Inventing for Boys

by A. Frederick Collins

The second plan as outlined above is to run small two to ten line classified ads for agents offering to start them in the mail order business. See Fig. 100.

Your proposition to each prospective agent who replies is something like this: you will give him, provided he buys, for cash in advance, of course, one dozen, one gross, or a dozen gross of the product you manufacture, the exclusive territory of a city, a county, or several of them, or of an entire State as you choose and according to the quantity he buys.

Included in the price he pays, you furnish him with so many letter heads and envelopes with his name printed thereon as manufacturer’s agent; printed circulars or folders, a series of follow-up letters and whatever else is needed to start him in the mail order business except the list of names and the postage stamps he will use. It is up to him to get these accessories.

A Series of Follow-up Letters.—By a series of follow-up letters is meant that a number of different letters, say six, are written up in such a way that each one makes a stronger appeal to the consumer than the one he gets before.

Let’s say that your agent sends a circular describing the merits of your patent mailing box for eggs to an egg grower in the rural district and with it a letter stating how glad he would be to receive an order from him for a dozen mailing boxes, the price, etc.; if, now, in ten days’ time no reply is forth-coming the agent mails him a second letter, stating that he can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from him, et cetera and so on. If this brings no response the agent mails a third letter in another ten days saying that since he (the agent) has used several stamps in writing to him suppose that he (the egg grower) sits down and uses a stamp on him and so forth and e pluribus unum, as Artemus Ward used to say.

And so the letters are mailed until the series of six have been sent out at ten day intervals. The idea is that as the letters, each of which is a little stronger than the one before it, reach the egg grower with clocklike regularity the value of your patent mailing box for eggs will sink deeper and with more telling effect into his cranium and that somewhere between the first and the last letter he will conclude he had better order a dozen or more boxes.

If the sixth and last letter does not bring an order the agent may then conclude that the chickens are dead, or that the roosters are sleeping, or else that the egg-grower doesn’t want the mailing box and he knows that he doesn’t want it. At any rate it is time for the agent to quit wasting stamps on him.

Selling Through Sales Agents.—Turning now to big business one of the most successful ways now in vogue to sell goods is the one adopted by automobile manufacturers.

By this method the manufacturer sells his product to his own sales agents and these in turn sell them to the consumer. Both the manufacturer and his agents advertise, the former nationally, that is he tries to reach all the people, and the latter locally, that is in his own territory.