FINAL EMPHASIS FOR ALERT SALESPERSONS
Since we are working in a free country which now contains more than 40,000 retail furniture outlets, it should be clear that we cannot make anyone buy anything. Selling continues to be chiefly a matter of people, not of goods in stock; for example, we find one dealer, operating with a small stock in a small town, complaining that all the good business goes to the city; while a second dealer, operating with a similar stock in a similar trading area, allows almost nothing to get away from him. The latter makes it his business to know what is going on in his community; goes out after an order well in advance of the time the goods will be needed; learns what is required; knows how to sell it; and where and how to secure it. The main difference is in the men, not in conditions.
BE ALERT FOR OPPORTUNITIES
The able salesperson is energetic, stout-hearted, and enthusiastic. He never permits himself even during periods of slow business to fall into the dangerous habit of assuming that every customer will be reluctant and exacting, and every sale difficult. He expects a fair percentage of quick and easy sales, and is prepared to seize every opportunity to make them.
Having confidence in himself, his store, and his merchandise, he works on the assumption that most of the people who enter a furniture store are definitely interested in an immediate or later purchase of merchandise to suit their particular needs and tastes. He further assumes that he will be able to learn those needs and tastes, find in his stock the right merchandise to satisfy them, and present the advantages of this merchandise in a clear and convincing way; and that when they are so presented, the customer will buy. This assumption may not always be valid; but it never fails to give him confidence and driving power, and is the necessary basis of consistently successful salesmanship.
The able salesperson never forgets that his customer will not buy until she is satisfied and convinced, however attractive his merchandise, low his prices, or logically complete his demonstration. He knows that she may have prejudices which are not easy to discover, or bits of information or misinformation which may cause her to question or distrust what he tells her, and thus to impede or wreck the sale.
ORDERLY PRESENTATION OF MERCHANDISE
One may never be certain which method and selling appeal will cause any particular individual to buy. Accordingly the salesperson will be prepared to follow an ordered procedure which will in theory exhaust all the possibilities. The important factors may be emphasized in the following order:
1. Pleasing appearance (design, coloring, materials, finish).
2. Personal and decorative suitability (size, convenience, emotional effect, prestige value).
3. Sentimental appeal (style, historical, or social associations, prestige value).
4. Quality (materials, construction, finish, established service record, manufacturer's reputation, store's reputation or guarantee).
5. Price (in relation both to the customer's means and spending habits, and to the sum total of values provided by all other factors).
CLOSE OF SALE SHOULD COME LOGICALLY
Ordinarily the charted sale will develop in this order:
1. Elimination of possible alternatives and concentration upon merchandise to be sold.
2. Elimination of resistances through answering spoken or unspoken objections.
3. Final demonstration of appearance, suitability, and values.
4. Direct suggestion to buy, when suggestion is necessary.
However, closing a sale is not a separate operation, but rather the natural and logical culmination of a continuous process, planned from the beginning to help the customer buy what she wants or needs. Thus the difficulties of closing a sale often are the result of inept work in the earlier stages. Good salesmanship is far less a matter of overcoming these difficulties than of foreseeing them at the beginning of a sale, and thus making it impossible for them to arise at the end.
For this kind of salesmanship we require:
1. A knowledge of people and the way their minds habitually work.
2. A thorough knowledge of home furnishing merchandise in general, and our own in particular.
3. A sound working knowledge of the principles and practice of the home-furnishing art; and
4. Planned procedure in showing our goods and in closing sales.
Give a chemist a bottle of colorless liquid containing three or four metals in solution, and in an hour or less he will tell you exactly what those metals are. He doesn't guess, but puts the solution through an ordered series of reactions which gradually exhaust all the possibilities.
Making a sale is roughly an analogous process. In dealing with a long succession of unknown customers we cannot possibly guess just which procedures will satisfy any one customer's tastes and personal, decorative, and financial requirements. Human beings never react with the exactness of chemical combinations, but their reactions may be relied upon to make planned selling enormously more profitable than use of any combination of haphazard methods yet devised.