CHAPTER II
TRAINING THE SALESMAN
The consciousness of being superbly equipped for your work brings untold satisfaction.
Efficiency is the watchword of to-day. The half-prepared man, the man who is ignorant, the man who doesn’t know his lines, is placed at a tremendous disadvantage.
A student seeking admission to Oberlin College asked its famous president if there was not some way of taking a sort of homeopathic college course, some short-cut by which he could get all the essentials in a few months.
This was the president’s reply: “When the Creator wanted a squash, he created it in six months, but when he wanted an oak, he took a hundred years.”
One of the highest-paid women workers in the world, the foreign buyer for a big department store, owes her position more to thorough training for her work than to any other thing. Between salary and commissions, her income amounts to thirty thousand dollars a year. Speaking of her place in the firm, one of its highest members said to a writer: “We regard Miss Blank as more of a friend than an employee; and she came to us just twenty years ago with her hair in pig-tails, tied with a shoe string; and she was so ill fed and ill clothed we had to pass her over to our house nurse to get her currycombed and scrubbed before we could put her on as a cash girl. Without training, she would probably have dropped back in the gutter as an unfit and a failure. With training, she has become one of the ablest business women in the country.”
There are a thousand pigmy salesmen to one Napoleon salesman; but if you have natural ability for the marketing of any of the great products of the world, all you need to make you a Napoleon salesman is sound training and willingness to work faithfully. With such a foundation for success you will not long be out of a job, or remain in obscurity, for wherever you go, no matter how hard the times, you will see an advertisement for just such a man.
The term “salesmanship” is a very broad one; it covers many fields. The drummer for a boot and shoe house, the insurance agent and manager, the banker and broker, whose business is to dispose of millions of dollars’ worth of stocks and bonds—all these are “salesmen,” trafficking in one kind of goods or another—all form a part of the world’s great system of organized barter.
There are three essentials which must be considered in deciding on salesmanship or any other vocation, namely: taste, talent, and training. The first is, by far, the most important of these essentials, for whatever we have a taste for, we will be interested in; what we really become interested in, we are bound to love, sooner or later, and success comes from loving our work.