David Ogilvy came to advertising from selling. Before he wrote an ad, he sold AGA cooking stoves door to door in Scotland, and in 1935 wrote a manual for the company’s salesmen, The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker. Fortune’s editors later called it the best sales instruction manual ever written Reported. One of its rules would fit in any marketing plan: “Find out all you can about your prospects before you call on them” Published.

An ad is a salesman who talks to thousands and can’t hear any of them.

What changes when nobody’s there

If marketing is selling at scale, why can so few people do both? Because the salesman’s best tools depend on hearing the buyer: you notice when an answer didn’t land, reach for the proof this buyer needs, and ask for the next step when they’re ready. A page has to do all of that without hearing anything. Four things change.

1. The order is fixedA seller follows the buyer’s questions wherever they go. A page has to guess the order in which most readers will have them, and put the answers there.
2. The proof has to be loaded in advanceA seller chooses the case study for this buyer. A page has to carry the proof for its most common reader, in the place doubt arrives.
3. Objections are answered before they’re askedA seller hears “that’s expensive” and answers it. A reader who thinks it simply leaves.
4. There is one askA seller can say “then let’s start with a trial order.” A page with three calls to action has no one to explain which matters.

Why the two sides fight

In a 2006 Harvard Business Review article, Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy described the friction between the two functions in large companies. Part of it is economic, a fight over budget. Part is cultural: salespeople think marketers are “out of touch with what’s really going on with customers,” and marketers think salespeople are myopic, too focused on the customer in front of them Published. They sorted companies into four stages, from undefined (each side minds its own business and they meet only in a crisis) to integrated, where the boundaries blur and the two share systems and rewards.

Both complaints are true. The seller has rich evidence about one customer and none about the market; the marketer has thin evidence about everyone. In a founder-run business the war happens inside one head, and the founder who can only pitch, or only write, is missing half the evidence.

Each side makes the other better

• The sales call is the best copy research there is. It gives you the customer’s own words for the problem, the objections in the order they come up, the proof that moved them and the question they asked just before they said yes. No survey gets you that. Chapter 7 shows how to harvest it.
• Marketing is sales without the salesperson, so it has to answer the objections before they’re asked. Writing the page forces you to find the order, the proof and the one ask, and that discipline makes the next conversation tighter. Chapter 8 does the translation.

Do this

• Write down the last thing a buyer said before agreeing to buy, in a conversation you won. Then look for that sentence, or its answer, on your main page. If it isn’t there, you’ve found your first edit.