You as the salesperson should try to cultivate a pleasant and interesting voice. It is as essential to your success as it is to the success of a public speaker. This does not mean that it is necessary for every successful salesperson to have a beautiful, well-modulated tone, but it does mean that you must study the question of using the voice effectively. You must speak clearly and distinctly. You must avoid giving offense by using a rasping, quarrelsome tone. You must endeavor to make your voice sound like the voice of a cultured person. You must study your language so that errors of grammar, blasphemy, and other things that offend the ear will not creep in where they are likely to injure your cause.

If the product you are selling is an office machine, you must remember that the noise made by the machine is likely to be an important consideration. Printers, for instance, are not noiseless machines, but some printers sell far more rapidly than others because the maker had sense enough to give some consideration to this point.

There are certain products, such as musical instruments, in which the sound produced is the important feature of the product. Here, of course, the sense of hearing becomes the chief factor.

Remember, too, that you must exercise your own sense of hearing, through attention, so that nothing important that is said will escape you own attention.

The ear is entirely different from the eye in the method whereby it receives impressions and the speed with which those impressions are transmitted.

You may see the light of a star many miles away in a flash, but no ordinary sound could travel that distance under any circumstances and if it could it would take many years to make the journey.

You have noticed that you can see the smoke of a gun a great distance away, while it takes some seconds for the report of the gun to reach your ears.

Sound waves travel through the air and strike upon the delicate organism of the ear-drum, and by some remarkable process we can tell the direction from which the sound comes, except when it is interfered with by the peculiar shape of surrounding walls or hillsides.

Exercises for the Ear

Exercise One. Exactness

Select any one sound and thoroughly analyze it. Take a note of music or the clang of a factory hammer. Determine its pitch as accurately as you can; also its volume, its carrying power, its resonance, etc.

Describe it orally and on paper at the time you hear it, then at a later time. As you repeat the exercise each day, notice how your power to describe the sound has increased with your ability to analyze it.

A very wonderful illustration of how a single sound can be described with almost infinite variations and increasing power is the way the baying of a hound is described by Conan Doyle in “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The description reveals a power of observation that is almost supernatural.

Exercise Two. Quickness

It is difficult to devise an exercise in ear-quickness that can be experimented with in the quiet of your own home. For mechanics and others who work with and around machinery it is not difficult to find an opportunity to listen to some piece of machinery that is out of order to see how quickly the cause of the disturbance can be located. Among children a game is often played in which all of the children but one hide behind various objects, bobbing their heads up and shouting “Here!” at which time the one who is “it” is supposed to turn and see them before they can get their heads out of sight.

Exercise Three. Range

Place a watch on one side of the room and stand on the other. Approach the watch slowly and notice the distance at which you first hear it ticking. Repeat daily with the same watch in the same room until you have become able to hear it at a great distance.

Perform the same experiment with the right ear alone by stopping up the left ear, and with the left ear by stopping up the right ear.

Perform the same experiment by standing facing the watch, by standing with your left ear to the watch, and by standing with your right ear to the watch.

Exercise Four. Direction

Go into a dark room in which someone else has placed a watch and listen until you hear it. Try to discover its exact location and to reach it with a single motion without feeling for it.

Have someone call you from various parts of a house or from various directions out doors and learn to locate by sound the exact spot where the person is standing. Study the influence of breezes, of the structure of walls of buildings, of the typography of the land, etc., in this exercise.

Listen carefully to the sound of a distant church bell. See if you can locate the direction of the bell and the distance away. Remember to experiment with the same bell five different days.

Exercise Five. Capacity

In many occupations the capacity of hearing is very important. How many different sounds can you now hear in the room where you are sitting? In the office where you are employed? On a city street? In a cafe where you are seated, how many voices can you hear of people in conversation? If you are a musician, how many different notes can you detect in a given chord of music?

Listen in the morning to the sounds of birds, bells, and animals of different kinds, and analyze these sounds.

An interesting exercise can be performed in the evening in a city. Give yourself sixty seconds to listen to the various sounds you hear and make note of them. Improvement in the ability to recognize a vast number of sounds will be very rapid. You will notice it distinctly on the sixth day. In analyzing the sound of a passing street car, for instance, do not say simply, “a passing street car.” Say, “the grinding of wheels, the bounding of a heavy car, the singing of a trolley, the ringing up of a fare, the calling of a street, etc.”

Exercise Six. Emotional Use of the Ear

Listen to someone talking and analyze his emotions. Is he tired, happy, discouraged, or hopeful? Is it a man or a woman? Is it a rich voice or a thin voice? Then make your own voice express sorrow, weariness, joy, pain, discouragement, and hope. Your ear will direct your throat until the desired result is attained.

For the salesperson, this is one of the most important exercises given. The voice is capable of almost immeasurable improvement and the ear is the sense organ through which this improvement is to be made. Deaf people who talk cannot acquire rich, beautiful tones, because the ear is not directing the process.

Exercise Seven. Selection of Desired Sound

In a multitude of sounds select a lesser sound and describe it to yourself until you become thoroughly familiar with it. Notice each day how much more easily you pick out that sound than you did the day before.

As an exercise in attention call the sound into your consciousness and then shut it out by calling into your consciousness some other sound. Then go back to the original sound. Notice the difficulty or ease with which you make the transition from one sound to another.

In many businesses the selection of the desired sound is very important. In the Stock Exchange, where people are shouting at the top of their voices, the selection of the sound you are listening for is essential. A mother with a sick child can sleep peacefully surrounded by a noise, but a single cry from the sick child will awaken her, just as an alarm clock will awaken the person who has trained himself to respond to it.

Exercise Eight. Acuteness

This is similar to exercise seven for the eye. Sit at ease listening vaguely to all the sounds that come to you. Gradually one of them will attain dominance without your knowing which one it is. Then suddenly determine to fasten your mind on that sound. Now listen eagerly for it, centering your whole mind upon it, and notice what a difference comes into the hearing of it.

Read my previous posts:

- Using the Five Senses in Selling

- The Sense of Sight in Selling

- The Sense of Sight in Selling – part 2

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