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REVIEW
THE
VOL. LXXX. No. 15 Published Every Saturday. Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., 383 Madison Ave., New York, N. Y., Apr. 11, 1925
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How Two Texas Music Dealers Build
Big Volumes of Retail Sales
Two Striking Examples in the Maxfield Music Co. and the Collins-Decker Co., Who, Though Located in
Comparatively Small Centers, Do an Annual Volume of Business Beyond What Many Re-
tail Music Merchants in Large Cities Are Able to Do in a Similar Period
HE territory of the average retail music
merchant is as large as he wishes to
make it, limited only in fact by the ratio
between increased overhead and the distance of
the unit sale from the general base of opera-
tions. There are retail dealers in the trade at
the present time who have found it profitable to
cover large sections of the States wherein they
are located, ten or twelve counties being a field
of operations, and given territorial districts be-
ing covered by salesmen who are assigned there
exclusively and who work such territory inten-
sively. Some remarkable successes have been
achieved by this means, dealers in small towns
running up imposing annual volumes of sales.
The nature of all musical instrument selling
lends itself particularly well to this wider cov-
erage. Much of piano selling especially is done
outside the warerooms floors, the selling itself
being carried into the homes of the prospective
customers. This is even true in large cities,
where there is concentration of population—
how much truer must it be then in country dis-
tricts that have as their buying centers com-
paratively small cities and towns? Yet there
are many hundreds of music merchants in such
centers who confine their operations to com-
paratively limited sections of territory with the
result that they remain small and check what
should be the natural expansion of their busi-
nesses. That they limit themselves by their
own lack of vision is well shown by the two
following examples which have been selected
from the many of similar type which exist in
the country's retail music trade.
The Maxfield Music Co.
Clarksville, Tex., is a town of 3,386, a typical
country town that may be found in many sec-
tions of the country. It is the buying center
for all the surrounding territory. Yet small as
this town is, G. A. Maxfield, proprietor of the
Maxfield Music Co., has developed a business
that amounts to an approximate annual turn-
over of 500 pianos and talking machines, or an
average annual sale of a little less than one to
each six people in the population. He has a
prosperous territory to work in, of course, but
prosperity alone could not account for this im-
posing total of sales in comparison to the pop-
ulation from which he draws them.
The answer is that he works every bit of ter-
ritory which he can profitably reach. Mr. Max-
field is one of those men who have tried the
T
music trade twice. Some years ago he entered
it with less than $100 capital, but after selling
a few pianos in the ordinary way he left it to
enter the drug business. In 1915 he returned to
the trade, and since that time he has steadily
is sometimes heard on the
part of retail music merchants regard-
ing the restrictions which the physical
aspects of the territory they cover place
upon the ultimate volume of sales which
they do. Here are two examples of how
retail merchants have built up imposing
volumes of sales despite the fact that they
are located in comparatively small towns.
Both of them are remarkable successes, due
ttt intensive sales work which carries music
to the home instead of waiting for the cus-
tomer to come into the warerooms and close
the
sale.—EDITOR.
forged ahead to his present position. By 1922
he had so widely extended his field of opera-
tions that he was compelled to open a branch
store in Mexica, a booming oil town. To-day
he does business over a large territory in north-
east Texas, a section that presents more diffi-
culties in this sort of selling than do many
other sections of the country which are more
thickly populated. At the present time he
handles the Starr, Henry G. Johnson and Con-
tinental lines of pianos and players, and the
Victor, Edison and Columbia talking machines.
The Collins-Decker Co.
Here is another even more striking example
of this ability to build up a large volume of
sales in a comparatively small city. Greenville,
Tex., is a fine little city with a population, ac-
cording to the latest census figures, of 12,384.
It has as its commercial slogan, for it is a town
that is strictly modern, "The. Blackest Land
and the Whitest People on Earth," since it is
the center of a fine agricultural section. The
town is the home of the Collins-Decker Co.,
which last year sold over 1,000 pianos, repre-
senting a total gross business of more than
$400,000. This business was done on an in-
vested capital of $150,000.
No retail music merchant can sell one piano
for every twelve people in his territory, no mat-
ter how intensive his sales work may be. The
Collins-Decker Co. does not try to do that. In-
stead it takes as its territory a good-sized sec-
tion of Texas, as well as portions of Oklahoma
and Arkansas. This territory is divided into
sharply defined sections, to each one of which
is assigned a salesman who works directly un-
der the supervision of J. L. Collins, who directs
the selling end of the firm's, business. The rea-
sons for the sale of 1,000 pianos within twelve
months, which is a volume of business that
many large city dealers with a much greater
population to draw upon, even taking competi-
tion into consideration, fail to reach, are found
in the way this selling organization has been
organized, through giving each salesman just
as much territory as he can handle adequately
and work intensively through personal contact.
Collins-Decker does not rest content with hit-
ting the high spots and making the easy sale;
it wants, and as a result it gets, every possible
sale that it can reach. Such intensive work
does not represent high selling cost when it is
properly handled, when the salesman is able to
plan his work through his intimate knowledge
of the existing conditions and when nothing is
done in a hit or miss fashion.
Reasons for Success
"The success of any retail music business
rests with the selling organization," said Mr.
Collins in discussing the growth of the com-
pany. "You have got to get good men and you
have got to pay them well. You have got to
treat them fairly and put the house behind them
at all times. You have got to keep in human
touch with them. And you have got to do the
same thing with your customers."
"That's right," added H. C. Decker, who is
in charge of the financial end of the business.
"You have got to be sure to keep the friendship
of your customers. Don't make the mistake of
thinking you will never sell them another piano
and that therefore they can be forgotten. When
you cover territory closely you can't do that.
We are patient and pleasant in our collections,
(Continued on page 9)