SERVICE
Why is it that of two salesmen working together in the same store, selling the same goods, at the same prices and under the same conditions, one regularly books twice as much business as the other? “Oh well,” someone says, “he has a following; he has friends who come in year after year and won’t buy from anyone else. He knows what they want, and all he has to do is to take the order. It’s a case of having them drop in his lap. The other man gets only the left-overs.”
“Simple enough,” he says, but is it quite as simple as he says it is? What has the one salesman to sell that the other doesn’t have?
It is that great, everlasting business builder—service. It is the salesman’s stock in trade, the thing he has to deliver to the customer, and the thing that stamps him either as a salesman or a mere “order taker.”
In the financial statement of one of the big New York stores is an item called good-will listed along with merchandise, stocks, cash and other property the business owns, and this item is valued at a million dollars. Every successful business enjoys a certain amount of good-will that may be reduced to a basis of dollars and cents. It is not unusual for a well-conducted business to have good-will actually worth several millions of dollars. And this is nothing more than a trade-following the store has built up as a result of satisfactory service given to the customers in the past. It is the same kind of trade-following the salesman must build up if he is steadily to increase his earnings, and it comes only through service—through changing an occasional customer into a steady one.