Music Trade Review

Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
12
(Salesmanship)
THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
man's place. The faculty of so doing constitutes a mark of pres-
ent and future success.
Brevity is the soul of wit; but don't try to be witty in the
idea that this will make up for lack of brevity, or abrupt in the
notion that you are thus being witty. Some men may like to
have your proposal thrown in their faces; but men who count
for something don't like it and won't have it. Be polite.
When you have to send out a series of follow-up letters,
remember the simple fact that you have a definite proposal to
make. The series of letters is the stage on which that proposal
is to be set off before the reader. Every part of this stage must
harmonize with every other part. Therefore, the successive
letters in the set must bear definitive relationship to each other.
Therefore, new proposals which in any way modify the original
one must be avoided. There must be no haggling in the sales
letter. If you cannot get the prospect's order in the first letter,
add further arguments; but don't change terms. The man who
does this simply invites the receiver of the letters to wait still
longer in the hope of getting still better terms. Why, in fact,
spoil one's own game?
These are the secrets; so we think. Perhaps some others
will agree with us.
The Automobile Is Not Affecting the Sale of Pianos
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Many Piano Salesmen Offer the Popularity of the Automobile As an Excuse for Lack
of Business, But This Excuse Has No Real Foundation, As a Little Thought Will Prove
ROBABLY the biggest bugbear of the piano salesman to-
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day is the automobile. Whenever a piano man has a chance
to discuss conditions during a temporary lull in his own trade
he immediately blames the lack of sales upon the automobile.
He declares that the prospects are spending their money on
motor cars and gasoline and touring the country instead of
sitting quietly at home enjoying piano music. Piano men even
go so far as to declare that business in rural communities is
below normal because the farmers are buying automobiles, and
here is one case where the charge hardly stands.
Ever since there have been farms, farmers have had to
provide themselves with transportation facilities not only to
travel around their own property but to go to and from the
markets and where, in the old days, the farmer purchased a good
horse and a buggy he now has an automobile. There is nothing
unusual about it, nothing to be afraid of. A good road horse
costs at least $250 and often more. A first class buggy means an
investment of at least $100, making a total of $350 or $400
spent for the entire equipment, and the horse has to be fed day
in and day out, winter and summer, whether in use or not.
Of course, there is gasoline at an average of twenty-five cents
a gallon, at present, but hay costs $20 a ton and $20 worth of
gasoline will drive the average automobile well over 1,000 miles.
Mighty few horses cover the same distance before they eat the
bale of hay. If the farmers are not buying pianos and players
as they should, some other excuse besides the automobile will
have to be found.
On the other hand, the city man does not spend all his time
in his car. He has a home and uses it. He buys furniture and
talking machines and other things that go to make the home
pleasant, and there is no reason why he shouldn't buy a piano if
properly approached. They talk about men buying automobiles
who cannot afford them. A good player-piano costs as much
or more than a great many makes of automobiles. If a man
can't afford the automobile, is he a good prospect for a player?
A piano salesman who knows his game can find plenty of
arguments to combat the automobile theory. The winter time,
cold and stormy, is when the piano or player proves the great-
est asset to the home, and that is just the.time when the aver-
age automobile owner keeps his car safely in storage.
The automobile can in no way satisfy the human craving
for music. They have succeeded in equipping the cars with
miniature calliopes but they haven't yet managed to fix them so
that they will play music rolls or talking machine records or
otherwise provide good music in the open, much less in the
house.
Personality Is a Valuable Asset to Every Salesman
The Ability to Make Customers Remember Who Sold Them, and to Remember the Sales-
man Favorably, Cannot Be Too Highly Estimated—A Modern Definition of Personality
ERSONALITY in salesmanship is not confined to the ability
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to make a pleasant and successful approach and to carry on
an interesting conversation. It means, rather, the ability so to
impress the customer that he will remember the salesman for an
indefinite time to come. It means in the salesman the faculty
for making himself appear out of the ordinary and distinctive,
so that he will be more easily remembered.
It means a great deal to a salesman if the customers, after
several years, can come into a store and ask particularly for that
one man and, moreover, describe him accurately if the name has
been forgotten. Such an incident proves that the salesman has
developed something about him that has marked him from his
fellows. It is an asset that means money.
There are too many salesmen who build for the present and
not the future, who are satisfied to make a sale to-day, forget the
customer and let the customer forget them. They sell goods and
make a fair living, but exist simply as parts of an institution.
In other words none of them is the salesman that one can re-
member readily; they are just salesman collectively.
Perhaps the best real definition of personality versus the
lack of it appeared recently as the introduction to a slangy story
in one of the big magazines, the writer summing it up as follows:
"I'd rather be champion egg beater of the world than one
of these average guys—good job, good pay, good citizens—and
that lets 'em out! What? That's enough? Sure! For them
kind of birds that's not only enough, that's all there is! That's
all they want, that's as far up as they look—get me? They
ain't got no more of this here personality thing than a tooth-
pick or a lead pencil—they're just one of a million! They
come and go—and nobody even looks up from the newspaper as
they pass, because they'll be lots more of 'em along in a minute,
the world's full of 'em—no, cluttered up with 'em!
"Average guys, y'know. Ever see one of them books that
some simp cheated his parents and disappointed his wife by
wastin' the time to get together? They're full of stuff like this:
'The average man drinks 8564^ quarts of water a year and
there are 40^4 pounds of salt in the average man's body' or 'The
average man walks twice around the world and three times past
the church durin' a lifetime.'
"There's about four hundred pages of that spicy readin',
showin' what the average guy does. His act is so full of old
stuff that they got a book showin' every move he makes from the
nursery to the undertaker. You can always tell what he eats,
smokes, drinks and owes. He's like the ball bearin's on a sewin'
machine-—you don't see him or hear him and you never know he
was there if he didn't bust now and then.
"I been in one of these small burgs, and a guy would roll
by in an auto who looked like Rockefeller's landlord, to the
naked eye.
"'Who's that bird?" I'd ask an onlooker.
"'Heh?' he'd answer, takin' a flash. 'Search me! One of
them rich guys from uptown, I guess—town's full of 'em !'
"Then another fellow would breeze by—on foot. Might have
on an old shiny suit, a wrong hat and little or no shoes—and
I'd see everybody wavin' their hands and greetin' him like he
was a prosperous season.
" 'Who have we here?' I'd say to the native.
"'Him,' he'd shoot back. 'Him? I guess you don't belong