Music Trade Review
Issue: 1926 Vol. 83 N. 16 - Page 5
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Filling Station Bills to the Dealer
Measure Volume of Sales
The Higher the Gasoline Bill the Greater the Number of Sales With the Piano Dealers Covering Rural
Territory—The Experience of the Broadway Music Co., Superior, Wis., a Baldwin Dealer, Which
Keeps Three Cars Constantly on the Roads —Putting Pianos in and Keeping Them There
W
HEN you have a merchandising: prob-
lem to solve, the way to solve it is to
get back to the fundamentals. It is
no use scratching the surface and doing a
little superficial investigation; the remedy that
will come into being from such action is much
more likely to make the situation worse than
it is to make it better. Half-measures are the
curse of business, for they cost . a lot and
get you nothing.
Piano selling in these days is one of those
things which need a good, thorough considera-
tion of their fundamentals. If these had not been
disregarded for the past ten or twenty years,
the industry would not now be engaged in
planning a national promotional campaign, for
i' would not need it. The sale of pianos would
have increased at the proper ratio with the
increase in wealth and population of the coun-
try, and we would not have to go out and
create a new market, as we have to do to-day.
Getting away from the fundamentals of selling,
plus a certain amount of "high-hatting" the
customer, are the things that we have got to
overcome, and, strange to say, it is only within
ihe past year or two that there has been a
general realization of the necessity of doing
that.
Did you ever talk to a retail piano salesman
who was active in the trade, say thirty years
ago? If you did, three-quarters of his stories
of the good old days revolved around just one
point of the retail game—and that was getting
rhe piano in the home of the prospective cus-
tomer. Instruments were shipped to him from
the city where his warerooms were located;
he made his headquarters in a certain town
where he was a good customer of the local
livery stable; and from there he worked the
country around, getting his pianos in the front
parlors. And once they were in, he made an
astonishing number of closings. That sort of
selling was based on fundamentals, and those
fundamentals are as good to-day as they were
then. And the market where they hold good
comprises nearly 50 per cent of the people of
the country.
With the coming of the automobile, which
should have made this form of selling a much
simpler thing, it is strange that it started to
go out. Probably the dealer thought that the
automobile brought the customer to him, in-
stead of realizing that it brought him to the
customer much better than ever the old-time
livery "plug" did. He was wrong, for a car
in the farmer's barn never meant the farmer
in the dealer's salesroom. What it really meant
was the dealer's salesman in just so many
more farmers' parlors. By the flivver the sales-
man got there with the piano simultaneously,
could cover much more mileage and see many
more prospects. Rut plate-glass windows in
the warerooms too often made the salesmen
dislike the dust of the country roads, and the
dealer in the small tow T n forgot to consider
that the size of his gasoline bill is more or
less the criterion oi his selling methods' ef-
ficiency. For gas and gross volume have a
CM>
tar
close relation these days. Don't forget it.
There are some dealers who have never for-
gotten that fact. In the old days they never
kicked on the amount of the livery bills they
IUSINESS IS BETTER STILL
for Baldwin dealers whose sales con-
tinue to increase month in and month
out because of driving selling efforts. C.To-
day, as never before personal house to house
solicitation, systematic and persistent, is
necessary to produce sales. CI, Some of our
most successful dealers are resorting to the
old plan of loading a piano on a truck, going
to the home of the prospective buyer and clos-
ing sale then and there while on the ground.
O.These vigorous and perhaps tenacious selling meth-
ods are necessary to offset similar effort being made in
other installment lines, tt Now when the long winter
evenings are approaching is the time to drive home the
fact that music in the home should and does have the
strongest appeal because it makes for happy and con-
tented family life. OLPiano dealers who lie down and
refuse to try are continually losing sales to more aggres-
sive competitors. C W i t h all possible conviction, there-
fore, we say that right now hard work will produce sales.
ilhffffarr. every Baldwin dealer must make things hum these
last three months of 1926 in order to assure success and win
a beautiful Trophy Cup or one of the fine Waltham Watches.
UP W. Fount Sn-ttr
lal&uiin
"^
got; in these days the filling station account
is one they are always willing to pay. Some
of them have always been that way; others
have been rapidly joining their ranks. Such
a one is H. M. Brown, of Superior, Wis., who
runs the Broadway Music Co., in that town,
and who handles the Baldwin line exclusively.
Mr. Brown's gasoline bills are big, but so are
his sales. Here is how he does it, told in his
own words:
"Up in Superior we have three trucks, operat-
ed by three full-time salesmen. These men
load a piano on a truck and take it out to
sell it directly, working a territory of an
average radius of about fifty miles about the
town. To me that is the only proper way of
really obtaining a satisfactory volume of busi-
ness under conditions as they are at the present
day.
"We do some newspaper advertising and we
do some direct-by-mail publicity. But 90 per
cent of our sales are made directly off the back
of a Ford roadster with a loader attachment.
We have found that it is just as easy for a
.salesman to sell a $400 piano by this means
as it is for him to sell a $100 radioi set or
any other article of a similar unit value.
"It is far better, for it is far easier to make
a sale by taking the piano directly to a cus-
tomer than it is to spend a lot of money in
endeavoring to make the customer come into
town to the warerooms in order to hear and
see the piano. The logical and best time to
close a sale is when the customer's interest
and desire are keyed up to the highest point,
and that is generally when the customer sees
the instrument we are trying to sell him for
the first time. It only takes the salesman just
a few minutes to put the instrument in the
house, and then the family, which it is just
SCARFS
COVERS and BENCH-CUSHIONS
0. HUMS MF«. CO. Itt-I WMt !4tH M.
as necessary to sell as it is the head of the
house, sells itself and helps along the sales-
man's arguments. That is why it is always
our custom to get back within twenty-four
hours after the piano has been placed in the
house in order to close the sale.
"It is hard to get good piano salesmen, but
you always can get them if you are willing
to offer the proper inducements, and at the same
time back them up with all the co-operation
possible. The men we have out working for
us are on a 12 per cent commission basis, and
we furnish them with the cars One stipula-
tion is, however, that each man we employ
must make a sufficient volume of sales to bring
him at least $200 a month in commissions. If
he isn't able to do that, why, it doesn't pay
us to furnish him with a car and keep it run-
ning.
"A dealer wants, above all things, to be close
to his salesmen. If one of my men runs into
a streak of difficulty, and the best of salesmen
do that at times, and his enthusiasm begins
to give out, why, the best thing to do is for
me to get right on the job with him, go out
over his territory, take my coat oft", and give
him all the assistance and co-operation I can.
This usually does the trick."
Mr. Brown is a Baldwin dealer. Now the
Baldwin house steadily works with its dealers
along these lines, as witness the notice recently
sent out to them, and which is reproduced with
this article. That this sort of selling is al-
ways successful is shown in the remarkable
record which the Baldwin house has made
during the past three years with $5,974,246.81
for the first six months of 1924, $6,986,063.93 in
the first six months of 1925, and $7,394,200.31
in the first six months of 1926. Increases in
the total of shipments of units in the various
lines made by this house showed during the
first six months of 1926 20.5 per cent in Bald-
wins, 33.3 per cent in Ellingtons and 34.5 per
cent in Hamiltons.
A manufacturer showing increases in business
like this means that his dealers must show cor-
responding increases, and fundamental selling
is the thing that does it.
Verry Corp. Dissolves
The Verry Music Corp., Richmond, Staten
Island, N. Y., has filed a certificate of voluntary
dissolution. The proprietors of the firm are
Leon E. and Rose T. Verry and Charles and
Esther Tick.
Opens in Leesburg
Mrs. L. Crawford Van Orsdale, formerly of
l'.ustis, Fla., has just opened a new music store
in Leesburg, handling pianos, sheet music and
music rolls.
Consult the Universal Want Directory of
The Review. In it advertisements are inserted
free of charge for men who desire positions.
Filling Station Bills to the Dealer
Measure Volume of Sales
The Higher the Gasoline Bill the Greater the Number of Sales With the Piano Dealers Covering Rural
Territory—The Experience of the Broadway Music Co., Superior, Wis., a Baldwin Dealer, Which
Keeps Three Cars Constantly on the Roads —Putting Pianos in and Keeping Them There
W
HEN you have a merchandising: prob-
lem to solve, the way to solve it is to
get back to the fundamentals. It is
no use scratching the surface and doing a
little superficial investigation; the remedy that
will come into being from such action is much
more likely to make the situation worse than
it is to make it better. Half-measures are the
curse of business, for they cost . a lot and
get you nothing.
Piano selling in these days is one of those
things which need a good, thorough considera-
tion of their fundamentals. If these had not been
disregarded for the past ten or twenty years,
the industry would not now be engaged in
planning a national promotional campaign, for
i' would not need it. The sale of pianos would
have increased at the proper ratio with the
increase in wealth and population of the coun-
try, and we would not have to go out and
create a new market, as we have to do to-day.
Getting away from the fundamentals of selling,
plus a certain amount of "high-hatting" the
customer, are the things that we have got to
overcome, and, strange to say, it is only within
ihe past year or two that there has been a
general realization of the necessity of doing
that.
Did you ever talk to a retail piano salesman
who was active in the trade, say thirty years
ago? If you did, three-quarters of his stories
of the good old days revolved around just one
point of the retail game—and that was getting
rhe piano in the home of the prospective cus-
tomer. Instruments were shipped to him from
the city where his warerooms were located;
he made his headquarters in a certain town
where he was a good customer of the local
livery stable; and from there he worked the
country around, getting his pianos in the front
parlors. And once they were in, he made an
astonishing number of closings. That sort of
selling was based on fundamentals, and those
fundamentals are as good to-day as they were
then. And the market where they hold good
comprises nearly 50 per cent of the people of
the country.
With the coming of the automobile, which
should have made this form of selling a much
simpler thing, it is strange that it started to
go out. Probably the dealer thought that the
automobile brought the customer to him, in-
stead of realizing that it brought him to the
customer much better than ever the old-time
livery "plug" did. He was wrong, for a car
in the farmer's barn never meant the farmer
in the dealer's salesroom. What it really meant
was the dealer's salesman in just so many
more farmers' parlors. By the flivver the sales-
man got there with the piano simultaneously,
could cover much more mileage and see many
more prospects. Rut plate-glass windows in
the warerooms too often made the salesmen
dislike the dust of the country roads, and the
dealer in the small tow T n forgot to consider
that the size of his gasoline bill is more or
less the criterion oi his selling methods' ef-
ficiency. For gas and gross volume have a
CM>
tar
close relation these days. Don't forget it.
There are some dealers who have never for-
gotten that fact. In the old days they never
kicked on the amount of the livery bills they
IUSINESS IS BETTER STILL
for Baldwin dealers whose sales con-
tinue to increase month in and month
out because of driving selling efforts. C.To-
day, as never before personal house to house
solicitation, systematic and persistent, is
necessary to produce sales. CI, Some of our
most successful dealers are resorting to the
old plan of loading a piano on a truck, going
to the home of the prospective buyer and clos-
ing sale then and there while on the ground.
O.These vigorous and perhaps tenacious selling meth-
ods are necessary to offset similar effort being made in
other installment lines, tt Now when the long winter
evenings are approaching is the time to drive home the
fact that music in the home should and does have the
strongest appeal because it makes for happy and con-
tented family life. OLPiano dealers who lie down and
refuse to try are continually losing sales to more aggres-
sive competitors. C W i t h all possible conviction, there-
fore, we say that right now hard work will produce sales.
ilhffffarr. every Baldwin dealer must make things hum these
last three months of 1926 in order to assure success and win
a beautiful Trophy Cup or one of the fine Waltham Watches.
UP W. Fount Sn-ttr
lal&uiin
"^
got; in these days the filling station account
is one they are always willing to pay. Some
of them have always been that way; others
have been rapidly joining their ranks. Such
a one is H. M. Brown, of Superior, Wis., who
runs the Broadway Music Co., in that town,
and who handles the Baldwin line exclusively.
Mr. Brown's gasoline bills are big, but so are
his sales. Here is how he does it, told in his
own words:
"Up in Superior we have three trucks, operat-
ed by three full-time salesmen. These men
load a piano on a truck and take it out to
sell it directly, working a territory of an
average radius of about fifty miles about the
town. To me that is the only proper way of
really obtaining a satisfactory volume of busi-
ness under conditions as they are at the present
day.
"We do some newspaper advertising and we
do some direct-by-mail publicity. But 90 per
cent of our sales are made directly off the back
of a Ford roadster with a loader attachment.
We have found that it is just as easy for a
.salesman to sell a $400 piano by this means
as it is for him to sell a $100 radioi set or
any other article of a similar unit value.
"It is far better, for it is far easier to make
a sale by taking the piano directly to a cus-
tomer than it is to spend a lot of money in
endeavoring to make the customer come into
town to the warerooms in order to hear and
see the piano. The logical and best time to
close a sale is when the customer's interest
and desire are keyed up to the highest point,
and that is generally when the customer sees
the instrument we are trying to sell him for
the first time. It only takes the salesman just
a few minutes to put the instrument in the
house, and then the family, which it is just
SCARFS
COVERS and BENCH-CUSHIONS
0. HUMS MF«. CO. Itt-I WMt !4tH M.
as necessary to sell as it is the head of the
house, sells itself and helps along the sales-
man's arguments. That is why it is always
our custom to get back within twenty-four
hours after the piano has been placed in the
house in order to close the sale.
"It is hard to get good piano salesmen, but
you always can get them if you are willing
to offer the proper inducements, and at the same
time back them up with all the co-operation
possible. The men we have out working for
us are on a 12 per cent commission basis, and
we furnish them with the cars One stipula-
tion is, however, that each man we employ
must make a sufficient volume of sales to bring
him at least $200 a month in commissions. If
he isn't able to do that, why, it doesn't pay
us to furnish him with a car and keep it run-
ning.
"A dealer wants, above all things, to be close
to his salesmen. If one of my men runs into
a streak of difficulty, and the best of salesmen
do that at times, and his enthusiasm begins
to give out, why, the best thing to do is for
me to get right on the job with him, go out
over his territory, take my coat oft", and give
him all the assistance and co-operation I can.
This usually does the trick."
Mr. Brown is a Baldwin dealer. Now the
Baldwin house steadily works with its dealers
along these lines, as witness the notice recently
sent out to them, and which is reproduced with
this article. That this sort of selling is al-
ways successful is shown in the remarkable
record which the Baldwin house has made
during the past three years with $5,974,246.81
for the first six months of 1924, $6,986,063.93 in
the first six months of 1925, and $7,394,200.31
in the first six months of 1926. Increases in
the total of shipments of units in the various
lines made by this house showed during the
first six months of 1926 20.5 per cent in Bald-
wins, 33.3 per cent in Ellingtons and 34.5 per
cent in Hamiltons.
A manufacturer showing increases in business
like this means that his dealers must show cor-
responding increases, and fundamental selling
is the thing that does it.
Verry Corp. Dissolves
The Verry Music Corp., Richmond, Staten
Island, N. Y., has filed a certificate of voluntary
dissolution. The proprietors of the firm are
Leon E. and Rose T. Verry and Charles and
Esther Tick.
Opens in Leesburg
Mrs. L. Crawford Van Orsdale, formerly of
l'.ustis, Fla., has just opened a new music store
in Leesburg, handling pianos, sheet music and
music rolls.
Consult the Universal Want Directory of
The Review. In it advertisements are inserted
free of charge for men who desire positions.
Future scanning projects are planned by the International Arcade Museum Library (IAML).