Remember that every sale you make is an advertisement that will either help or hinder your business. It is an advertisement of the character and general policy of your firm. It advertises the squareness, the honesty, or the cunning, the trickery of the whole concern; in other words, the man you approach will get a pretty good idea of your firm,—their policy and methods of doing business,—by the impression which you make on him. He can tell pretty well whether he is dealing with high-class men, whether he can absolutely depend upon the word of the house, whether he can rely upon their statements, whether he will be protected, or whether he will have to protect himself by watching and guarding every little step in every business transaction with the house. He can tell whether he can rely absolutely upon its doing the square thing by him or not. “A company is judged by the men it keeps.”
The best salesmen to-day, besides making a study of their business, make a study of their customers and their wants. Many customers regard such salesmen as their business advisers, and they give them their confidence, knowing they will receive from them “white” treatment, that they will only sell them the merchandise which it is to their advantage to buy.
After he has gained their confidence it would be easy enough for the salesman to violate it and sell a much larger bill of goods than is to the advantage of the customer, but the modern salesman knows that this is a poor sort of business policy. The old-time method of holding up a customer when you get him for every dollar you can squeeze out of him, and piling onto him just as many goods as he can be induced to take, and at the biggest possible price, has gone by forever.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE PRICE OF MASTERSHIP
“Three things are necessary, first, backbone; second, backbone; third, backbone.”—Charles Sumner.
“When other people are ready to give up we are just getting our second wind,” is the motto of a New York business house. A good one for the success aspirant.
“Ships sail west and ships sail east,
By the very same winds that blow;