I had already formed the habit of reflecting on the cause whenever one of my letters was either distinctly effective or decidedly a failure. And as a personal salesman, when I failed to land an order, I often went out and walked the street in an effort to think out the cause before I called on the next prospective buyer. Sometimes I went back and frankly asked the unyielding buyer about conditions. Almost in variably I found that my failure to sell was due to the lack of knowledge of facts concerning competition or conditions within the buyer's business. And I frequently asked older salesmen in this business and in other lines about conditions as they knew them out of their larger experience. The result of this aggressive willingness to find out things was to give in a short time a big fund of the kind of information that serves so well to cut down the percentage of failures in the selling game.
4. Knowledge of conditions and of Merely a realization of such facts as the following is of little practical value: that nearly all of us dislike to admit financial inability; that we all like to be ad dressed by name; that we dislike to have our names misspelled or mispronounced; that we do not wish to be driven ; that we do not like faultless people, and so on. To insist upon such generalities is danger ous, if it leads the correspondent to neglect the many exceptions among the addressees to whom he writes.
The real solution of the correspondent's problem lies in his acquiring a knowledge of the economic con ditions that surround the individual addressee in his relation to the correspondent's proposition. This knowledge of the conditions that are responsible for the addressee's point of view will enable the corre spondent to judge how the average person would re act to those conditions and to make allowances for exceptional cases without 111,11Ch effort. Then, if he
really imagines himself in the addressee's place, he can take advantage of the latter's fundamental desires, of his likes and dislikes.
5. Another you receive the fol ..
letter : Dear Sir: You know that a big volume of business lowers the cost of production; and the price you pay for tailor-made clothes is fixed, first of all, by the cost of producing them.
Last year our sales were well over $1,000,000. Our shops rank with the biggest in the country. What does this mean to you? It means better clothes for less money. The small tailoring shops cannot compete with large-scale production.
And the fact that we are tailors to a whole nation of people makes it imperative that we set and maintain a high standard of service; for idle machinery would mean a correspondingly big loss to us. Therefore, you can rest assured that the service you will get from us will be satisfactory in every respect.
In fact, we guarantee unqualified satisfaction. Each gar ment we make is sent out with the following guaranty: "This garment, made by the Fisk Tailors, is guaranteed by them to give you entire satisfaction. If you do not feel entirely satisfied with any garment you get from us, we will take any amount of trouble and expense necessary to make you entirely satisfied." Such an unqualified guaranty assures you of our best effort to give you entirely satisfactory service in the first place; for we know how disagreeable it is when a customer has to complain in order to get satisfactory service.
Painstaking service to men like you has built this business into a large-scale producer ; and large-scale production is rTflected in our prices.
Our special representative, Mr. Marshall Zombro, in your town will be pleased to show you the latest Fisk models and fabrics. Yours very truly,