“I wrote out to my man and told him the straight
of it, that the agencies had done him a great injustice,
and for him to write me personally exactly how he
stood and that I would see things through for him
in the office; that my house meant him no harm; that
he was a stranger to them, but upon my recommendation,
if his statement were anything like what I thought
it should be, they would fill the order. At the
same time, I suggested that the bill be cut about half
for the first shipment.
“Well, sir, that man sent me in his statement
showing that he not only had merchandise for which
he owed very little, but also over four hundred dollars
in the bank. I remember the amount. His statement
showed that he had a net worth of nearly eleven thousand
dollars,—and that man told the truth.
Now, this information he would give me direct, but
the house was not able to obtain it elsewhere.
“Now, this is a case, you know, where there
is now good feeling all around and this is so just
because the credit man paid attention to the salesman.”
The outer door of the hotel was opened. In blew
a gust of wind. The green leaves of the big palm
rustled noisily as we scattered to our rooms, thankful
we were not credit men.
WINNING THE CUSTOMER’S GOOD WILL.
To win the customer’s good will is the aim of
every successful salesman.
“Ah, but how can I do this?” asks the
new man.
The ways must be as many as the men he meets.
The dispositions of men are as varied as their looks.
A kind word will win one man and a bluff another.
A generous deed will go right into the heart of one
merchant; another will resent it, thinking that the
man who does him a favor seeks only to buy his good
will. The one thing, however, that the man on
the road must do, and always do, is to gain the
confidence of the man with whom he seeks to do
business. His favor will as surely follow this
as day follows night. The night may sometimes
be long, like that at the North Pole, but when day
does finally dawn it will also be of long duration.
The man whose confidence it is slow for you to gain,
will probably prove to be the man whose faith in you
will last the longest.
Then, the salesman must not only have the knack of
getting the good will of his customer on first sight,
but he must also possess patience and, if need be,
let confidence in himself be a slow growth. He
must do business from the jump when he starts out
with samples but, to be truly successful, his business
must always grow.
A little group of us, having come back from our trips,
fell in together one day at luncheon in Chicago.
Our meeting was not planned at all, but before the
first of us had forgotten the sting of the tabasco
on our Blue Points, so many old friends had foregathered
that we had our waiters slide two tables together.
There was quite a bunch of us. The last one to
join the party was a dry goods man. He was a
jolly good fellow.
