Masonry Magazine November 1965 Page. 24
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.
How To Deal With The Suspicious
In disliking to deal with the suspicious customer more than any other kind I know that I am like the majority of salesmen. He makes us feel so unworthy of ourselves, the suspicious man. And yet does ever a day go by, I wonder, without our having to come to grips with the suspicious customer?
Since it is our bad fortune to have him part of our lives, it seems to me the sensible thing is to learn to live with him and make him show us a profit for having to undergo the unhappiness of his presence.
So I am going to talk to you about how to meet and handle the suspicious customer.
I want to call in as a helper a noted business psychologist named Robert Mines.
"The first thing to know about the suspicious customer is that he will nearly always want to argue," said Dr. Mines.
"Don't argue with him if you can get out of it.
"Don't try to shut the suspicious customer up: let him talk to his heart's content. You listen.
"If you argue with him he will become more firmly convinced than ever that he is right, but given the opportunity to talk himself out, in nine cases out of ten he'll come around to the idea that you are one of the few people who is on his side!" If, however, you are trapped and must argue, state your case moderately and accurately.
"Then, scratch your head or shake it a little and say that's the way it seems to you," ran the Mines advice, "but of course you could be mistaken about it. And this causes him to receive what you have to say and, like as not, turn around and try to convince you of it, since you are in doubt.
"This, incidentally, was the method of Benjamin Franklin, and who was ever more successful in dealing with people than Franklin?"
You will never find suspicious customers a joy to deal with, but you will find them a profit if you follow this simple method.
Have The Courage To Ask For It
Every selling interview is a test of courage, he told me. The courage of two individuals is being tested. You, as a salesman, are one of these persons. The other is the prospect. It is just a question of who can out-gut the other person.
It isn't a very elegant way to state a subject, but the man who stated it thus, a good friend of mine, Gaylord B. Buck, was forthright and practical -and courageous in his own right.
Buck was one of the greatest personal salesmen and sales executives I have known; and from him I learned much of what I know about selling. And I like his slant toward selling courage as much as anything else he taught me.
His rule for courage ran like this: "Always ask for an order. If he turns you down, ask again. If he turns you down again, ask again. And keep on asking.
"You have to out-gut the buyer. He says no; you say yes; he says no; you say yes.
"Be stronger than the customer you talk to and in the end you cannot help but get enough orders to make you rich.
"But you can't falter, ask here and there for one; you have to ask, ask, ask, every time. Every time.
He Treated Them All Alike - Bad
A few years ago when the famous Stillman's gymnasium in New York was razed, much was made of the techniques of the operator of the institution for so many years, Lou Stillman.
Stillman's, in case you have forgotten, was a musty, dirty, smelly downtown gymnasium where the fighters trained in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke and profanity It was a noisy place. But the boys, good and bad, trained there, paying for the privilege just as those who watched them trained paid for that privilege.
Stillman was a hard-boiled individual whose code of selling was to give every customer a bad time. Stillman did. He treated them all alike, the champions and palookas. He boasted. "I treated everybody who came to my place bad."
In that he was like the clerk in a store who announced to another clerk "I treat all my customers alike. I do not use discretion with anyone."
Not A Dull Moment
You would think that of all forms of selling the milk routeman would have the worst, calling when his customers are asleep, but one man who was in the business for years found compensations in the requests customers made, notes like this:
"When you leave my milk, knock on my bedroom window and wake me up. I want you to give me a hand to turn the mattress."
"My back door is open. Please put milk in refrigerator, get money out of cup in drawer and leave change on kitchen table in pennies because we want to play bingo tonight."
"When you leave the milk please put coal on the furnace, let the cat out, and put the newspapers inside the screen door. P.S. don't leave any milk."
All in the day's work, the salesman opined.
Cut out this article and future articles and place them in your business file for further reference.
NOVEMBER 1965 © CHARLES ROTH. All rights reserved.
MASONRY • November, 19