Retail Shoe Salesmanship

by George F. Hamilton; Frank Butterworth; H. T. Conner; A. H. Geuting

EXAGGERATION

Just as it is important for the salesman to develop positive, money-making ideas, it is necessary for him to guard against anything in his selling talk that will result to deaden the customer’s confidence. Lincoln very wisely said, with his original knack of expressing the point so that no one could miss it, that “you can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Ninety-nine per cent of the customers are in the class of people who may be fooled once but who make it their special business to guard against it the second time.

Exaggeration is one way of fooling the customer. There are times when a sale might be closed more quickly by stretching the truth, but the advantage to the salesman and the store cannot be lasting on such a basis. When the customer learns that he has been fooled, and in most cases he will find it out, his further business will very likely be lost forever. The customer has been given a just cause for grievance and it will be necessary to overcome his strong prejudice before he can be brought into the store again. He will never entirely forget the occurrence even though he might overlook it for the time being. Moreover, it will surely be revived in his mind at a later time upon any slight indication of what might seem to be an attempt at unfair treatment.

Exaggeration is largely a matter of habit. If the salesman allows himself to stretch a point today and he finds that it works, the chances are that he will try the same trick a second and a third time, until finally the exaggeration comes to him so naturally that he does not realize he is fooling the customer. On the other hand, it is a matter of habit also to cultivate honesty and square dealing. If the customer is given the true facts in the first place it means that there can be no come-back—that he will know what to expect of the goods he has bought and that he will respect the man who sold them, when he finds that they come up to his expectations.