I found it in:
- 'Psycho-Cybernetics', by Maxwell Maltz, 1960, Pocket Books.
Hope is useful!
I'll allow the author to explain it with his voice:
"-In his book, How to Make $25,000 a Year Selling*, Charles B. Roth tells how a group of salesmen in Detroit who tried a new idea increased their sales 100 per cent. Another group in New York increased their sales by 150%. And individual sales men, using the same idea, have increased their sales up to 400%."(Charles B. Roth, 'How to Make $25,000 a Year Selling', Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, Inc.)
"And what is this magic that accomplishes so much for sales men?
It is something called role-playing, and you should know about it, because if you let it, it may help you to double your sales.
What is role-playing?
Well, it is simply imagining** yourself in various sales situations, then solving them in your mind, until you know what to say and what to do whenever the situation comes up in real life.
It is what is called on the football field 'skull practice'.
The reason why it accomplishes so much is that selling is a matter of situations. One is created every time you talk to a customer. He says something or raises an objection. If you always know how to counter what he says or answer his question or handle the objection, you make sales...
A role playing salesman, at night when he is alone, will create these situations. He will imagine the prospect throuwing the wildest kind of courves at him. Then he will work out the best answer for them.
No matter what the situation is, you can prepare for it beforehand by means of imagining yourself and your prospect face to face while he is raising objections and creating problems and you are hanlding them properly."
*I know, but the book was written around the 1960s.
**May I expand on this: imagining can be potentialized when you are able not just seeing images or better, watching movies but, listening to the conversation. The more rich the situation is, the more it has not just images, but sounds and feelings, the more useful will be.
