Furthermore, there is not the difference in selling cost that might be supposed between securing busi ness by personal salesmanship and obtaining it by any of the other methods which are frequently substi tuted for salesmanship.
4. Importance of personal salesmanskip.—Of the two subdivisions of the field of marketing methods —salesmanship and advertising—personal salesman ship must be looked upon as the more necessary. This relative importance must be recognized. The vast majority of business concerns spending large appro priations in national advertising today were firmly established as business successes before they entered into advertising campaigns of any appreciable size. Personal salesmanship with little or no assistance in the way of advertising placed them in a financial posi tion where they could afford to advertise and further develop their business. This is true of the Eastman Kodak Company, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, the National Cash Register Company, the Quaker Oats Company, the Northwestern Knitting Company and hosts of other enterprises. Today, of course, it has become quite common for a newly organ ized company to launch a big advertising campaign immediately, and this campaign, if effective, will very quickly establish a wide potential demand for the con cern's product ; but it is absolutely essential that the new concern have also an effective personal-selling campaign under way if it is to continue in existence. A newly established business can get along without advertising, but it cannot get along without efficient personal salesmanship.
It should be understood that this discussion of ad vertising and salesmanship has been included only to establish their relation to each other and their relative importance. Salesmanship itself will be discussed here without regard to whether or not it supplements or is aided by an advertising campaign; the principles of salesmanship remain absolutely the same in either case.
5. Merchandising machine.—Merchandise moves so smoothly from the factory to the ultimate user that we cannot realize how complex is the business mech anism which makes the movement possible. A huge factory in Illinois, let us say, turns out farm imple ments for users who may live anywhere between Maine and California, or even in foreign countries. The Illinois manufacturer cannot very well sell hoes direct to the truck farmer in Mississippi. He sells
his hoes to a jobber in Memphis who carries and dis tributes the stock of a number of manufacturers. The Memphis wholesaler sells, in turn, to a retailer in Meridian, Mississippi, who, since he is close in touch with the wants of the Mississippi farmer, car ries stock drawn from wholesalers in Memphis, New Orleans, Mobile and Birmingham, and from manu facturers who sell to the retailers direct.
Year by year, new and better appliances take their places in the Meridian retailer's stock. One after an other appear motor plows, seeding machines, cream separators, milking machines and power Cad] offering the farmer the opportunity to do something that he could not do before or to perform some old task more efficiently. Each new article is produced in one or more plants and distributed over the whole country, and sometimes over the whole world. In the case of each, the wholesalers and the retailers have to be persuaded to stock up with the new and improved article, and must be taught how to sell it. This is the work of that part of the business organism known as the merchandising machine—the distributing or sales end of the business.
6. Power furnished by the ship puts life and vitality into this mechanism, and makes the goods move. The manufacturer's sales man shows the wholesale dealer that he can resell the product at a profit. The salesman of the wholesaler does the same with the retail dealer. The retailer, in turn, paints pictures of better work done in less time and with less effort by means of the article offered, and so persuades the farmer to buy. The salesman, then, spreads the good news of how to get more and better goods for what one has to spend. The prog ress of civilization has meant, above everything else, that the use of the best material things has become more common. The genius of inventors and the dar ing of capitalists who backed them have resulted in modern mechanical processes for producing goods in large quantities. But these processes could never have been made to pay, nor would the cost of the ne cessities and comforts of life be as low as it is, if sales manship had not provided the wide distribution that warrants the production of goods upon a vast scale.