Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
SALESMANSHIP
A Complete Section Devoted to Piano Salesmanship Published Each Month by The Music Trade Review
Conversation and Its Relation to Piano Salesmanship
There Is Always a Point in Every Piano Sale Where Conversation Becomes Super-
fluous, and If Persisted in Beyond This Point the Sale Is Liable to Be Lost
ARK TWAIN told a story once of attending a church serv-
M
ice where the minister was down for a sermon on foreign
missions. He was an eloquent and persuasive speaker. At the
climax of his discourse, he had Mark going, as it were, and so much
under conviction that nothing short of a ten dollar bill in the plate
would have satisfied his conscience; if the sermon had ended and
the collection started right then. But the speaker continued to
speak, and as he went on, it began to seem to Mark that the heathen
were not so badly off after all; probably five dollars would do. And
so it would, if the sermon had at that moment come to an end
and the plate been poked into Mark's face without further ado.
But the orator was too much engrossed in the subject—or in
the orator—to know when to stop, so he kept on talking. The
longer he talked the more the early enthusiasm which Brother
Twain had for the cause of the poor, benighted ones in the dark
continent continued to dwindle, dwindled from ten dollars to five
dollars, from five dollars to two dollars, from two dollars to one
dollar, from one dollar to fifty cents. And the upshot of it was
that when the stream of talk had finally been shut off, Mark had
acquired a positive antipathy to the heathen, and had decided to
give them not a nickel. The plate did finally reach him; and by
that time he felt so mean that he stole ten cents out of it.
That is a classic example of the error of excessive conversa-
tion. It is, of course, possible that the renowned Mark has here
taken poetic license in respect of some details; but the moral is
plain. It is, to be brutal; "know when to stop chewing the rag."
Gentlemen who sell pianos and player-pianos are prone to
believe that silver tongued oratory is a prime requisite of sales-
manship. Yet the most successful salesman in the piano line whom
we have as yet met. if not actually mute, is at least a taciturn and
saturnine person. He says very little, but what he says is to the
point. He might qualify as the boy who put the "tac" in tacit;
if the humor be not too deep for the attentive reader.
Now we have observed a great deal of the technic, as it may
properly be called, of the successful salesman aforesaid and have
seen that he values, as above price, the faculty of listening. He
is an expert listener and does far more listening than he does talk-
ing. It is a truth familiar to all observers that prospective pur-
chasers of specialty goods like pianos and player-pianos are anx-
ious to inform everybody just what sort of instrument is wanted,
how much it must cost, how reluctant father is to pay for it, how
mechanical player-pianos do sound, don't they; and so on and so
forth, to the extent of several hundred words, more or less.
Now it is a paradox, but true, that the less a salesman tries
to sell a talkative customer, the more likely he is to sell that chatty
person. The talkative man or woman—may we venture to say—•
especially the latter—likes to hear his, or her, own voice, and
usually cannot resist the temptation of taking the lead in the con-
versation. The consequence is that if the person be left alone and
allowed to talk, he or she will do all the.inspecting, all the comment-
ing on the points, all the asking of questions; so that the salesman
will have simply nothing to do except to speak when he is spoken
to, answer all questions and look pleasant. The longer one sticks
to the selling game, the more certain it is that the less one talks,
all things considered, the better it is for all concerned.
Of course, this is not intended to be taken as a hard-and-fast
rule, but it is valid as a general statement of a widely applicable
principle. The converse of the above applies to the salesman who
has a wagging tongue. There used to be an idea that selling is a
matter of persuading folks to buy what they do not really want. So
long as such a stupid and false idea prevails in any man's mind, it
is certain that he will hypnotize himself into the belief that his
prospect has to be talked into buying. But this rests on a fallacy,
for nothing is more certain that the effort to persuade, as soon as
it is perceived by the prospect, arouses the hitter's hostility. If
the prospect has a strong mind, then this aroused hostility will
almost certainly operate to prevent the closing of the sale. If he
or she is weak, the sale may be made, but it will be a sale made
under protest, as it were; and one that may not stick. Sales made
under a sense of doubt and a feeling of constraint are not good
sales. Likewise, sales that are not good sales, are not permanent
sales. Lastly, sales that involve the element of impermanency,
or, to put it bluntly, sales that involve sending the snatch wagon
at the end of three months, are not desirable, and ought never to
have been made.
True salesmanship is square. It recognizes that legitimate per-
suasion is one thing and talking a prospect into a sale quite an-
other. One has every right to ask a person whether he or she can
be interested in a piano or player-piano, every right to talk the merits
of one's goods as high as regard for truth will allow; but it is
wholly wrong and against the spirit of modern salesmanship en-
tirely to try forcing the customer's inclinations.
It is for that reason that the chatty salesman is often not
quite so successful as he might be. The chatty one lets his tongue
govern him and falls into the error of supposing that the sale is
made always on account of the oratory, whereas it is often in
spite of it. The best salesmanship is that which knows its goods
thoroughly, knows their strong points, knows how to explain them,
knows the competitors' strong points, knows how to combat them,
knows the causes which operate to create desire for the goods,
knows how to size up the mental level of the prospect, knows
whether the prospect can probably afford to buy, knows that goods
sold on price are no good; and keeps his mouth severely closed on
every other topic.
We have played very strongly on the verb "to know"; and
thereby hangs a tale. Salesmanship is not conversation, it is knowl-
edge. The best salesman is he who knows most and talks least.
The language we speak changes constantly. It is always de-
veloping, always expanding; yet sometimes narrowing, too. For in
Shakespeare's time the word "conversation" meant one's whole
conduct, not merely one's talk. If one were to say that the basis
of salesmanship is right conversation, one would be stating ejpi-
grammatically a very wide, nay, an universal, truth. And the best
of it is that it works equally well both ways, ancient and modejrn.