a. The historical background of the style to which the chair belongs, and the most effective methods of developing its style appeal.
b. Types of rooms and color schemes with which it can be used harmoniously.
Equally comprehensive information is necessary for all other items in your stock. Without it the percentage of purchasers that we can be sure of reaching with a key appeal will be reduced, and our earning power correspondingly limited.
SELLING MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION
Assuming that we have acquired adequate knowledge of the materials and construction of our merchandise, how are we going to use it effectively. We suggest a few general principles as guides to sound practice:
Both materials and construction normally are factors to be employed in closing a sale, but not in opening it.—If you went into a store and asked to see a pair of shoes and the salesman, seizing the first model at hand, assured you that it was made of tanned box calf, with waterproof soles, cork filling, and tacked insoles, by a process involving more than 150 separate operations, all of which made it a wonderful value at $8.50, would you tell him to wrap up a pair? Hardly.
Neither materials nor construction would interest you until you were comfortably fitted with a shoe that satisfied your ideas of style and color, and at a price within your buying limit.
When a customer asks for an advertised article and seems pleased with its appearance, the demonstration of its value can start at once. In any other situation it must wait until you find something with which she is pleased.
There are those who appear to believe that selling is a game in which the object is to beat down the customer's opposition and make her buy. In dealing with customers of any type above the most unenlightened, this idea always has proved a boomerang.