Music Trade Review

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THE
JANUARY 26, 1924
MUSIC TRADE
REVIEW
11
Teaching Salesmanship by the Roll
How Demonstrating Methods in Selling the Player-Piano, Which Are the Base of Its Proper Salesmanship,
Could Be Improved by the Development of a Music Roll Which Would Place at the Service
of the Retail Salesman a Clear Demonstration of the Proper Principles
D
URING the last year or so there have
been brought out what may roughly be
called demonstration rolls, by which term
it is intended to describe music rolls contain-
ing text and musical perforations to the end
either of demonstrating the special points of
some reproducing piano or pedal player-piano,
or, on the other hand, of teaching the new
owner of a player-piano how to play it satis-
factorily. In the writer's opinion, this interest-
ing new notion has had less attention from the
trade than it properly merits.
It has been the constant custom of the writer
to say in these columns that the principle on
which is based all scientific ideas of selling
player-pianos is the principle of demonstration.
One does not sell a player-piano for the mate-
rial that is in it, but for what it will do. Rightly
speaking, the construction in its technical as-
pects is of less than no importance to the gener-
ality of the persons who look at a player-piano.
Such persons take for granted that the con-
struction is all right and would probably never
think of asking technical questions if these had
not been suggested to them at some time or
another by the talk of enthusiastic but unscien-
tific salesmen. It is what the instrument will
do which the salesman sells; and it is by prac-
tical demonstration that this is brought to light.
Demonstration, then, must precede all other
elements in making a player-piano sale. Unfor-
tunately, however, one of the hardest of tasks is
apparently the task of getting salesmen to at-
tempt to reduce their demonstrations to any-
thing approaching system. Of course, everyone
knows that each prospective customer involves
an individual problem; but that does not alter
the fact that the principles upon which the
player-piano's appeal are based never conspicu-
ously change. They remain substantially the
same, with all people and at all times.
These principles are, of course, founded upon
the love of music which normally exists in
every man or woman, and upon the fact that
to produce music for oneself is to every normal
person a pleasure.
What Is a Normal Person?
That one uses here the word "normal" sug-
gests belief in the existence of certain common
elements in the mental approach which each
person makes to music. A normal person in the
sense here adopted means a person who neither
is mad about music nor hates it, whose educa-
tion has been neither conspicuously superior
nor vastly inferior to that of the crowd, who
has the desires and the impulses which in gen-
eral we see to be common to the crowd. Such
a person will surely have some interest, greater
or lesser, in music. It may not be a great inter-
est or a very intelligent interest, but it will be
an existing interest capable of cultivation and
development.
When such a person, man or woman, comes
to a salesman to discuss the question of buying
a player-piano it is to be assumed that the la-
tent feeling for music is present in average in-
tensity and the business of the man who does
the selling is, therefore, as much as anything
else, to disabuse that person's mind of the
prejudices which have been accumulated there
by the generally bad use to which he or she has
heard player-pianos in the neighborhood being
put. And it is here that the demonstration or
instruction or selling-talk music roll comes into
the limelight.
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So far as we know, every such roll hitherto
brought out has been intended either for the
use of the owner in the home as an aid in teach-
ing the use of some special expression device
or pneumatic system, or else has been devoted
to exploiting the powers of some reproducing
mechanism. What we should now like to sug-
gest is a music roll specially intended to help
salesmen in developing the right sort of selling
method for pedal player-pianos in general.
There are certain things which every sales-
man should know and do. In some of the in-
struction rolls we have had the pleasure of
seeing and playing, the whole story of playing
the player-piano satisfactorily has been well
and simply illustrated and told; but what is
wanted now is something specially intended
only for the salesman, and not for the owner at
all. There is a considerable difference between
the two sets of requirements.
What the salesman needs most of all is to
know how (1) to teach the owner to play
softly and bring out good tone and (2) how to
do what he does without giving the idea that
to play the player-piano is very difficult. To
this end we should suggest that a salesman's
instruction roll should treat the following fea-
tures:
Plan Suggested
First: It should explain that the player-piano
is sold on the basis of what it will do and that
the whole art of selling really sifts down to the
art of showing the prospective purchaser that
to play the instrument tolerably well is neither
difficult nor a tedious task requiring much
practice.
Second: It should instruct the salesman how
to sit at the instrument, how to place his feet
on the pedals and how to adopt an easy and
natural pose; to teach him not how to show
off, but how to instruct the prospect in the art
of getting started properly. The sooner one
gets the prospect on the bench with feet on the
player pedals the better it is for the sale.
Third: It should teach the salesman, with
musical examples, how to teach the prospect
the difference between loud and soft playing
and particularly how softly and sweetly the in-
strument can be made to play.
Fourth: It would teach the salesman with
musical examples the musical meaning of the
expression signs and how to handle the expres-
sion levers and buttons accordingly.
All this, of course, is suggested to be placed,
in a mixture of illustration, text and perforated
music, on a music roll for the special purpose
of teaching the salesman how to sell to the
customer. Now, as was said before, player sell-
ing is demonstration more than anything else,
and, since the very best kind of demonstration
is that which the prospective customer does for
himself by actual experiment, with the instru-
ment under the salesman's guidance it is certain
that an instruction music roll setting forth all
this, and offering actual ways and means for
doing it, would be of immense use and advan-
tage.
This is not intended as an alternative to the
instruction or demonstration rolls which have
been mentioned, but as something entirely sepa-
rate, intended for the special purpose of teach-
ing retail salesmen how to sell.
Mason & Hamlins for
Pays Tribute to Workers
in Large Advertisement
Red D Steamship Line
Weaver Piano Co. Uses Full-page Space to
Show Appreciation of Veteran Workers in Its
Factory Production Force
Well-known South American and West Indian
Line Selects Mason & Hamlin Pianos for Use
in Ships' Salons
YORK, PA., January 19.—The Weaver Piano Co.,
of this city, through the use of practically a full-
page advertisement in the York Dispatch, a
local paper, made a radical departure in the
usual type of advertising of the piano manufac-
turer. This large space was devoted entirely to
a tribute to the workmen of the Weaver plant
and introduced a note of civic pride as well. Its
publication was appropriately timed to the event
at which recognition was paid to the long serv-
ice of Weaver employes. The advertisement is
captioned "York Mechanics Our Pride," and it
continues: "At this season of reflection we
proclaim to the world our faith in York me-
chanics and our pride in that particular group
which is engaged in the art of producing
Weaver pianos. By faithful and persistent ef-
fort they have succeeded in developing a piano
that is the admiration of those who are com-
petent to judge a piano impartially and purely
on its merits."
The succeeding paragraphs treat not only on
the Weaver piano, but on the many other lines
of manufacture in which York excels
In closing, the following tribute is paid: "It
is the art and genius in the mechanics who
have been associated with us, many of them
for over a quarter of a century, that have made
the Weaver piano possible."
An interesting series of retail sales has been
completed recently by Charles E. Brockington,
of the New York warerooms of the Mason &
Hamlin Co., who has placed several Mason &
Hamlin pianos in the salons of most of the
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Mason & Hamlin on the "Carabobo"
Red D Line steamships plying from New York
to South America and the West Indies. The ac-
companying photograph shows a Mason &
Hamlin upright in the salon of the new steam-
ship "Carabobo" of that line, which was
launched on frer virgin trip to PortO' Rico, La
Guagra and Maracaibo a week or so ago. The
vessel takes its name from the place where Gen-
eral Simon Bolivar won the battle for the lib-
eration of Venezuela.
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