It is the set of the sails, and not the gales,
That determines where they go.”
“Wrecks of the world are of two kinds,” said Elbert Hubbard. “Those who have nothing that society wants, and those who do not know how to get their goods into the front window.”
The way to succeed in salesmanship is to get your goods into the front window and hustle for all you are worth. Hard work and grit open the door to the Success firm.
Two college students started out to sell copies of the same book. After some weeks in the field one wrote to headquarters as an excuse for his poor business that “everything had been trying to keep him down of late.” The weather had been so bad he could not get out a great deal of the time; then everybody was talking “hard times,” and no money, and making all sorts of excuses for not buying. He said he was so disgusted and discouraged that he saw nothing for it but to give up canvassing as a bad job.
The other young man, canvassing in similar territory, sent in his report about the same time. This is what he wrote: “In spite of bad weather and the fact that everybody is trying to hedge on account of the war scare and the general business depression I have had a banner week, and my commissions were over eighty dollars. I get used to this ‘hard times and no money,’ and ‘can’t afford it’ talk, and I just sail right in and overwhelm all these objections with my arguments. I make the people I talk to feel that it would be almost wicked to let the opportunity pass for securing a book, the reading of which has doubled and trebled the efficiency of a multitude of men and women and has been the turning point in hundreds of careers. I have made them feel that it will be cheap at almost any price, and that I am doing them a great favor in making it possible for them to secure this ambition-arousing book.”
This young man sold, on the average, to eight people out of ten he called upon during the week.
A traveling salesman for a big concern got it into his head that his territory out through the West was played out. His orders were shrinking, and he told his employers that the territory had simply been worked to a finish, that there was no use in staying in it any longer. His sales manager, however, knew the section well, and doubted the man’s glib statement. He put a young fellow in his place who had had very little experience, but who was a born hustler, full of energy, ambition and enthusiasm. On his first trip he more than doubled his predecessor’s record. He said he saw nothing to indicate a played-out route, and was confident that business would increase as he became better acquainted with the territory.
The fact was that, not the territory, but the man was played out. The older salesman was not willing to forego his comforts, his pleasures, to hustle for business. He was not willing to travel across the country in bad weather on the chance of getting an order in a small town. He preferred to remain in the Pullman cars, to go to the larger towns and sit around in hotel lobbys, to take things easy, to go to the theaters instead of hunting up new customers and making friends for the house. He wanted his “dead” territory changed, because he had no taste for hustling. His successor did not see any lack of life in that “played-out” route because he was “a live wire.” The trouble was not in the territory; it was in the man.
At an agricultural convention while discussing the slope of land which was best suited to a certain kind of fruit tree, an old farmer was called upon to express his opinion. He got up and said, “the slope of the land don’t make so much difference as the slope of the man.” It isn’t the slope of the territory that counts so much in selling as the slope of the salesman; that is everything. In every business it is always a question of the sort of a man behind the proposition. It is the slope of the man, his grit, his stick-to-it-iveness, that count most.