Above all, the sales manager should impress upon his salesmen the important fact that they should use the equipment to illustrate the selling talk and not the talk to explain the equipment.
13. S ales manual.—It is not unusual to embody in a sales manual all information on selling talks and sales methods, the handling of equipment, appeals to special classes of prospects, the reserve talks and an swers to objections. If a standard selling talk has been devised, this with its footnotes will occupy a prominent place in the manual. Even tho no stand ard presentation is included, the best methods of ap proach, demonstration and closing should be given and the various selling points of the product should be enumerated, in order that the salesman thoroly fa miliar with the manual may present his proposition in an interesting and convincing manner and may have at his command answers to questions and objections.
The manual should also contain information con cerning such office procedure and house policies as is necessary for the salesman. It may contain a history of the house and of the development of the product. Nor are articles of a purely inspirational nature by any means out of place.
14. A suggested table of nature of the contents of any sales manual will depend upon the requirements of the particular business. Follow ing is a suggested tab-le of contents for a complete loose-leaf sales manual. It has been compiled prin cipally from the sales manual of a New York concern.
1. House Policies.
2. Historical Sketch of the House.
3. The Inside Organization.
4. Discussion of the Principles of Salesmanship.
5. Detailed Description and Discussion of the Product (unless this is fully covered in other litera ture; or, the products may be so many and so va ried as to require a separate catalog or price list, and if so, this section may be omitted).
6. Selling Equipment.
7. Standard Presentation.
8. Notes on the Standard Presentation.
9. Selling Points.
(A) With different classes of business.
(B) With different classes of prospects.
10. Sidelights and Stories which can be Included in the Selling Talk.
11. The Answers to the Usual Objections.
12. Advertising Activities and Policies.
13. Instructions How to Organize and Handle Territory.
15. Manual should provide information and inspi ration.—The sales manual should be prepared not only to serve as a textbook for new men, but also to be a source of information and inspiration to the older men of the force. The sales manager should encourage the men in the field to read it frequently, so that they may be constantly reminded of the good selling points and the good selling talks which they may have for gotten. The preparation of the sales manual is a task worthy of the utmost care,, for if it is really to serve its purpose, it must be inspirational in tone and rich in human interest.
16. Form, of the sales mannal.—It is not necessary that the sales manual be elaborate in order to fulfil its functions. The form is secondary in importance to the contents. It is neither necessary nor advisable to have a printed manual where the force is small. Mul tigraphed sheets will serve as well. It is a good plan to have the sales manual in loose-leaf form, since this allows for necessary changes and additions, and also renders it possible to make up slightly different man uals that will be suitable for different classes of repre sentatives. For example, certain things included in
the sales manuals of branch managers may be omitted from that of salesmen or dealers.
17. Sources of material for the stenographic reports of the talks given in the training class, and those of the proceedings of the _annual sales conventions will serve as the backbone of the sales manual. If the concern has had a house organ for any considerable period it will be replete with valuable selling suggestions, which should be collected, classi fied and organized. These ideas should be supple mented by information gathered directly from the men in the field. We have already discussed some of the methods of securing information from the salesmen. It is not unusual to go about gathering this informa tion for the sales manual in a more formal manner. The salesmen may be requested to help get up the manual by contributing their best selling talks. They may be asked also to state the objections on the part. of prospects which they find most difficult to over come. The objections should, be grouped according to the vocations of those who made them, then the men who are most successful in selling to persons in these vocations should be asked to give their best argu ment in overcoming the objection in question. They may also be asked for statements of the methods that they use in approaching and handling prospects in their favorite fields.
1-1 manual prepared in this way meets with favor among the men because they feel that they have helped to write it, and that it contains a digest of all the methods of the best men on the proposition. That is most important. A theoretical or office-made manual —or what amounts to the same thing, one that is con sidered such by the men—is seldom, if ever, satisfac tory. The sales manual in its final form should repre sent the successful experience of the most capable men in the field. And if the reliable, steady producers of the selling organization come to refer to it as the "Bible," so much the better.
18. Example of introduction to a manual.—The following is the foreword of a sales manual which has been Nye11 received by a selling organization: This sales manual was not written in an office. It was compiled frotn the experience of you men on the firing line. Everything in it, after having been whipped into shape from the experience of the men in the field, was submitted to you for criticisms and suggestions before being put into final f o rm.
It is your sales manual, therefore. It represents at this time a complete statetnent of all that experience has proved best in the selling of our product. It is put together in loose-leaf form so that this statement will be true no matter when it is read, for the replacing of anything which time may put into the discard, or the adding of the lessons that the future will undoubtedly teach us if we are to. continue to progress, is a simple matter.
And to you men on the firing line is assigned the. duty and responsibility of seeing that this sales manual is always up to the minute.
A detailed description of the product to be sold would find a place in most sales manuals. But a detailed description of our product is omitted here because the subject received exhaustive treatment in the other literature of the house, which is hereby declared a part of this sales manual.