Background on Newsell
It has been the sacred belief of the American selling profession ever since the subject was first written about, that the primary job of the salesperson is to: Close the sale! Yet newsell says: You cannot close the sale! This revolutionary insight has allowed newsell to beat oldsell profit-results hands down, every time, in any market and with any product or service. Sometimes newsell has beaten oldsell results by a ten times better return on investment. The names newsell and oldsell describe the strategy they do not describe the individual.
Today, many American entrepreneurs still use oldsell and there are just as many Americans who do not use oldsell at all. There are also many Australian entrepreneurs who still prefer to use oldsell while others choose to use newsell.
In 1980, Cambridge Professor Edward de Bono was Michael’s tutor for the world’s first PhD in Lateral Thinking in which he proposed the Theory of Newsell.
At the commencement of the project Professor Edward de Bono wrote (17 August, 1978): Your application of the principles and attitudes of lateral thinking to selling in your Newsell approach is, to me, an interesting and powerful approach to an important area. What particularly interests me is your proposal to test theoretical constructs in a very practical manner in your field work.
His External Examiner was Professor George Gallup, the inventor of market research and public opinion polling at Princeton. On the successful completion of the Newsell project involving 70,000 employees at 24 New York City hospitals,
At the completion of the project Professor George Gallup wrote: Newsell is the first new strategy for selling in fifty years. You have presented a new approach to a very old subject with proof that your ideas do work. I find some parallels in your thoughts about selling and my own views on how advertising works. … What you are doing in teaching people to think may be the most important thing going on in the world.