ARE YOU COVERING ALL
YOUR PROSPECTS?
By J. BRADFORD PENGELLY
There are millions of potential customers for the music industry who are
never approached by the industry's salesmen.
These potential customers are not approached because salesmen and dealers
cannot afford to spend the time and effort needed to develop these potential
customers into actual buyers.
But what CAN individual men and women in the music industry do to
develop these marginal prospects?
The second article in PRESTO MUSIC TIMES' "Better Business Clinic 7
series.
W
E DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU how to run your
business; we are simply throwing out a few sugges-
tions which may enable you to increase the prospect-
coverage of your organization.
Last month we said that the final determinants of your suc-
cess as a musical instrument merchant or salesman were
three:
1. How closely 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.
3. How alert you are to the public response to music, and
to your association with it in the mind of your community.
My primary point was that by promoting the cause of music
the music merchant or salesman promotes his own business,
for more music always means more musical instrument sales.
We have received many letters in response to that article.
They are nice, complimentary letters, but most of them boil
down to this :
"Very well," writes Mr. Music Merchant. "So what? Of
course community tie-ins will help us increase sales, but how
can I tie more music into the life of my community, and
what do you mean by community in the first place? Isn't this
primarily a problem to be handled on a national basis by the
big manufacturers?
Isn't the community you are talking
about the whole United States?"
This amounts to asking us to get down to cases. There is
of course a national aspect to our industry's sales problem
which only the large manufacturers and the trade associations
can solve. But there is a local side to the problem which must
be solved bv individual music men in their own communities.
Please assume when we use the word community in this
series that we are talking about the potential market of the
individual dealer. If your store is in a town of 5,000 people
it may be that market visitors, farmers, and courthouse-goers
regularly bulge your market from 5,000 individuals to four
or five times that number of families. On the other hand, if
you operate a neighborhood store in a city of two million peo-
ple, it may be that your potential market is no larger than the
market of your business colleague in the small town.
The Department of Commerce and many wholesalers, manu-
facturers, and trade associations have spent millions of dol-
lars and years of effort in exploring potential markets. To our
knowledge the only such research in the musical instrument
field was done in 1938 by Lawrence H. Selz and published in
pamphlet form for the members of the National Piano Manu-
facturers Association. What Mr. Selz found to be true of
the potential piano market we may assume to be true more
or less of the potential markets of other musical instruments.
The piano is at once the best known and the most expensive of
popular instruments, and while there may be more desire to
own pianos than there is to own—for instance—accordions,
there is certainly less ability to pay for pianos.
Mr. Selz discovered that in 1938 there were approximately
5,865,296 piano owning families in the United States, and that
there were approximately 10,983,700 families in the United
States who were financially able to own pianos. This means
that the piano dealers of the country have sold one-half their
possible customers.
"Very well," you may say, "but I never hoped to sell five
million pianos. What good does it do me to know that there
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