TWENTY years ago the head of an industry now in the million-a-month class sat listening to his ``star'' salesman. The latter, in the first enthusiasm of discovery and creation, was telling how he had developed the company's haphazard selling talk and had taken order after order with a standard approach, demonstration, and summary of closing arguments. To prove the effectiveness of ``the one best way,'' he challenged his employer to act as a customer, staged the little drama he had arranged, secured admissions of savings his machine would make, ultimately cornered the other, and sold him.
``That's great,'' the owner declared the in- <p 26> <p 27> stant he had surrendered to the salesman's logic. ``If we can get all our agents to learn and use this new method of yours, we'll double our business in three years.''
Then followed discussion of the means by which the knowledge could be spread.
``I've got it,'' the manager announced at last. ``I'll telegraph five or six men to come in''—he named the agents within a night's ride of the factory—``and you can show them how you sold fifteen machines last week.
``We could take down your talk in shorthand and send it to them, but that wouldn't do the business. I want them to watch you sell, to study how you make your points, how you introduce yourself, how you get your man's attention, how you bring out his objections and meet them, how you lead up to the signing minute, and show him where to sign. *What you say is about half the trick: *how you say it is the convincing part—the thing the slowest man in the force by watching you can learn more quickly than the smartest could work out at home.'' <p 28>
The result of that conference was one of the earliest organized training schools for salesmen in the country. It was an unconscious, but none the less certain, utilization of the instinct of *imitation for increasing the efficiency in employees. Since then, business has borrowed many well-recognized principles from psychology and pedagogy and adapted them to the same end.
Many important houses have grafted the school upon their organizations and *teach not only raw and untrained employees, but provide instruction calculated to make workmen and clerks masters of their jobs and also to fit them for advancement to higher and more productive planes. Teaching is by example rather than by precept, just as it was in the old apprentice system.
The newer method uses even more than the older a perfect example of the process and the product for the learner's imitation and makes them the basis of the instruction.
No man was made to live alone. For an individual, existence entirely independent of <p 29> other members of the race is the conception of a dreamer; apart from others one would fail to become *human. Modern psychology has abandoned the individualistic and adopted the social point of view. We no longer think of *imitation as a characteristic only of animals, children, and weak-minded folk.
We have come to see that imitation is the greatest factor in the education of the young and a continuous process with all of us. The part of wisdom, then, is to utilize this power from which we cannot escape, by setting up a perfect copy for imitation.