CHAPTER I
THE MAN WHO CAN SELL THINGS
Cultivate all the arts and all the helps to mastership.
The world always listens to a man with a will in him.
Soon after Henry Ward Beecher went to Plymouth Church he received a letter from a Western parish, asking him to send them a new pastor. After describing the sort of man they wanted, the letter closed with the following injunction: “Be sure to send us a man who can swim. Our last pastor was drowned while fording the river, on a visit to his parishioners.”
Now, this is the sort of a man that is wanted everywhere, in every line of human activity, the man who can swim, the salesman who can swim, who can sell things, who can go out and get business, the man who can take a message to Garcia, who can bring back the order, the man who can “deliver the goods.”
The whole business world to-day is hunting for the man who can sell things; there is a sign up at every manufacturing establishment, every producing establishment for the man who can market products. There is nobody in greater demand than the efficient salesman, and he is rarely if ever out of a job.
Only a short while ago two companies actually went to law about a salesman who transferred his connection from one to the other, his original employers holding that he had no right to do so, as he was under contract (at a $50,000 salary) to them.
In spite of the fact that thousands of employees are looking for positions, on every hand we see employers looking for somebody who can “deliver the goods”; a salesman who will not say that if conditions were right, if everything were favorable, if it were not for the panic, or some other stumbling block, he could sell the goods. Everywhere employers are looking for some one who can do things, no matter what the conditions may be.
There is no place in salesmanship for the man who waits for orders to come to him. He is simply an order taker, not a salesman. Live men, men with vigorous initiative and lots of pluck and grit, men who can go out and get business are wanted.
It should not be necessary to prove that training is needed for success in salesmanship or in any business. Yet, because men have been compelled for centuries “to learn by their mistakes,” to pick up here and there, by hard knocks, a little knowledge about their work, there has been a prejudice against trying to teach business by sane, scientific methods. Besides, in former times, the working man and the mere merchant were supposed to belong to a low class of society, apart from the noble and the learned, and little attention was given to their needs. A man, too, was believed to be born with a natural aptitude for salesmanship or business building, and this was supposed to be all-sufficient.