CAN A WOMAN SELL?

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 173, 14 August 1909, Page 3

CAN A WOMAN SELL?

I think that personal experience is always the best answer. I am a woman, and I can sell! I used to sell a great

deal at bazaars and rummage sales before 1 married, and I was always cleared out long before the s'ales were over. All that past experience now comes into, and helps, my present business life (says a writer in Pearson's Weekly). Jt always seems strange to me that

any woman should have to be taught the art of selling. Personally, 1 find the art so interesting and so easy to practise that selling seems to me to be one of the many things that a woman does well by instinct.

There is "a great difference between the selling of a woman who has been laught to sell and who does it by ru'e and rote, and the selling of a woman who has a natural gift for the work. DON'T TALK ABOUT THE WEATIIKR Some schools, which are supposed to teach the whole art of selling, issue some very dull and elaborate treatises on "How to Sell." Hut if the pupils were to follow at all closely the elaborate instructions given in these booklets, 1 am sure that no one would ever be persuaded to buy. I remember, when I was a young girl, reading a book which was supposed to be a shopgirl's diary. In it she told that one of tlie Instructions she received from her employers was, that before she ottered anything for sale she must make a pleasant remark upon the weather! I

If you notice, you will find that in present-day shopping this remark upon the weather is still made.

For instance, if I enter a shop and say, "I want to match this chiffon—do you think you have this shade of color!" the saleswoman will probably answer, "I will see, midain— fliis weather is ivcry unseasonable, is it not?" And then she will actually wait for me to answer her before she goos to fetch my chiffon!

This immediately puts me off buying anything; for when I go to a shop it is to buy what I want as quickly as possible, and to talk of that, not of the weather.

I think that ns a rule men do not sell so well as women; they have not so much imagination nor such tact; they look more easily bored, and they arc not enthusiastic. As a rule a man has much less belief and interest in his wares' than we women have. A woman becomes strangely attached to the things she is handling and dealing in day by day, and it is quite natural that she should think them superior to any rival make. A woman cannot bear the thought that other people's things may be better than those she is selling, any more than a mother can believe that some other woman's child is prettier than hers. We women actually invest the things we sell with our own enthusiasm and individuality. We glorify our goods in such a manner that the customer sees them glorified 100, and begins to look at everything with the same enthusiasm that we who arc celling feel for them. TAKES CARE OF THE NERVOUS

CUSTOMER. Another gift a woman has is that of reading the character, or nature, of her customer. By what she reads she is able to judge in what way to approach him, and what sort of tilings to offer him. A woman's intuition and tact is of the greatest value to her when she is selling. She takes the nervoiK hesitating customer under her wing, and by gentle suggestions she leads him on, arid all the lime she is talking she is persuading liiin. by stibtlc womanly tact, to buy many things he did not know he hail any need of until she took him in hand.

As n rule, selling is a grim ull'oir to a man. It is' something that he has to do against the grain. He places his goods before his customer in a "take it or leave it" billion: whereas a woman will bring her whole gift of persuasion to bear—all her subtle art and womanly tact—in order to sell what she has placed before her customer. And because selling is such casework for a woman and such hard work for n man, much of this work must sooner or later fall into woman's hands.