Masonry Magazine March 1967 Page. 10
THE SELLING PARADE
by Charles B. Roth, America's no. 1 salesmanship authority
The Selling Parade by Charles B. Roth is another new feature added by Masonry. Watch for it in all future issues of the magazine for the entire Masonry Industry.
Cut out this article and future articles and place them in your business file for further reference.
Keep Doing What Made You Successful
"The trouble with most salesman is that they get tired of hearing themselves say the same things to prospects day after day," one of the greatest salesmen I ever knew, J. B. (Pat) Barry, Santa Monica, California, told me.
He added: "That often is their downfall."
Barry himself gave the same sales presentation, without varying a word, for thirty years and got rich at it. What is more, he rehearsed it nightly all those years to give it better.
Another friend, Joe Bowlin. Fort Worth, Texas, puts the same matter in a slightly different way: "Keep on doing the things that made you successful."
It is Bowlin's thought that all of us are inclined to forget, once we become reasonably successful, that we became successful by doing certain things. It's they that made us successful. But we drop them. We are like a man who forgets his old friends when money comes his way.
"But you can't drop your success practices as easily as you would friends," Bowlin says. "If you do. pretty soon you won't be successful any longer."
Another man who has observed and remarked the same thing is Dr. Kennest McFarland, who is noted as a speaker and as counselor on success.
"Perhaps the greatest danger confronting successful individuals," he believes, "is that they will quit doing the things or following the policies that made them successful."
And listen to this: "The hardest part of success is to keep on succeeding. There is always room at the top because the people up there go to sleep and fall off. This process is called 'resting on the laurels.'"
Ask yourself if you are utilizing all the techniques of selling you know and used on the way up or have you forgotten some of them in your complacency at being on top? Are you working as hard, telling as interesting a story, striving as long for new customers?
Is your attitude toward success right now? Do you still want it enough to do the things you have to do to get it? Are you still growing?
All professional salespeople face the crisis of forgetting the things that made them successful. But they remember them, and that is another evidence of their professionalism.
In overhauling your success attitude, a necessary procedure at intervals, Dr. McFarland advises:
Always look for reasons why you can do things rather than reasons why you can't.
"Remain as simple in your approach to the job as you can, because in simplicity there is strength and in complexity there is weakness.
And remember there is no market for cynics. If we lose faith in the fundamental goodness of mankind, we lose the mainspring of man's ability to serve his fellow men successfully."
Watch Those Shiny Pants
Burton Bigelow, sales consultant now retired, was a man of basics. He said this:
"Whenever you see a salesman whose pants are shiny and whose shoes are not well-worn, better fire him. He is sure to have the pants-and-chair disease. The seed of success is not in him.
"Did you ever hear the story told by the late Vash Young one of New York's biggest insurance salesmen? Vash Young says he will not come into his office until after lunch time. He does his important calling in the morning. If he gets to the office early. he soon gets up to his ears in detail and makes no calls, tells his story to no one, asks for no orders all with what results? He doesn't do any business!
"There's a certain salesman in a 20-man organization I'm familiar with who simply doesn't fit into any ideal conception of what a salesman ought to be and yet each month, he manages to come out somewhere near the top.
"How does he do it? Well, you see, he was trained in the pre-boom days. He doesn't realize that men don't get down and get their mail opened before ten o'clock. So he calls on some of his early prospects around 8:30 in the morning. The prospect is down early, so is the salesman that establishes a common bond of interest right there. He is never turned down on these early calls. He tells his story to a man with a fresh mind, makes a good impression, asks for an order and more frequently than not, gets it! He never thinks of knocking off early for lunch, or quitting at 4 o'clock, or staying away from prospects on Saturday morning. He knows just what my friend, Tom, told me: The only time a man is making any money for himself or for his house is when he is standing in the presence of the prospect telling his story and asking for the order.
"Of course, a word ought to be said here in defense of that representative who is required by his house to be 90 per cent Jack-of-All-Trades and only 10 per cent salesman."
Cut out this article and future articles and place them in your business file for further reference.
All rights reserved. March 1967 CHARLES ROTH.