Your Salable Qualities
Your most salable quality may be dependability, rather than quick thinking. If this is the case, concentrate your salesmanship on making impressions of the true idea of your reliability. Your greatest success will be achieved in some field of service where dependableness is a primary essential. You may be naturally unfitted to make a star reporter, but peculiarly qualified to develop into the cashier of a bank.
Should you happen to be unattractive in features, your job is to transform your homeliness into a likable quality—not to try to make yourself appear handsome. If you are wholly inexperienced, that need not be a detriment to your success in the field you want to enter. When you have mastered the selling process, your very greenness can be presented before the mind of a prospective employer as the best of reasons for engaging you. You will be able to make yourself appear desirable because you are green in that field, and therefore have no wrong ideas to "unlearn."
Know All of Yourself
You can greatly improve your chances to get the job for which you are best adapted, if you use the reciprocal selling process employed by the professional salesman when he sells his services to a house. He meets the head of the concern as his man-equal, and does not just offer himself "for hire." Such a consciousness of your man-equality when you are face to face with a prospective employer can result only from certain, analytical knowledge of your best self, complemented by knowing how to sell the true idea of your particular desirability and worth.
Very likely you think you are seriously handicapped in many ways. Having made no detailed analysis of yourself from a salesman's view-point, you do not appreciate fully the number and the market value of the advantages you might have. Probably some of your best, most salable qualities are latent or but partly developed.
Chart Necessary
List your particular "goods of sale." Put down on a chart, not only the qualities you have now, but all the additional ones you feel capable of developing. Then you will realize vividly that you possess many abilities, some undeveloped yet, which are always needed in the world. You know that such qualities should be readily salable, to the mutual benefit of yourself and of buyers. You are learning the selling process in order to make certain that you can sell the best that is in you, as other men are selling themselves successfully.
Complete your chart by listing your various defects. Then study out ways to use even your particular faults differently than you have been handling them; so that they will help you, instead of being hindrances to your success. Think of some people you know, and of how they have turned their physical "liabilities" into "assets" of popularity.
The very first sales knowledge you need is of exactly what you have to sell. You cannot see all of yourself, your good and bad points—yourself as you are, and as you might be—unless you make a detailed chart of your "goods of sale." One of the most important immediate effects of such a self-analysis will be increased self-respect. Your handicaps will shrink, and the peculiar advantages you have will grow before your eyes. You should feel new confidence in your own ability.