Letters From an Old Time Salesman to His Son

by Roy Lester James

Now, I’m not trying to belittle the honest sales effort of yourself or your friend Ryan in the least, but I just want to be sure that you appreciate the fact that your success last week wasn’t due 100 per cent to the siren voice of your salesmanship, but that a great big piece of credit was due to the solid foundation on which you were building your sales.

I notice you sort of “bragged” over the fact that you sold only the best merchants in each town and those who were capable of giving orders worth while. If I had to take my choice between five nice new ten dollar bills and five old ragged ones, why, of course, I’d choose the crinkly kind, but if there wasn’t any law against my getting both piles, I don’t think I’d be so particular, because it has been my experience that the ragged ones can be changed into just as many dimes and quarters as the new ones, and either one is acceptable to the receiving teller when you pass the little black book under the wicket on Saturday.

Now the matter of choice in selling retailers is just the same. With a line like your company has, in the first place you should attempt to place it in a big way in the best stores in the town, but there isn’t any game law against selling it to the little fellow around the corner, is there? Nobody in “the house” ever told you to beware of selling the small merchant, did they? You bet they didn’t! In fact, every successful business has been founded on the small customer, who afterward grew into the big one. You know when Marshall Field first started in business his store didn’t cover a city block, but I suppose there were some two and three-quarters per cent salesmen in those days who thought Field’s business was too small to bother with, but if any of those salesmen are still living you can probably find them now acting as a nurse-girl to a wheezy taxicab.

Notice you say Ryan told you the reason he didn’t call on some merchants was because there was no use—they couldn’t be sold. I’ll never forget, the fellow who broke me in as a salesman told me the same thing my first week as we were getting off a train in a little Missouri town that had only two stores in it. He said that the one customer we sold there was the much better merchant of the two and it was no use to go near the other one.

Well, I believed him, and made my one call in the town regularly and received the one order and thought I was doing pretty well until one day, when I called, my customer informed me that he had just sold out to the other merchant across the street and that henceforth there would be only one store there.

Of course, I went over and tried to sell the other fellow, but he naturally wondered why I’d never called before and I didn’t have any very good answer. The result was that I was beaten by my own stupidity and I had to call on that fellow for six months before I ever scratched an order book.

Now that is only one of many instances I could tell you, but I’ve found that there is one thing that, as a salesman, you must never take another man’s word for and that is that So-and-So across the street, or around the corner, will not buy. I’ve always found it a safe rule to call on every man who had his door unlocked and the worst thing that ever happened to me in applying the rule, was to get an occasional turn-down, while I have had the surprise of my life many times, to see what big orders you could get out of a little store.

The longer you sell goods, the more you’ll realize that it’s a battle from start to finish, but just take it from the old man that you’ll have more luck capturing an increase in salary at the end of the year with a whole army of little dough-boy customers on your list than you will by trying to impress the boss with a giant named Goliath who is a single-footer.

Your loving,

“DAD.”