WOMAN—THE IDEAL "SALESMAN"

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 11, 1 May 1925, Page 23

WOMAN—THE IDEAL "SALESMAN"

HERE IS A SUGGESTION FOR A CAREER FOR OUR GIRLS

WOMAN IS THE BORN COMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. SALESMANSHIP IS PERSUASION SUBLIMATED TO A SCIENCE. THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY HAS EQUIPPED WOMAN PERFECTLY FOR THE WORK OF PERSUADING MEN

WTO MAN is the born commercial traveller. By training, instinct and inheritance, she is the ideal salesman. Salesmanship is persuasion sublimated to a science. And the evolution of society has equipped woman perfectly for the work of persuading man. Man, in barring her for six thousand- years from the activities of the marketplace, has trained her into a selling-agent who surpasses him in every phase of the sellinggame. Civilisation has already made salesmanship her life. Mentally, emotionally and physically she is, from her earliest childhood, a finished persuader. She is, before she tries her initial deal in commerce, an able trader. Since the world began, man’s requirement of woman has been, in effect: “Put yourself over! Catch my interest. Hold that interest. Having interested me, display to me such fineness of sympathy, such quickness of understanding, such thorough responsiveness, that I will not be satisfied until I have you for my own. Persuade me that I shall have the best of it when I clinch the bargain to take you out of your home and put you into mine, paying for the privilege by working my fingers to the bone until the day of my death!” When it comes to selling, there is nothing in business, modern, mediceval, or prehistoric, to equal such a trade as that! Woman has been engaged in it for thousands of years with satisfying, not to say dazzling, success. In “putting herself over,” in “selling herself” in the highest sense of the word, she has registered astounding achievements. Woman —the Salesman It is in psychology, therefore, that we find the trustworthy and final answer to the query: “Is woman a

better seller than man?” And it is well to remember that here, as everywhere else, psychology is merely another name for common sense: it consists of the facts discovered by a thorough and scientific study of the race’s experience. Without a reference to the number of women who to-day draw down big salaries and fabulous commissions because of their ability as salesmen, without quoting the industrial leaders and business kings who are prolix 'a their testimonials to woman’s superiority in the selling game, without listening by name to women who are doing the selling done by men ten years ago, and incidentally doing it —without any of those dry and dusty proofs, it is easy for any, self-reliant young woman, contemplating a self-sup-porting career, to see that she is, at the very start, an expert seller of goods, a shrewd trafficker in all those articles which men buy and sell. She can see it by examining her own psychology, by realising her natural and instinctive talent for the wo k. 1 here comes, of course, this objection from the man sceptic: “In ‘putting herself over,’ in persuading a man that he will do well to expend all he has in order to win and keep her as his wife, a woman has , to her credit only an emotional performance, a social triumph.” That is entirely true. But this also is entirely true: Selling is pre-eminently the social side ot , business. The consummation of a s le is the most emotional occurrence in commercial life. It is an

event which cannot come into being without emotional prelude and accompaniment. The one who sells is actuated by a desire to get money for the object sold; and the one who buys either consciously needs the article bought or must be persuaded that he needs it, and —an essential point— be made to feel that in buying he is “getting the best of the deal.” The seller who, on entering an office, can arouse interest in the “prospect” and, when departing, can leave elation in the prospect’s heart is the king—or the queenof sellers. The Gift of'Versatility H ERE is the explanation of wois the explanation of woA man’s sovereignty in the selling world: emotionally she is quicker, stronger, more understanding and more versatile than man. The woman who marries a man does so because, in the beginning, she caught his interest. The woman who sells a bill of goods to a man does so because, in the beginning, she interested him in her “line”— and she interested him in her “line” because she first, in some degree, interested him in herself. That applies with equal force to the man who is selling. No salesman can interest a “prospect” in an article if the prospect is prejudiced against the salesman. The prospect’s attitude toward the article is influenced by his attitude toward the representative of the article, the salesman. There has yet to be born' the man whose mind cannot be reached through his emotions. Invariably his

judgment, his intellect, is swayed by his personal likes and dislikes, his aversions and admirations. Mr. Flannery, of Pittsburgh, U.S.A., is president of a company which manufactures five times more radium than is produced by all other manufacturers of that product the world over. When he started out to market radium, he encountered the problem of educating his prospective customers as to what could be done with radium. After educating them, he had a chance to sell his radium. Incidentally, an amount of radium equal in bulk to threequarters of an ordinary cigarette was worth at that time one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. His experience made him, in my opinion, an expert on what is good salesmanship. “My idea of a top-notch salesman,” he said, “is this: a man snappily but not loudly dressed, one who makes a good impression the moment he enters an office, one whose bow and words of greeting are attractive, whose voice is properly pitched, not rasping nor supercilious nor mechanical, whose talk about his goods is as entertaining and persuasive as it is full of information, whose knowledge of human nature is such that he can avoid making even one uninteresting remark, and whose instinct is such that he can handle with equal skill all sorts of men, the grouch and the joker, the young and the old, the easy-going and the dignified, even the apparently repellent man. “And remember this: when I employ a salesman, I look for a man who is as good in leaving an office as he is in going into it. A word too much, a sentence too long, talk merely for talk’s —any of these things has spoiled many a deal. I want a man who knows when to

leave. A salesman learns that after a while, gets it by instinct, perhaps.” “Do you think a woman is a poorer salesman than a man?” I asked him. Then spoke the Irish in him. . “Is a woman,” he retorted, “harder to look at than a man?” Gjfrom 'Poverty to Affluence T HE definition given by one who definition given by one who ' might be termed the radium king shows how largely salesmanship is an emotional undertaking. The sel- , ler’s clothing, voice, gestures and bearing are all factors in the volume of the day’s business. In this field personality, one’s emotional reaction to another’s mood or attitude, is supreme. No one may be emotionally inept and go high in the selling profession. An inventor, dreaming a new thing and struggling to perfect it, may be the most uncouth social animal imaginable, and yet succeed financially. An expert accountant may achieve a brilliant career with his nose thrust into books. A man may outline on paper a big business campaign, or draft a selling-plan to be carried out by others, or set down valuable ideas on efficiencyand yet never concern himself about how he can or cannot appeal to all sorts of people. But the one who sells, the one who makes business, is compelled to regard his personality as the ally of his intellect; he must develop the one no less than the other. The expression of ideas is productive in proportion to the degree in which the prospect’s “feeling” is pleasant. That fact brings up the experience of a young woman who, without a day’s training or preliminary work, travelled in less than a year all the way from poverty to affluence. Her home broken up. her financial resources practically nil, she came into my office one morning several years ago, ostensibly for professional advice as to how she could “cure a killing nervousness” and get her thoughts away from her troubles. Like so many people seeking advice, she really wanted nothing ex-

cept the approving and reassuring statement: "You’re right in what you’ve already decided to do. Go ahead!” "I m going to think up something the public wants,” she announced, “and then present it in an interesting way. I know I can sell! Anybody who has enthusiasm and energy can sell; and I’m full of both She was back in two days. "What women want,” she said, “is to be better-looking. And I am going to sell them something that will beautify them, give them a better complexion.” 'jpHREE months after that she related this : "I advertised a face cream which I got together after learning all I could about the other lotions on the market. The business got too big for my means. Accordingly I took my proposition to two business men. I’ve talked both of them into not only willingness but even eagerness to put the cream on the market in a big way. “It’s a funny thing,” she added, “how easy it is to interest men in a business proposition that looks good. Frankly, I think I got their interest at the start partly because I was a woman. I could see how they sprang to attention, so to speak, when I entered their offices. “And pretty soon I knew what interested them. One of them was a great admirer of this black fur coat I’m wearing now. The other liked better a severely tailored black broadcloth suit.” “How did you find that out?” I inquired. “Oh,” she said carelessly, “I don’t know. A woman simply ‘gets’ that sort of thing. She doesn’t have to figure it out. It’s like what another woman told me the other day. I asked her what she considered her best method of selling, or her best asset in getting results. “The effect,” she laughed, “that my cold bath every morning has on my complexion— and a darkblue tailored suit tempered by a

smile. Men are impressed by a vigorous, efficient manner, and good health. The baby-doll type has no place in business.” Emotion : Man s Bane '’J'HE young woman who gave me ’this story and her own bore out the correctness of Mr. Flannery’s definition of a good salesman. She recognised the value of personality in an office. While she would not have entertained for a moment an idea of the mildest of flirtations with either of the men who had been persuaded to finance her product, she realised fully the tremendous power of sex, the advantage of being a woman, when it came to a matter of talking business with a man. It cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that in the office itself, where “everything is business,” the pleasing personality is the best seller, and the socially expert person is always the winnerassuming, of course, a fairly similar quality of the goods offered. “The successful business man,” the experts say, “concentrates on the matter in hand. He is absorbed in the facts and figures you have laid before him. Never delude yourself with the idea that he will buy ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff because he likes you or because you have pleased him with a joke or an epigram. Business is business. And he buys to benefit himself, not to do you a favour.” All that is perfectly true, in a way. But the psychologists discovered long ago, and can prove it to you any day in less than a minute, that a man cannot make of himself under any circumstances a thoroughly intellectual machine. His emotions are always at his elbow; his feelings are constantly whispering over his shoulder and influencing his conduct. He does not, of course, intend to let your interests obscure his for a moment. In fact, if he did become as slack as that in his business meth-

ods, he would soon be begging instead of buying. But the seller’s personality, trick of presentation, timbre of voice, skill in keeping quiet at the right time, swiftness in recognizing the moment propitious for slipping in a persuasive word — those are the little things which are sure to influence his “cold intellect.” It is through you that the proposition with all its facts and figures has been presented to him. He has been looking at your “line” and its prices through your voice, eyes, smile and gestures. You are, necessarily, the spectacles, the only spectacles, through which he can at that moment obtain his view of the proposed deal. If the glass through which he looks is dingy and rough and such as to make him uncomfortable, you lose. If the spectacles give him an idea that everything is couleur de rose, that it is delightful to use such spectacles, you win. That is psychology, common sense, fact, experience, human nature—indeed all of those! An Age-Old T° illustrate: according to the historians, we have been on this earth a good many thousand years. For all that time, then, there have been at work two forces, or tendencies, to make a woman the person best qualified to persuade a man that he should buy what she wants to sell; and for the same number of years these forces have been training man to let woman persuade him to buy what she wants to sell. I refer to woman’s lifelong campaign to interest man, and man’s instinctive hope that she will interest him. “Sell me yourself,” said man in the beginning, assuming world-mas-tery; “but after that, stop! I’ll do the rest of the buying and selling.” Back of every business activity is self-interest. A man plans this or that because he figures that it will get more for him than it will give to another. And back of man’s pro-

hibiting woman from the work of salesmanship was self-interest, selfishness. The exclusion was decorated and adorned with much talk of chivalry, woman’s weakness, and the fair sex’s inability to go against the hard life of salesmanship. All that was camouflage. Man kept woman out of trade because instinctively he feared her competition. He kept her out of the field exactly as he would like to keep other men out of the field. In his heart, if he had examined it, he would have found that his exclusion of woman from buying and selling came from his desire to keep down the number of his possible competitors. He knew her skill. Woman was a person who made the “big trade,” matrimony, with extraordinary ease. What could she not do in commercial fields, the world of lesser trades? Such was his subconscious reasoning instinct. And his instinct was right. Gharm as a eßusiness Asset A WOMAN, becomingly gowned, dressed so that she mingles with an air of business efficiency all her feminine charm, arouses the interest, certainly captures the attention, of the average business man the moment she enters his office. That has been woman’s business since the dawn of history. She brings to the task everything that she has learned and everything that has been implanted in her by a heritage of centuries. It is no new job for her. She has to please. If she does not please, she loses. On top of this, she has that incalculable help, the man’s tendency to expect her to please him. Thus, in the first minute of the meeting, she has doneshe and inheritance and instinct and history—what some men might do in half an hour, what others can never do. She has her prospect always in an attentive mood, most of the time in a receptive frame of mind. Selling experts say that many a sale has been prevented by the salesman’s making the fatal mistake of talking too much or of lugging into the conversation subjects which not only do not interest the prospect but actually bore_him. The clever woman will never do this. Trained to say the right thing, she has learned long ago to detect immediately the incipient boredom or the dawning displeasure of the man to whom she talks —and at the first sign of boredom her thoughts are off, swift as a bird, in search of an idea which will again rivet his attention. Here, as in other situations where instinct and feeling furnish the key to the best thing to say or the most pleasant thing to do, the woman far surpasses the man. This is easily demonstrated. Successful selling is the direct result of ability to hope. Big sales come from a resilience of spirit. One’s optimism must be so supreme that it makes success a reality in advance and inspires one with the power sufficient to make the prospect buy!

And here again woman’s heritage enriches her. She is born into the world to hope. Countless generations of women before her have learned to tread discouragement underfoot, to make out of the filmiest appear-

ance of hope a whole structure of “things about to happen,” to imagine a world of wants “just about to be fulfilled.”

ped to realise instantly when the discussion of a subject must be changed if the other side’s interest is to be maintained or renewed, she always has “on the rim of her consciousness” the facts which will fill

the need whose existence her intuition announces to her. You are good at the business of selling, exactly in proportion to how skillful you are in social contact. The woman who can receive guests in a charming way can feel very sure that she can interest the man whom she approaches in his office. She whose wit and charm dominate

a dinner-table can start out on the road with absolute confidence that she will get a sympathetic hearing from the merchant to whom she wants to sell. Selling, to give it another definition, is the art of making a man willing to hear you—willing to hear you in regard to your goods, willing to be convinced that he needs the goods you want to sell, and finally, leaving him hoping, after he has made the purchase, that you will call again. In inducing these various frames of mind, a woman is the better performer. M UCH has been written for and has been written for and against a woman’s using her sex as a help in business. The discussion is futile. A woman cannot help capitalising in business the fact that she is a woman. Indeed, if a woman tried not to capitalise it, men would not permit it. They could not permit it. Human nature, the attitude of the sexes toward each other, cannot be changed by an economic upheaval. No matter what the surface indications are, no matter what may be pretended, the psychology of the thing remains. It has been firmly established by the thousands of years the race has existed. In his heart, the man says: “Here comes a woman into my office: I must give her at least polite attention—because she is a woman.” In her heart, the woman says: “Here is a man to whom I have to talk, I can count on his attention—because I am a woman.” Each one realizes unconsciously how the other feels, and each knows that the other knows. Woman’s charm, of appearance or personality, is provocative of man’s interest—and man, whether he fully realizes it or not, is generally ready to be interested. From that situation develops the fact, as true to-day as it was five thousand years ago, that in the prompt capture of attention, the woman has the better chance to win. Here is one more reason why a woman is a better seller than a man, particularly on the road: a man’s psychology is such that he is slow in throwing off depression. The average man gets bad news in his morning mail, and the chances are ten to one that the discouraging or demoralising information he receives will pull down his efficiency for the entire day. A woman, on the other hand, can accomplish the rebound from despondency to cheerfulness with amazing rapidity. She has been doing that all her life. All the past generations of woman, her mother and her grandmothers, were forced to run up the ladder of emotional adjustment with an agility utterly beyond the usual ability of men. A young girl can always turn with apparent ease, in a fifth of a second, from the tragedy of a drunken father on the dining-room floor to the romance of a possible Prince Charming in the parlour, or from the heartbreaking poverty which denies her silk stockings to an absorbing interest in making old lace.