Music Trade Review

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THE
MUSIC TRADE
REVIEW
JULY 5, 1924
THE POINT OF REVIEW
C
ONSIDERING the amount of training which the average
young piano salesman receives it may be said that the good
piano salesman becomes good in spite of it. For there are very
few merchants or sales managers in the retail piano trade who take
any great trouble to train their own sales forces or who go much
out of their way to aid the young man who is breaking into the
business. Yet, taking the experience of those dealers and managers
who have worked along these lines, it can be said that there is
mighty little work in the retail piano trade that brings such real
dividends as this does. Why is it neglected, therefore?
me «e
«?
ARGELY carelessness is the correct answer summed up in a
few words. The average dealer or manager may have all the
good intentions in the world, but, taken up as he is with a multi-
plicity of detail in the business, he finds little time to devote to a
work which on the face of it does not yield immediate returns
and which in some cases yields no apparent returns at all. For the
dealer or manager too often thinks that if he devotes time and
energy to training a young salesman, more often than not that sales-
man when he becomes a real producer leaves him for some other
dealer who receives the benefit of the former's effort. A natural
enough conclusion, but one which, in the long run, is wrong for a
well-trained salesman in the retail piano trade is an asset not only
to the man who employs him but to the competing dealer with
whom he fights for sales. A man who is trained right sells right,
and no dealer or manager can ask for a better break in competition
than to meet this form of selling.
L
M
OST of the trouble in retail piano selling is caused by salesmen
who do not know their business, and the responsibility for
that can be traced directly back to the men under whom they
received their first experience. The salesman who spends more of
his time trying to convince the house that it ought to accept a sale
on terms that are beyond the maximum than he does in closing the
actual sale is a victim of incorrect training. Nine times out of ten
he started with a house that sold on any terms, more or less, in
order to close a sale. The salesman who represents the prospect
rather than his employer in settling on an allowance for a trade-in
usually came originally from a house where the trade-in in reality
was a means of concealed price cutting. Habits obtained early in
experience are hard to shake off and rare is the salesman who can.
really do it. The salesman who never gets a prospect who looks
like a bad credit risk usually had his first contract signed with a
house that sold to anyone and everybody and gambled on its sales
paying out as they ought to do. And once he has that streak he
never quits gambling so long as he stays in the business no matter
how tight the credit system may be of a house for which he even-
tually works.
iH
K
M
T ? O R , remember, training retail piano salesmen is not so much
-I training them how to close a sale as it is training them how to
close a sale that will stick and show an eventual profit. It is not
a hard thing to sell pianos, providing the terms of a sale are liberal
enough. And it is human nature for a salesman to follow the lines
of least resistance. Rut the house whose selling policy is based on
such methods is the house that, in the long run, shows no net profit.
Its paper shows a heavy percentage of past due, its average sale is a
sale of terms and not music, and while its volume may be imposing
its real condition is something that no retail piano dealer need envy.
And the whole thing may be traced directly back to the way retail
men are trained, for once a retail sales force gets into slack habits
the only way to reform it is to replace it with a new one.
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' T P H E real training of a retail piano salesman shows not in the
A volume of sales he makes, but in the profit the house makes
on the sales he closes. Many a salesman who has a reputation
and a comparatively big income to-day would be in quite another
class if his sales sheet were based on the profit and his commissions
paid on the same basis. In fact, there is no retail sales force that
would not benefit if these figures were available and if they were
applied once or twice a year to the individual salesman's efforts.
It would be a mighty good thing in a retail house where periodical
lists of .^alepmen are made up according to their relative standing
for two lists to be shown, one based on volume and one based on
profit. Some startling upsets would occur if this were done, and
many a ?tai salesman would fall below the steady plodder, whose
volume of sales is not nearly as impressive, but whose profit makes
the "white-haired boy' of the warerooms look like the traditional
thirty cents. The retail piano trade has never lacked retail sales-
men who could sell pianos, despite all claims to the contrary; what
it has lacked is salesmen who can sell them right and on terms that
are right as well.
K
«
K
T
HE Music Industries Chamber of Commerce to-day is working
to evolve a correspondence course in retail piano and musical
instrument salesmanship. Training of this kind can help the
average young piano salesman, even though there are a good many
men who are prone to consider that it is of no particular value.
For salesmen are made, not born, these days, and there are certain
fundamentals that every one has to learn. To learn these in theory
is easier than learning them by hard experience and costs less. But
that is all such a course can do—teach the fundamentals. It cannot
take the place of a bad example set by the head of the house or by
the man who has direct charge of the salesmen. Nor is it expected
to do so. What is needed to make better trained piano salesmen is
better selling methods on the part of the houses that employ them,
and until we get the latter we are not going to get the former. There
is not the slightest chance of argument so far as that is concerned,
nor is there ever going to be a chance for it.
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T
HUS the most valuable asset in training good salesmen is the
example set by the house itself in the requirements it demands
in every sale. The next most valuable asset is the attention the
deaier or the sales manager gives the novices in his sales organiza-
tion. As pointed out above this is never wasted effort. To neglect
a young salesman simply because he may go to another house once
he is trained is like the policy of biting off your nose to save your
face. The face remains, of course, but whatever good looks it had
are spoiled forever. It is necessary to repeat here that a well-
trained salesman, the type that closes good sales, is an asset to the
entire trade as well as to the house that employs him. For that
type of salesman competes on a basis of value and quality, never
on a basis of prices and terms. He does not have to resort to the
latter tactics for he has salesmanship enough to confine the fight
for business to the former basis.
N0
*£ Mf
H E R E is a certain retail sales manager well known in the trade
who makes it a policy to hire inexperienced men for his selling
force almost without exception. In six months on an average these
men are either no longer in his employ or else they have become
producers of good business. How does he do it? By giving the
new men personal attention, by seeing that they obtain a certain
number of good prospects and not all the dogs in the lists, by
encouraging them to come to him directly with their problems,
by helping them to close and giving them full credit for a sale when
he helps them to close it. Every man who goes into his employ
feels that this manager is as much interested in his success as he is
himself. He knows that hard work and all his interest is expected,
but at the same time he knows that he is going to get all the co-
operation possible. If the average dealer and manager would take
a leaf from this man's book and adopt the same policy regarding
the new men who come into his employ the dearth of good piano;
salesmen about which we hear so much and which has become so
marked that the associations themselves have had to take action
regarding it would soon be a thing of the past and the whole
industry the better off for it. That is the real solution of the^
problem of better salesmen.
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T
T H E RF.VIF.WKR.
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