Business Marketing Advertising

In an effort to determine the comparative buying activity of various localities, The Dartnell Corporation, of Chicago, once analyzed the records of sales people in nearly one hundred and fifty sales organizations.
Some strange facts were uncovered. A food product person making the upper Missouri territory declared that business was absolutely dead. A muslin underwear salesman felt the same way about the Dakotas.

Yet investigation showed that a sales person for Federal Miniature Lamp Company was piling up the biggest record in the history of his company in Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Utah and Colorado. In the Dakotas, a knit-goods sales person had doubled his sales during the summer months through his plan of educating merchants to selling sweaters in the summer as well as winter. He started the plan by taking a dealer to the circus on a warm day and pointing out the hundreds of sweaters in the audience. The next day the merchant put in a window display of sweaters and sold his whole stock.

In considering the southern states, it was found that a New Orleans sales person and a Houston sales person for the N. C. R. Company averaged 122 per cent and 120 per cent of their quotas during the summer months, winning silver cups offered by the company. A Burroughs sales person in the Joplin, Missouri, territory, was showing sales increases by selling banks on putting adding machines in the lobby for use of depositors. One of the Florida salesmen for Royal typewriters had been leading the entire country in sales, not for a month ? but for six months.

The same was true in every section of the country. A hustling New York salesman won a five-hundred-dollar prize as leader of the sales force in the contest of The Addressograph Company. In San Francisco a new salesman ? too “green” to know it couldn’t be done ? is breaking records for an envelope company.

In every territory reported as being in particularly bad shape, some sales people can be found who is getting a record-breaking business. Sales people in all lines who are leading their organizations are scattered all over the continent, proving there is no favored section where business is better than right in your own territory. This investigation shows conclusively that business is good everywhere for the salesman who goes after it the hardest.