HOW COMMUNITY
INCREASE SALES
"TIE - INS
By J. BRADFORD PENGELLY
It is questionable whether any subject in connection with the Retail
business is equal, in its present-day
importance,
to the subject
Music
of good
merchandising.
The whole success or failure of a retail organization to sell its goods and derive
a profit from that operation revolves about its ability to maintain an adequate
turnover in
merchandise.
In view of the vital necessity of keeping this merchandise moving, this series of
monthly articles, in the form of a "BETTER
BUSINESS CLINIC," is intended
to stress this important factor, offer practical, concrete suggestions, and keep
the dealers informed of the progress that is being made in this field.
OR MORE YEARS than I care to remember I've been
hearing that our economic troubles lie in the distributing
end of the business machine. The American productive
mechanism is generally agreed to be in good shape, but Dis-
tribution in these United States is held to be a sorry mess by
all critics and many supporters of our business order.
If this is true—and subject to a flock of discounts, I think
it is—our business future is squarely up to the men who do
the distributing. In semi-final analysis, this means the Re-
tailers.
In the music trades few retailers can themselves serve all
their customers. Musical instruments and musical merchan-
dise cannot be piped or wired to the customer's home, and
customer-contacts cannot be limited to monthly billings. In
the music trades the retailer must rely on salesmen to act for
him in his relations with his customers.
In the final analysis it is the salesmen to whom we must
look for the future of the music trade—and the future of music
in America!
Now businessmen generally and salesmen in particular can-
not have routine, unadventuring minds. Their calling does
not attract those who seek soft berths and fixed pensions.
They prefer the adventure involved in each day's new prob-
lems to the steady round of clerical routine. By their calling
they have chosen human contacts over paper work, Possibility
over Security.
F
E
I
G
H
But just as the retailer looks to the manufacturer for some-
thing more than merchandise, so looks the salesman to the re-
tailer. In these days no manufacturer dreams of dumping his
wares on his customers without sales information and counsel.
In these days the alert retailer supplies his men with some-
thing more than inventory.
The salesman—for his own sake and for the retailer's—wants
to know how and where to sell.
The alert retailer can provide such advice. If he can show
his salesmen how to reduce time and effort per sale he is
making a real contribution to sound merchandising prac-
tice. He is doing his part in solving the great American prob-
lem of Distribution, and he is helping himself and his em-
ployees to greater earning power.
The retailer's—and the salesmen's—volume depends on a
number of things. The musical merchandise, from pianos to
phonograph needles, now manufactured in the United States
is infinitely better than any similar line has ever been any-
where before. Given this good line and a live community in
which to sell it, the number of sales a man or an organization
produces is, in its simplest terms, the resultant of these fac-
tors :
1. How thoroughly you tie in music with the social, civic,
and business life of your community.
2. How closely you identify yourself and your organiza-
tion with music in general in the mind of your community.
T
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