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SALESMANSHIP
Vol. III. No. 4
A Complete Section Devoted to Piano Salesmanship Published Each Month
New York, Oct. 14, 1916
Salesmen Can Kill Sales By Simply Talking Too Much
The Piano Salesman Who Is Inclined to Be Too Talkative Frequently Wearies His Prospect
to Such a Degree That the Interest in the Instrument He Is Trying to Sell Is Often Lost
ANGUAGE, said Talleyrand, was invented for the purpose
of concealing thought. However that may be, ability to
L
talk never seems to be directly in ratio with mental powers.
The stupid man is by no means the silent man; and most men
do much more talking than thinking. Language may have been
invented to conceal thought; but one is tempted to believe it
•ofttimes exists mainly to conceal the lack of thought.
Salesmanship is vulgarly supposed to be principally a matter
of speech. The supposition has just enough truth in it to assure
its complete misunderstanding being both easy and plausible.
The temptation to overwhelm a prospective buyer with a torrent
of more or less well conceived talk, is ever present; and operates
with fatal regularity.
Excess of speech in the act of selling is a sign of in-
feriority. The prototype of the chatty salesman is really the
peddler who comes to the door and tries, by dint of saying as
much as possible before the unwilling listener can drive him
away, to secure somehow an opening that shall lead to his admis-
It is tantamount to the method of the street fakir, who
sion.
drowns out argument and objection alike in a torrent of patter,
hoping thereby to hypnotize those to whose reason he cannot
appeal.
To say that the house-to-house peddler and the street fakir
flourish, only gives point to the objection. You will never find
man or woman who will admit being charmed or attracted in any
way with the personality or approach of such a salesman. The
sale, if it be made, is made in spite of the bungling approach,
not because of it.
When we begin to think of really high class selling, as for
instance the selling of expensive musical instruments, the waste-
fulness, futility and stupidity of excessive talk become painfully
apparent. The best salesmen are not the chatty people, the best
salesmen are the quiet men, those who aim to make their points
without attracting attention to themselves. They are the men
who have recognized—and persistently apply—the simple but
little known truth that sales are made by leading, not by driving,
by creating an atmosphere conducive to responsiveness and re-
ceptivity on the part of the prospect. The great salesman is the
salesman who has recognized that his chief duty is to put his
goods into the light and himself into the shadow. The great
salesman does not, in the precise truth of the matter, sell goods,
he causes the prospect to buy them.
Too much talk is the one certain destroyer and murderer
of the art of salesmanship. It is wholly impossible to carry on,
with an intelligent opposite mind, a prolonged business conversa-
tion, without saying something that will arouse a current of
antagonism and bring about an argumentative state. To begin
an argument is, of course, the most simple and certain way of
killing a sale. The prospect immediately becomes more in-
terested in winning the argument than in looking at the pros-
pective purchase. The salesman, unless he is very careful, be-
comes more interested in the dispute than in his business. The
sale meanwhile quietly dies and has been decently interred long
.
before any one finds out that it has been even feeling unwell.
Heaven deliver us from the chatty salesman, from the one
who is always so excessively affable and genial and hail-fellow-
well-met that he spills his kindly feelings all over the landscape
in a torrent of language and an ocean of smiles; who first be-
wilders, then overwhelms. Heaven deliver us from the person
who believes that the first commandment of the salesman is
"thou shalt not be a grouch" and who, in the effervescence of
his good intentions, manages to act and talk—principally the
latter—in a manner which only deepens into profound conviction
the first impression that he must have served his apprenticeship
as a peddler before taking to the more or less respectable calling
of piano salesmanship.
The great salesman is the salesman who can be affable when
affability is the natural reaction to the prospect's mood, but
who does not believe that affability, expressed in conversational
marathons, is a panacea.
The great salesman, however, knows well the power of con-
versation ; when its action is reversed. He knows that he has
no more potent weapon than the power of the prospect's own
oratory, turned on himself. He knows that if he can only get
the prospect to talk about the goods, the goods will give a glad
cry and entwine themselves lovingly around the prospect's heart;
not to be disentangled without immense and difficult effort. He
knows, in short, that just as the secret of salesmanship is to get
the prospect to sell the goods to himself, so also the best way to
get him started in this desirable direction is to encourage him
to talk about the goods, about why he wants them; even to argue
with himself as to whether he wants them or not; the prompter
of all this meanwhile confining himself to an occasional tactful
suggestion intended to keep the prospect from perhaps losing
the argument with himself or going off on a side track.
Other things being equal, it remains a great truth that the
less one talks on matters not strictly related to the case in point,
the better for all concerned. The really successful salesman is
polite, but not effusive. Effusiveness is the sign of the faker
everywhere. The successful salesman is never slangy, for though
slang, if it be new and clever, is sometimes amusing, it is never
necessary; and ladies can nearly always get along without it.
This sort of salesman knows the merits of his goods down to the
ground, can demonstrate them and show their beauties off to
perfection; and he can do this with the fewest possible words.
This sort of salesman does not intrude, does not reel off patter.
He talks to the point, he says as little as he may, but what he
says is apt. He is respectful, but not servile. He is affable but
not oily. He is ready to take and smile at the wit of the pros-
pect, but he keeps his own wit to himself; for his duty is to sell
his pianos, not to display his own personality.
The teachers of salesmanship are always talking about what
they call "personality." "Would you be aggressive?" they ask stri-
dently. "Would you possess a forceful personality, a personality
that succeeds?" "Of course," replies the unsophisticated tyro.
{Continued on page 12)