The organization and control of a distributive sales force are aspects of sales management so prolific in peculiar problems that only the briefest and most general reference to them is possible. The keynote of the efficient sales organization is service to the customer, and the whole department must be planned and operated with this ever in mind. System and method are highly essential in a sales department ; but vision and imagination are none the less important. There must be a departmental objective, clearly de fined and positively expressed, towards the attainment of which all must strive. There must also be a clear-cut sales policy as a fundamental; and a sales department "procedure" to co-ordinate executive detail. When it comes to the control of the outdoor sales force, one finds two extreme schools of thought—one which believes in laying down minute procedure to which salesmen must rigidly adhere; the other which believes in letting the salesmen work in any way they choose, so long as orders in adequate volume are forthcoming. A course of action which is a happy mean be tween these two extremes is, however, found most generally satisfactory.
Retailing.—Retail selling, of course, presents its especial prob lems which are the more difficult of solution because of rapidly changing conditions. The growth of the "chain shop" idea, "super markets," the expansion of the co-operative store movement, the development of the departmental store—these are important fac tors in the tendency most clearly indicated in retailing today towards fewer, bigger and better shops. That shops are bigger and better cannot be denied ; that they will be fewer by the inevitable process of elimination by intensified competition on one hand and amalgamation and absorption on the other seems ines capable.
The business of retailing may be divided under two main heads —administration, which includes finance, and merchandising, which embraces both buying and selling. Our concern here is with the selling part of merchandising. One of the most important things to realise is that all trade is either "created" or "diverted." It is created when we make a customer of an individual who has never previously purchased that class of merchandise; it is di verted when we merely secure the business from a competitor.
There are three classes of custom—casual, attracted and permanent—least desirable in this order. Casual custom is least desirable because least dependable. Attracted custom may be the fruits of advertising, novelty or interest of window display, exhibitions, demonstrations, etc. Stores which are situated in recognised and popular shopping centres, though appearing to de pend largely on casual custom, are really exploiting attracted custom. In permanent custom we have the highest form, and the only form perhaps upon which real success may be built. Custom is made permanent by quality of merchandise (which embraces worth, value and desirability from the points of view of style and aesthetic appeal), quality of the service, the attentiveness, tact and courtesy of the assistants, and so on. The aim should be to convert the casual customer, first into an attracted customer, and then into a permanent customer.
All retail sales may be classified as "inevitable" or "worked for." The sale made to a customer who enters the store with her mind more or less made up to purchase that particular class of merchandise is an inevitable sale. Nothing but the absence of the article from stock, or gross discourtesy on the part of the assistant, will prevent the sale from being successfully completed. But if the assistant succeeds in interesting the customer in a second article, and in effecting the sale of that, then that second sale is "worked for," and its making is real salesmanship. The business which is able to show healthy expansion on inevitable sales only is the exception and not the rule. Most retail businesses are more or less dependent upon extra or "worked for" sales. Therefore, it is upon the making of extra sales that one concentrates in the teaching of retail salesmanship. The three sources of extra sales are (1) more customers, (2) more sales to the same customers, and (3) sales retrieved which would otherwise be lost. Admittedly, it is to advertising principally that we look to bring us the new customers to repair wastage and to provide the material of growth. None the less, it is part of salesmanship to give such complete satisfaction to those customers we have that they will return, and with them their friends. In making more sales to the same cus tomers, the object is to tap the customer's "potential" purchas ing power, as distinct from her (or his) "realised" purchasing power. Nothing savouring in the remotest degree of importunity is advocated; the forcing of goods upon customers is intolerable. The crux of the sale is the creation of desire to possess what is being offered sufficiently strong to overcome the natural reluctance to part with the price. It is absolutely wrong to sell a customer an article she does not desire, but perfectly right and proper to sell her a dozen articles which she has been made to desire, even though she had no intention of buying them when she entered the store.
The making of extra sales by retrieving sales which would otherwise be lost follows the eradication by training of such faults in the assistant as boredom, discourtesy, inattention, undue familiarity, lack of knowledge of goods, poor display, want of sales imagination, failure to overcome objections to suitability and price, and so on.
Training in retail salesmanship is being conducted with con spicuous success, and the following are the subjects it is desirable to cover by the instruction—the house policy, shop etiquette and deportment, sales routine, the layout of the store, personal hy giene and dress, general principles of salesmanship, the customer's mental states, personal attributes and qualities essential to success, how to handle the price factor, how to suggest other purchases, customers' buying motives, general knowledge of merchandise, how to handle difficult types of customers, effective display, typical sales difficulties, self-expression, commercial calculations, etc. This summary covers sufficient material for at least six months' instruction.
It can and should be much abbreviated for senior and experi enced sales assistants. (C. C. K.)