The sense of taste is important in case of groceries, drinks, and other things the sale of which depends materially upon the taste. In other cases it can’t have much to do with the salesperson’s business, if anything.

Taste is a very much misunderstood sense. The tongue not only tastes, but it also feels, and many of the impressions that we consider taste are not taste at all, but feeling. Our senses of sight and smell are also often confused with our sense of taste.

The tastes are often classified as follows: sweet, salt, sour, and bitter. The cultivation of the sense of taste is of great importance commercially only to a few people, professional tasters of tea, tobacco, liquor, drugs, and groceries. To all other people it has no special commercial value, but is of great importance in the matter of digestion. The person who has accustomed his taste to strong seasonings or strong liquors, has, to that  extent, disqualified himself from using this beneficent sense as a protection and guide in eating and drinking.

Two exercises only are suggested, the second of which is of greatest importance.

Exercises for the Taste

Exercise One: Quality

Experiment with flavors, seasoning, and spices taken from your kitchen, until you are able to identify them.

Exercise Two: Practical Daily Exercise

Select some food of which you are fond and chew it slowly and thoughtfully, analyzing it until you are able to determine approximately what per cent of it is sweet, salt, sour, or bitter. Try eating slowly so that the food will become thoroughly chewed and mixed with saliva before being swallowed, and giving thought to the delightful taste of food while this process is going on. You will be surprised to find how pleasurable it is to eat simply a bit of bread and butter if you eat it in this thoughtful, careful way, thoroughly determined to get the utmost possible enjoyment from the taste. You  will require from one-third to one-half the quantity of food you formerly required and will be surprised to find how pleasant the process of eating really is.

Eating is one of the most important things we do, and taste is one of the most significant factors in proper eating. This exercise will tend greatly to develop your love for dishes that you are already like, and, more than that, it will enable you to learn to eat many things which you are not eating today.

Simply take a mouthful of the food you do not like, if it is known to be a healthful food, and chew it slowly and thoughtfully, analyzing it. You will discover that one of the chief reasons for our disliking certain foods is that we have never given them a trial sufficient to discover what qualities to expect in them. We therefore refuge to eat them, or we swallow them with loathing, which is sure to be bad for the digestion.

Smell

It should be unnecessary to state that the salesperson should be very careful of the way his clothing smells, but there are many salespeople who are careless in this regard. People are much more particular about this than we usually think they are. For a person’s clothing or his breath to reek of some obnoxious odor, is very damaging to his personal influence. Some salespeople have breath so offensive as to cause the loss of considerable business. Customers simply refuse to talk to them.

In the case of certain products, such as perfumery, the sense of smell is the chief factor in the sale.

Smell, like taste, has very little commercial value, except to those who use it professionally, as in the smelling of flowers, drugs, and groceries. Experts in smelling, like experts in tasting, frequently draw very high salaries, but for the ordinary person the major value of this sense consists in the added pleasure in life that its exercise gives. Smell is not so important as the other senses, but it is the sense that most powerfully appeals to the memory.

Exercises in Smell

Exercise One: Quality

Select a number of different flowers and vegetables that are convenient. Give yourself three seconds to smell of each one of, say twenty, different varieties. Then with the eyes blindfolded see if you can designate the flower or vegetable by the odor.

Exercise Two

Select a given flower or perfume, place it in a room devoid of other odors and measure the distance at which you can perceive the presence of the flower; or have some one else select one of several flowers with the odors of which you are familiar, and see at what distance you can determine which it is.

As in previous exercises, repeat daily for five days and notice your improvement on the sixth day.

About the Exercises for All Five Senses

It is strongly recommended that you devote from twenty to thirty minutes per day for one week to all previous exercises (read my previous posts about the five senses) in the cultivation of the five senses. You may not be able to see clearly before making these experiments what effect they will have upon the general awareness of your sense perceptions. After you perform them all, however, you will be in a position to judge of the value that they will be to you.

Read my previous posts:

- Using the Five Senses in Selling

- The Sense of Sight in Selling

- The Sense of Sight in Selling – part 2

- Hearing in Selling

- Touch in Selling

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