Master Pitchmen & Snake Oil Salesmen

Let's talk about Ron.

If you’re interested in learning how to sell a product, you owe it to yourself to know Ron Popeil. Ron is a master pitchman best known for late night infomercials selling kitchen products. Countertop rotisserie chickens, vegetable chopping gadgets, and more amusingly a spraycan men can use to conceal their bald spots.

To many, “Set it and forget it” was the battlecry of the Snake Oil Salesman. There’s a long history of how the expression came to life, but essentially a Snake Oil Salesman is a cultural meme describing a vendor who knowingly hawks a bad product with outrageously overstated claims about the benefits of a product.

Ron was most definitely not a Snake Oil Salesman. - he’s actually a very ethical salesman. His products are still on the market collecting amazon reviews as we speak. The products do exactly what Ron said they would, you need only “Set it and forget it.”

So why bring it up?

Master Pitchmen & Snake Oil Salesmen are actually two sides of the same coin. Both have an incredible ability to speak to a crowd of people and get them excited enough about a product that they will make a purchase.

Copywriting is a distillation of sales techniques. Before all the sales books and trainings, some young salesperson that needed to earn a living had enough persistence to figures out how to sell some product or another through trial and error.

Eventually they get to the point where they can make a pitch that’s fairly successful and consistent. Sooner or later two salesmen talk and start trading ideas, those ideas spread, and copywriters eventually gather them all up, write them down and use them to sell in print.

Ron wasn’t really an infomercial guy. His show - and it’s fair to call it a show - was a recording of what he actually did in stores. Set up a display in a place where there’s an audience (a good example being a department store) and start a performance. He would get the attention of the consumers passing by with some showmanship, and draw them into a story and a presentation.

These actually still exist. You can catch them in malls sometimes - a crowd of people gathered around a stage watching a pitch/performance. It engaged their emotions enough to get customers to stick around (and many didn’t) and took them through the sales pitch. It’s actually very similar to the techniques buskers and professional street performers use.

The beauty of this is that it’s live feedback.

The salesperson - as they’re learning and crafting the pitch - gets real time feedback on what the audience responds to. If something consistently doesn’t work, it gets dropped and a new idea takes it’s place.

Until eventually, the salesperson figure out something that works for the audience.

This is a little different than a salesman who works with one client at a time. Ron was good at figuring out how to craft a sales pitch for an audience of people. Once he did that, it was a matter of setting up the same conditions in a television studio, recording it, and putting out into the world.

It’s direct response in it’s finest. You know immediately if the pitch works or not because if it does, you get orders right away. If it doesn’t, you get no response.

Ron got great at doing this with all sorts of products. All the elements of sales copy we use today can be directly attributed to guys like him.