Salesmanship is the business of the world; it is about all there is to the world of business. Enter the door of a successful wholesale or manufacturing house and you stand upon the threshold of an establishment represented by first-class salesmen. They are the steam –and a big part of the engine, too–that makes business […]

Since starting on the road many have asked me: “How can I get a job on the road?” Young men and old men have asked me this–clerks, stock boys, merchants and students. Even wives have asked me how to find places for their husbands. Let’s clear the ground of dead timber. Old men of any […]

The helping hand is often held out by the man on the road. Away from home he is dependent upon the good will of others; he frequently has done for him an act of kindness; he is ever ready to do for others a deed of friendship or charity. Road life trains the heart to […]

The man who believes that on every traveling man’s head should rest a dunce cap will some fine day get badly fooled if he continues to rub up against the drummer. The road is the biggest college in the world. Its classrooms are not confined within a few gray stone buildings with red slate roofs; […]

Salesmanship has already been defined as the art of overcoming obstacles, of turning defeat into victory by the use of tact and patience. Courtesy must become constitutional with the drummer and diplomacy must become second nature to him. All this may have a very commercial and politic ring, but its logic is beyond question. It […]

Many a bill of goods is sold on the road through the influence of the clerk. The traveling man who overlooks this point overlooks a strong one. The clerk is the one who gets next to the goods. He checks them off when they come in, keeps the dust off of them every day, sells […]

“Do I like cancellations? Well, I guess not!” said a furnishing goods friend, straightening up a little and lighting his cigar as a group of us sat around the radiator after supper one night in the Hoffman House. “I’ll tell you, boys, I’d rather keep company with a hobo, than with a merchant who will […]

Is not the salesman on the road who sells goods to one customer at one price and to another at another price, a thief? Is not the house which allows its salesman to do this an accomplice to the crime of theft? This is a hot shot, I know; but, if you are a salesman, […]

TACTICS IN SELLING–I. The man on the road is an army officer. His soldiers are his samples. His enemy is his competitor. He fights battles every day. The “spoils of war” is business. The traveling man must use tactics just the same as does the general. He may not have at stake the lives of […]

I sat with a group of friends around a table one evening not long ago, in one of the dining rooms of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. The dining room was done in dark stained oak, the waiters whispered to each other in foreign tongues, French and German; on the walls of the room […]

To hire and handle salesmen is the most important work of the head of the house. When a man goes out on the road to represent a firm, his traveling expenses alone are from five to twenty-five dollars a day, and sometimes even fifty. His salary is usually as much as his expenses, if not […]

A bunch of us sat in the Silver Grill of the Hotel Spokane where we could see the gold fish and the baby turtles swimming in the pool of the ferned grotto in the center of the room. This is one place toward which the heart of every traveling man who wanders in the far […]

Salesmen are told many things they should do; perhaps they ought to hear a few things they should not do. If there is one thing above all others that a salesman should observe, it is this: Don’t grouch! The surly salesman who goes around carrying with him a big chunk of London fog does himself […]

To win the customer’s good will is the aim of every successful salesman. “Ah, but how can I do this?” asks the new man. The ways must be as many as the men he meets. The dispositions of men are as varied as their looks. A kind word will win one man and a bluff […]

The credit man was the subject of our talk as a crowd of us sat, one Sunday afternoon, in the writing-room of the Palace Hotel at San Francisco. The big green palm in the center of the room cast, from its drooping and fronded branches, shadows upon the red rugs carpeting the stone floor. This […]

With all of his power of enduring disappointment and changing a shadow to a spot of sunshine, there yet come days of loneliness into the life of the commercial traveler–days when he cannot and will not break the spell. There is a sweet enchantment, anyway, about melancholy; ’tis then that the heart yearns for what […]