In my previous post “Using the Five Senses in Selling” I was talking about how to train your senses to be able to influence the mind of the buyer.

In selling products, a strong appeal may be made to the sense of sight. The products displayed must be clean, attractive to the eye, and well arranged for display. Dirty, messy samples are likely to do the salesperson more harm than good.

The importance of this is well illustrated in the sale of expensive and valuable products, such as jewelry, in which great care is taken to make an attractive display. But this should not be confined to expensive articles only. Even the cheapest, most inferior product should be displayed as attractively as the salesperson knows how.

You should learn that the personal impression that you create depends largely upon the same thing. You must be so dressed and groomed that you can’t fail to make a pleasant impression. You must have an agreeable expression upon your face, and on the other hand you must not overdo matters by being over-dressed or hypocritically polite.

You should not only influence the buyer through the sense of sight, but you must cultivate your own sense of sight in such a positive way as to make careful observations of what you see.

The eye is in many respects the most wonderful of the senses. With a single glance it can follow the course of a shooting star for millions of miles and with a single glance, even without a microscope, it can see objects so small that all the other senses would be incapable of perceiving them. Millions of objects that can be neither heard, felt, tasted, nor smelled can be plainly seen.

The eye is the window of the soul. It receives a far greater multitude of impressions than any other sense organ except touch and gives out in due proportion a large variety of emotions.

Exercises for the Eye

In these and all following exercises the following rule applies: They must be repeated daily for minimum five days to get valuable result, and after that you can repeat it as long as you get good results.

Exercise One: Exactness

To improve your exactness, select one object before you, a book, a chair, or a tree. Look at it thoroughly for several minutes, not allowing the mind to wander. How long is it? How deep? What color? What shape is it? What are its peculiarities? Close your eyes and see if you can recall each one of these points. Describe it orally. If you are skillful with a pencil, draw it.

Leave it and at the end of the day recall and describe it.

On the next day return to it and make further observations. See what you missed the day before.

No matter how simple the object is, go into the smallest details in this exercise. Repeat it daily and, by the end of the fifth day, you will be surprised at what you failed to see on the first day.

Exercise Two: Quickness

The following exercise is to cultivate the speed with which you can use the eye. Enter an unfamiliar room, and give yourself precisely ten seconds to glance around it, noting all the objects you see; or have a group of objects placed on a table. Leave the room and repeat them from memory or, better still, write them on a piece of paper.

Repeat daily for five days and then on the sixth day try the same experiment in a different room with different objects and note the improvement in your ability.

The same experiment can be performed in the matter of counting a large number of objects all similar, as for instance, a handful of marbles, or matches, to be counted with a single glance occupying less than a second. You will notice an increasing ability to perceive an increasing number at a single glance as you proceed with the exercise.

Another variation of the same exercise is to take a brisk walk around a block and at the end of it enumerate the various objects that you have seen, not counting houses, trees, and other common objects.

Exercise Three: Range of Vision

Some people are more far-sighted than others and you can’t compare yourself with other people, but you can compare yourself today with yourself tomorrow, in the following exercises:

Stand on an elevation where you can see a considerable distance, say half a mile, and note how many objects you can see at that distance. Repeat at the same spot for five days and select a different spot for the sixth day.

Any marked improvement along this line will require a much longer time than in exercises one and two, but it is well known that sailors who are accustomed to see long distances on the water and others whose occupations require much improvement in vision can, in the course of a few years, attain a perfection that is really amazing.

A good variation of this exercise is to increase the distance each day between yourself and the object that you select, measuring the improvement in your range of vision by the distance you stand away from the object.

Next time:

• Exercise Four: Capacity of Vision
• Exercise Five: Force of Gaze
• Exercise Six: Emotional Use of the Eye
• Exercise Seven: Selection of the Desired Object

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