The Book of Business Etiquette

by Nella Braddy Henney

Among men, “picking up” acquaintances on a train or boat is allowable if it comes about in a natural way, but there are men who object to it. Many business men do not discontinue their work because they are traveling. Portable typewriters, secretaries, the telegraph and other means of swift communication have made it possible for them to accomplish almost as much as if they were in the office back home. Such men do not like to be interrupted, and if a garrulous or an intrusive person approaches it is within the bounds of courtesy to turn him aside. Generally, however, there is a comradery of the road, a sort of good fellowship among voyagers which lets down ordinary bars, and the men who like to rest as they travel find it highly diverting and interesting to talk with other men from various parts of the country. This holds true in hotels, especially in the commercial hotels, where traveling men foregather to meet their customers and transact their business, and in hotels in small places where the possibilities for amusement are limited and the people have to depend on one another for entertainment. But there are limits. No man should ever thrust himself upon another and it is almost an iron clad rule that he should never “pick up” women acquaintances when traveling. It is permissible to talk with them, but not to annoy them with personal attentions nor to place them under obligation by paying their bills. If a man and a woman who are traveling on the same train fall into conversation and go into the dining car together, each one should pay his or her own check, or if he insists upon paying at the table she should insist upon settling afterwards. In hotels also this is essentially true.

Hotels are judged more by the people who come to them than by anything else. The guests indicate the quality of the service, and for this reason, most hotels prefer that they be gentlemen. There is an atmosphere about a first-class hotel that frightens away second-rate people. Most places have standards and many a man has been turned away even when there was an empty room because the management did not like his looks.

Tipping is one of the most vexatious petty problems with which a traveler is confronted. It is an undemocratic custom which every sensible man deplores but sees no way around. Waiters, porters, and other functionaries who are in positions to receive tips draw very small salaries, if any. They depend upon the generosity of the public they serve. The system may be all wrong (we believe it is) but it means bread and butter to those who live by it, and it is only just, as matters are now arranged, for the traveler to pay. It is foolish to tip extravagantly or to tip every pirate who performs even the most trifling service, but a small fee, especially if the service has been good, is a courtesy not to be forgotten.

Tipping originally grew out of kindness. The knight who had received special attention at the hands of his squire expressed his gratitude by a special reward. The word “gratuity” itself indicates that the little gift was once simply a spontaneous act of thoughtfulness. It has degenerated into a perfunctory habit, but it should not be so. Excellent service deserves a recompense just as slip-shod service does not. And no one has a right to spoil a waiter (or any one else) by tipping him for inefficient work. In hotels and restaurants the standard fee is ten per cent of the bill.

Regular travelling of any kind even under favorable circumstances is a great wear and tear on the disposition. Commuters who go in and out of town every day are a notoriously hag-ridden lot, and the men who go on the road are not much better. But there is one enormous difference. It is the privilege of the commuter to growl as much as he likes about the discomforts of the road and the stupidity of the men who make up the time tables, but travelling men—we are speaking of salesmen especially—can never indulge in the luxury of a grouch. One of the biggest parts of his job is to keep cheerful all the time and that in itself is no small task. (Try it and see.) A farmer can wear a frown as heavy as a summer thunder cloud and the potatoes will grow just the same; a mechanic can swear at the automobile he is putting into shape (a very impolite thing to do even when there is no one but the machine to hear), and the bolts and screws will hold just as fast; a lawyer can knit his brows over his brief case and come to his solution just as quickly as if he sat grinning at it, but the salesman must smile, smile, smile. The season may be dull, the crops may be bad, there may be strikes, lockouts, depressions and deflations, unemployment—it makes no difference—he must keep cheerful. It is the courtesy of salesmanship, and it is this quality more than any other that makes selling a young man's job—we do not mean in years, but in spirit—an old one could not stand it.

In the good old days when the country was young and everybody, from all accounts we can gather, was happy, salesmen in the present sense of the term were almost unknown. There were peddlers, characters as picturesque as gipsies, who travelled about the country preying chiefly on the farmers. Often they spent the night—hotel accommodations were few and houses were far apart—and entertained the family with lively tales of life on the road. Next morning they gave the children trifling presents, swindled the farmer out of several dollars and made themselves generally agreeable. The farmer took it all in good part and looked forward with pleasure to the next visit. The peddlers came in pairs then, like snakes, but they were for the most part welcome and there was genuine regret when they became things of the past like top-buggies and Prince Albert coats.

After the peddler came the drummer, a rough, noisy chap, as his name indicates, harmless enough, but economically not much more significant than the peddler. He stayed in the business district where he was tolerated with good-natured indulgence. He was less objectionable than the man who followed him, the agent. He was (and is) a house-to-house and office-to-office canvasser and a general nuisance. He sold everything from books to life insurance, from patent potato peelers to opera glasses. He still survives, but not in large numbers, for his work, like that of the peddler and the drummer, has been swallowed up by the salesman.

The rewards which modern salesmanship holds out to those who succeed at it are so large that the field has attracted all kinds of men, highly efficient ones who love the game for its own sake, grossly incompetent ones who, having failed at something else, have decided to try this, and adventurers who believe they see in it a chance to get rich quick. The teachers of salesmanship tell us that we are all selling something, even when there is no visible product. The worker, according to them, is selling his services just as the salesman is selling goods. It may be true, but we all could not (and it is a blessing) go out and sell things in the ordinary sense in which we use the word. Some of us have to be producers. But the salesman's work is important. We do not discredit it.

Salesmanship is built on faith. A man must believe in his product and then must make other people believe in it as firmly as he does. So devoted are some salesmen to their work that it is difficult to tell whether they consider their calling a trade, a profession, a science, or a religion. Sometimes it is all four. Sometimes it goes beyond them and becomes a kind of mesmerism in which the salesman uses a sort of hypnotic process (which is simply the result of being over-anxious to sell) to persuade the prospect that he cannot wait another day before buying the particular article that the salesman is distributing. The article may be stocks and bonds, wash cloths, soap, or hair nets. It makes no difference, but he must be filled with enthusiasm and must be able to pass it along. And this very virtue which is the foundation of successful salesmanship is likely to lead the salesman into gross rudeness. For the man who is selling is so eager and so earnest that he forgets that the man who is buying may have his own ideas on the subject.

The first step in salesmanship is to acquire a thorough knowledge of the product. The next is to gain access to the man who is to buy it. This is not always easy. Business men have been annoyed so much by agents that they have had to erect barriers, in many instances almost impenetrable ones. It is especially difficult in big cities where the pressure is heavy, but most worth while business men have learned the value of contact with the world outside and are willing to give almost any man an interview if he can show a valid reason why he should have it. Whether he gets a second interview or not depends upon how he handled the first one.