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Salesmen’s Don’ts
by
“I had a long and interesting talk with that gentleman. He gave me his card and when I saw his name I recognized that he was a noted lecturer.”
“Well, what good did that do you?” said one of the boys who was not far-seeing.
“Good? Why that man asked me to come to his home. There I met one of his sons who was an advertising man for a very large firm in Galveston. He, in turn, introduced me to the buyer in his store and put in a good word with him for me. I had never been able to really get the buyer’s attention before this time but this led me into a good account. You know, I don’t care anything for introductions where I can get at a man without them. I’d rather approach a man myself straight out than to have any one introduce me to him, but there are cases where you really cannot get at a man without some outside influence. This was a case where it did me good.”
But, with all this, don’t depend upon your old friends!
A salesman’s friends feel that when he approaches them he does so because they are his friends, and not because he has goods to sell that have value. They will not take the same interest in his merchandise that they will in that of a stranger. They will give him, it is true, complimentary orders, charity-bird bills, but these are not the kind that count. Every old man on the road will tell you that he has lost many customers by making personal friends of them. No man, no matter how warm a friend his customer may be, should fail, when he does business with him, to give him to understand that the goods he is getting are worth the money that he pays for them. This will make a business friendship built upon confidence, and the business friend may afterward become the personal friend. A personal friendship will often follow a business friendship but business friendship will not always follow personal regard. Every man on the road has on his order book the names of a few who are exceptions to this rule. He values these friends, because the general rule of the road is: “Make a personal friend–lose a customer!” Don’t switch lines!
The man who has a good house should never leave it unless he goes with one that he knows to be much better and with one that will assure him of a good salary for a long time.
Even then, a man often makes a mistake to his sorrow. He will find that many whom he has thought his personal friends are merely his business friends; that they have bought goods from him because they have liked the goods he sold. It is better for a man to try to improve the line he carries–even though it may not suit him perfectly–than to try his luck with another one. Merchants are conservative. They never put in a line of goods unless it strikes them as being better than the one that they are carrying, and when they have once established a line of goods that suits them, and when they have built a credit with a certain wholesale house, they do not like to fly around because the minute that they switch from one brand of goods that they are carrying to another, the old goods have become to them mere job lots, while if they continued to fill in upon a certain brand, the old stock would remain just as valuable as the new.
One of my old friends had a strong personality but was a noted changer. He is one of the best salesmen on the road but he has always changed himself out. He was a shoe man. I met him one day as he was leaving Lincoln, Nebraska. “Well, Andy,” said I, “I guess you got a good bill from your old friend here.”