Business Marketing Advertising

It is estimated that the turnover of salesmen since the first of the year averages more than 1,500 a day. In other words, that many sales people either lose their jobs or quit every day. This is more than three times the normal mortality rate!

A Dodge dealer in New York, operating twenty sales people, states that only four of his men have been with him over six months. In the wholesale hardware field alone, it has been ascertained that 60 per cent of the sales people now employed did not have their present positions at the close of the war. And so it goes. Your line is no exception.

Well can we pause and wonder what conditions make it necessary for business houses to discharge sales people who have been with them for years, and who are personally liked by every official of the company, and in some cases are relatives of officials.

Why are sales people who finished former years with creditable records being given less exacting work or dis missed from the service altogether? Why is it that there are a hundred applicants for every position as a salesman, and only one out of ten is worthy?

You do not have to look far for the answer. It is nothing but plain, everyday fear. Most sales people today are licked before they start out to sell a bill of goods. They are victims of that little imp, Fear, who sits on the edge of every salesman’s mind, pleading, coaxing, and enticing him into doing the very thing that will lead to his downfall. He never loses an opportunity to plant poison in your thoughts. He is on the alert for every chance to snatch away the success you have won and cast you out on the junk pile.

You get up in the morning feeling fine. You fairly itch to get started. As you approach your customer, however, a persuasive voice whispers in your ear: “Never mind calling on this fellow now, you can see him some other time.” Or, it may say to you: “Pass up this buyer for the person down in the next block. I don’t think this fellow has the money.”

You can tell the voice quite easily, for it always counsels hesitation, delay, inaction. And its counsel always leads to the same end ? discouragement. You lose your smile. Your work becomes burdensome. The territory seems impossible. You feel like going back to the hotel and writing the house that the people in this city are not interested ? that everybody is against you, and that there is no use trying to get any business. But don’t fool yourself. Remember that great pilots are made in stormy waters.