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Concerning Credit Men
by
“Lucky boy! Lucky boy!” spoke up the clothing man in his big, heavy voice.
“Yes, you bet,” chimed in the others.
“It’s a strange thing to me,” chimed in the clothing man, “that credit men do not exercise more common sense. Now, there is one way, and just one way, in which a credit department can be properly conducted. The credit man and the man on the road must work in double harness and pull together. The salesman should know everything that is going on between his house and his customer. And when it comes to the scratch, his judgment is the judgment that should prevail when any matter of credits is to be decided upon. The salesman should have a copy of every letter that his customer writes his house, and he should be sent a duplicate of every line that the house writes to the customer. He should be kept posted as to the amount of shipment the house makes, and he should be notified whenever the customer makes a remittance. This puts the salesman in position to know how much to sell his customer, and also when to mark the new bill he sells for shipment. At the time of making the sale, it is very easy for the man on the road to say to his customer, ‘Now look here, friend, as you haven’t been quite able to meet your past obligations promptly, suppose that we stand off this shipment for a little while and give you a chance to get out of the hole. I don’t want to bend your back with a big load of debt.’ For saying this, the customer will thank his salesman; but the house cannot write the letter and say this same thing without making a customer hot.
“And another thing: If a salesman has shown himself strictly square in his recommendations, the salesman’s recommendations regarding a shipment should be followed. The salesman is the man–and the one man –who can tell whether his customer is playing ball or attending to business. Now, for example, not a great while ago, I saw a merchant that one big firm in this country thinks is strictly good, playing billiards on the Saturday before Christmas. If there is any time on earth when a retail merchant should be in his store, it is on this day, but here was this man, away from his store and up at the hotel, guzzling high balls and punching ivory. That thing alone would have been enough to queer him with me and if I had been selling him and he was not meeting his bills promptly, I should simply tell the house to cut him off.
“The salesman also knows how much business a man is doing,–whether it is a credit business and all the other significant details. The merchant will take the traveling man that he buys goods from, and throw his books and his heart and everything wide open, and tell him how he stands. Even if he is in a little hole of some kind, it is of the traveling man that he asks advice as to how to get out.
“Again, the traveling man knows all about the trade conditions in his customer’s town; whether there has been a good crop and prices high; whether the pay roll is keeping up or not; whether there is some new enterprise going to start that will put on more men and boom things. He knows all about these things, and he is on the spot and has a personal interest in finding out about them, if he is honest, and most salesmen are. It is to his interest to be so. And he can give information to the credit department that nobody else can.
“The report of a salesman to his firm is worth forty times as much as these little printed slips that have been sent in by some ninny, numskull reporter for a commercial agency. These fellows, before they go around soliciting reports from merchants, have usually been lily- fingered office boys who have never been in a place where a man can learn much common sense until they have grown too old to get on to things that have come in their way.”