Persistent Effort After Prospecting
This man was known to be unapproachable. So, instead of attempting to interview him, the elevator boy prospected to discover his characteristics. He found out exactly what qualities were most likely to please his intended employer. Then he cultivated the tone, manner, and habits of action that he felt certain would impress the difficult prospect most favorably. It took the resolute elevator boy nearly a year of continual, skillful work to make the big business man notice him and distinguish him from the other elevator boys. Six months more were required to develop the big man's attention into thorough interest. But at the end of a year and a half of faithful prospecting, the ambitious youth gained his selected, self-created opportunity to succeed. There was no stopping him after he got his start. In less than a decade he had sold his qualifications so successfully to a group of powerful financiers that he, too, had become a multi-millionaire.
This illustration of persistent effort to gain a desired chance should help to keep you from becoming discouraged about your prospects for success. Bear in mind the old, familiar motto, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." Stick to your prospecting when you know you are on the right lead. It has been estimated that the busy bee inserts its proboscis into flowers 3,600,000 times to obtain a single pound of honey. But the bee is the only insect, remember, that lives on honey.
No Poor Territory For Success
The poor salesman is apt to complain that his territory is poor. The good salesman makes any territory good. So in prospecting your field of immediate opportunities, make the best, not the worst, of your present circumstances. The star base-ball player does not refuse to play on the small-town team because it isn't good enough for him. The great Ty Cobb first made them "sit up and take notice" in a bush league. Undoubtedly he felt then that he was fit for better company, but he put in his best licks and played big-city ball on the small-town team. That was excellent prospecting for the chance he wanted with the best clubs. From the very beginning of his career, Ty Cobb has used masterly salesmanship to get across to the world true ideas of his best capabilities in his chosen field.
To-day there is no poor territory for success. Telegraph and telephone and wireless methods of communication, electric light and power, railroads and inter-urban car service, farm tractors, passenger automobiles, motor trucks, and the airplane have so revolutionized the inter-relations of men that all the former great distances of different locations and view-points have been shortened almost to nothingness. The whole world lives now in a single community of interest. The great war has taught us that each individual is close to everyone else. In your prospecting for success you are not limited by any narrow boundary of opportunities. Wherever you are, newspapers and magazines bring to your door chances for big success. If you search for prospects in everything you read you should be able to reach out all over the earth with your capability. An ambitious man I never had heard of before wrote to me at one time from South Africa to secure a selected territory for the sale of automobiles in a western city of the United States. From a distance of nearly half the circumference of the earth he got his chance to succeed.
The Fields of Opportunity Are Broad
A clerk in a Los Angeles real estate office received a letter from an acquaintance in Chicago who had spent his summer vacation in Michigan. The Chicago man wrote that the farmers of the Traverse Bay region were made rich by a bumper crop of potatoes just harvested. The Californian saw a chance for success in this bit of information. He worked out his idea and talked it over with his employers. He sold them on it. They sent him East loaded with facts about "the glorious West" and brim-full of Los Angeles peptimism. Aided by cold weather in Michigan that winter, the western real estate man eventually sold California irrigated ranches to a score of Michigan farmers who suddenly had made sufficient money to retire from potato raising, and who were old enough to be strongly attracted by the idea of owning and cultivating land in a more genial climate. Thus a sentence in a letter led straight to the success of the clerk who perceived his prospects and knew how to make the most of them.
Know Local Conditions
While distances have been bridged by modern swift means of communication and transportation, every locality has opportunities for success that are peculiar to it alone. Conversely every locality is handicapped in certain ways. Therefore in your prospecting for success study the conditions in your especial field. As a salesman of yourself, you should know your "territory," its advantages and disadvantages in particular respects. Men are doing business in your town. There is no better way to gain a prospect to succeed with a house in your home community than to demonstrate to the head of the concern that you comprehend just what he is "up against" on the one hand, and on the other what "edge" he has on businesses in the same line located elsewhere. You could make no worse mistake, you could injure your own prospects no more, than by showing ignorance of local conditions, or inappreciation of the circumstances in which your prospect's business is being conducted.