CHAPTER IX

PUTTING IT ON THE MARKET

Long before you get your shop into running condition and you are able to fill orders, you and your associates will have talked over the best way that should be adopted to put your article or machine on the market so that it will bring in the largest returns in the shortest time.

Here again the method you will choose and use will depend on what you have to sell and the backing you have to sell it with. Just as there are only seven original jokes and all the others that you see and hear are worked over and out of them so, too, there are only a few _basic principles_ in the art of selling goods but these are modified into a thousand and one schemes.

~How Best to Do It.--~How? Aye, that’s the question! But even as you have had the genius to invent a new and useful time, labor and money saving device--there will, among the men you have surrounded yourself with, rise up one whose brains teems with schemes of ways and means to dispose of the factory’s output at the greatest profit and you may have a few stray ideas too as to how the thing can best be done.

In every business however small or large there should be frequent _conferences_ of the partners, or of the heads of departments, and to save time and to conserve energy it is better that these meetings should be held at certain times each week, or oftener, when all of the matters of the office and shop can be discussed freely and threshed out. Indeed it is the common practice of every business concern where there are a number of departments for the heads of them to get together every day in conference to learn the viewpoints of the others.

By this method every one knows exactly where the business stands for that day not only in his own department but in the other fellow’s as well and he conducts his part of it accordingly. This welds the whole business into an efficient unit instead of having it made up of a bunch of straggling ends. If the business can’t be put on a paying basis under such favorable conditions then you had better get a new partner, hire a new manager or call in the old sheriff.

~Agents Wanted.--~Hundreds of small patented inventions as, for instance broom hangers, pinless clothes lines and burglar alarm traps are sold by the manufacturers of them directly to small agents all over the country and who, in turn, sell them by making a house to house canvass. See Fig. 98.

The amount of your sales under this plan will depend on the number of agents you are able to secure and generally on the persuasive ability of the rhinoceros skinned peripatetic to sell the good housewife something which she truly doesn’t want. But should your invention be one of exceeding merit--and of course it is--then the path of the itinerant salesman is made glad and he sees a rose for every prick of the thorn he gets.

Agents can be had by running small ads in the daily and Sunday papers in the large cities under the classified head of _Agents Wanted_. There are advertising agents who will _run_ an ad for you in 15 or 20 papers throughout the United States, whose combined circulation runs up into the millions of copies and all for a $10 bill. An ad of this kind can also be run in such magazines as _Popular Mechanics_, _Popular Science_ and a dozen other like publications.

~The Mail Order Business.--~The two chief plans for working a mail order business are (1) by selling direct from your shop to the consumer and (2) by selling your product to agents whom you start in the mail order business.

To work the first plan there are two ways by which you can get the names of prospective buyers and these are (a) by running small ads in the papers and magazines and (b) by buying a list of the names of firms who make a business of classifying and selling them.

Regarding the first plan suppose you have invented a new _blood testing apparatus_ in which case you couldn’t possibly hope to sell it to any other class than doctors. Now you can buy a list of all of the doctors in Boston, or of any other city, in Illinois or any other State, or of all of them in the whole United States from _Boyd’s City Dispatch_, 19 Beekman Street; _Rapid Addressing Machine Company_, 374 Broadway, and R. L. Polk and Co., Inc., 87 Third Avenue, all of New York City.

When you get this list you can then send out to each doctor a nicely gotten up _folder_ or _booklet_ and a clearly worded letter, which you can have _mimeographed_, that is duplicates made from the original typewritten letter, and according to business rules and regulations these ought to make a noise like a lot of orders.

Lists of men and women in every line of business, profession and trade; including R. S. Dun and Company’s list which is guaranteed 99 per cent. accurate, can be bought of the above concerns that are classified to fit whatever article or device you intend to market. This is one way of conducting a mail-order selling campaign.

The second plan as outlined above is to run small two to ten line classified ads for agents offering to start them in the mail order business. See Fig. 100.

Your proposition to each prospective agent who replies is something like this: you will give him, provided he buys, for cash in advance, of course, one dozen, one gross, or a dozen gross of the product you manufacture, the exclusive territory of a city, a county, or several of them, or of an entire State as you choose and according to the quantity he buys.

Included in the price he pays, you furnish him with so many letter heads and envelopes with his name printed thereon as _manufacturer’s agent_; printed circulars or folders, a _series of follow-up letters_ and whatever else is needed to start him in the mail order business except the list of names and the postage stamps he will use. It is up to him to get these accessories.

~A Series of Follow-up Letters.--~By a series of follow-up letters is meant that a number of different letters, say six, are written up in such a way that each one makes a stronger appeal to the consumer than the one he gets before.

Let’s say that your agent sends a circular describing the merits of your _patent mailing box for eggs_ to an egg grower in the rural district and with it a letter stating how glad he would be to receive an order from him for a dozen mailing boxes, the price, etc.; if, now, in ten days’ time no reply is forth-coming the agent mails him a second letter, stating that he can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from him, et cetera and so on. If this brings no response the agent mails a third letter in another ten days saying that since he (the agent) has used several stamps in writing to him suppose that he (the egg grower) sits down and uses a stamp on him and so forth and _e pluribus unum_, as Artemus Ward used to say.

And so the letters are mailed until the series of six have been sent out at ten day intervals. The idea is that as the letters, each of which is a little stronger than the one before it, reach the egg grower with clocklike regularity the value of your patent mailing box for eggs will sink deeper and with more telling effect into his _cranium_ and that somewhere between the first and the last letter he will conclude he had better order a dozen or more boxes.

If the sixth and last letter does not bring an order the agent may then conclude that the chickens are dead, or that the roosters are sleeping, or else that the egg-grower doesn’t want the mailing box and he knows that he doesn’t want it. At any rate it is time for the agent to quit wasting stamps on him.

~Selling Through Sales Agents.--~Turning now to big business one of the most successful ways now in vogue to sell goods is the one adopted by automobile manufacturers.

By this method the manufacturer sells his product to his own sales agents and these in turn sell them to the consumer. Both the manufacturer and his agents advertise, the former nationally, that is he tries to reach all the people, and the latter locally, that is in his own territory.

The result of their joint advertising is inquiries and these the sales agent follows up by personal solicitation. Fig. 100 shows diagrammatically how the scheme works out.

~Selling Direct from Factory to Consumer.--~A large number of manufacturing concerns have built up profitable businesses by advertising in various publications and dealing directly with the consumer. See Fig. 101.

Many products, especially those in the nature of machines, can be sold by this method where they could not be marketed in any other way. Take as an example the larger sizes of hand power printing presses. One firm has sold thousands of these machines through the persistent use of small advertisements where only a few could have been disposed of through dealers of any kind, for the reason that there is not a sufficient demand for them in any one locality.

Any article, device or machine can be sold directly to the people through the medium of cleverly displayed advertisements placed in the right publications. When you get ready for an advertising campaign write to any advertising agent--and he also advertises--telling him what it is you have to sell and he will send you a list of the periodicals which will reach the class of folks who will be interested in your commodity and also quote you advertising rates. But of advertising I shall have something more to say later on.

Where you sell direct to the consumer you should also use, of course, a series of attractive _pictorial_ cards, circulars, folders and booklets which describe your offering in terms of glowing color and cold, hard facts. Don’t try to deceive your customers for no business can be conducted on misrepresentation and last, and besides it is just as easy to enthuse with the truth as it is to equivocate, _not to use a harsher and uglier word_.[6]

A series of follow-up letters should also be used and lists of the people you want to reach are sometimes as useful, and occasionally more so, in bringing results as advertising. In fact every art and device known to the system of business should be freely used where there are no middlemen.

~Selling Through the Trade.--~The older plan for a large manufacturer to dispose of his goods is through the retail stores, but this is a more costly and a harder way than by the direct method of reaching the consumer.

The reason for this is that the manufacturer does not deal directly with the retailer, but must do so through a lot of middlemen of whom there are in some cases not less than three and often more.

Figure 102 shows how many different concerns stand between the manufacturer and those who buy his goods; the manufacturer turns his product over to the _commission man_ who unloads it on the _jobber_ or _wholesaler_, who sends _drummers_ on the road, who make the _retailer_ buy it, who hands it out over the counter to his _customers_, who are merely acquaintances of his.

All of the middlemen make big profits while the manufacturer and the retailer have to be satisfied with a very small margin and the consumer knows that he is paying several prices too many for the article he buys.

The advantage, though, of handling your product through middlemen lies in the fact that you can very often get a commission man, or a jobber, to contract for the entire output of your factory, and sometimes a certainty of this kind with small fixed profits is better than taking a chance of putting a large sum into advertising with the uncertainty of large profits or of no profits at all.

~Getting Publicity.--~Going back once more to the time when you have completed your model and your patent has just been granted, it is often a good idea to give some _publicity_ to your invention.

By publicity I mean to get some _write-ups_ in the papers and some articles in the magazines and if you go about it the right way it will not cost you anything for space and sometimes the editors will even pay you for your contributions.

When you have reached the stage where you want some publicity write up a clear description of say 500, 1000 or 2000 words, depending on the importance and intricacy of your invention, and have a typewritten copy made of it; next have some good 5 by 7, or better, 8 by 10 photographs made of your model from different viewpoints. Small kodak pictures are of no value in obtaining free publicity for clean-cut, large pictures, count for as much or more with the average editor than either subject matter or written copy.

Now the kind of publications in which you will want your article to appear will hinge on the class of readers who will be interested in it. But let’s suppose that it is a new machine, or a new electrical apparatus of some sort or other. If it is a machine send your typewritten article to the editor of the _Scientific American_, Woolworth Building, New York; if your photos and article appeal to the editor as being new and novel he will most certainly print them in his paper.

In an article of this kind it is not good policy to crack up yourself or put in your street number, as this savors too much of trying to get a page or so of advertising in the body of the paper free of charge; your name and the city where you live are enough to include in the article, but in a letter accompanying the latter you can send your detailed address. And you can send in another article and photos to the _Engineering Magazine_, 140 Nassau Street, New York; _Machinery_, 140 Lafayette Street, New York, and other publications of a like character.

Should your invention be electrical, or have a single electric element connected with it, send your article to the _Electrical World_, 239 West 39th Street and to the _Electrical Review_, 13 Park Row, both of New York, and the editors of either of these publications will most surely and gladly accommodate you with space for your contribution.

The purpose of having articles appear in these _technical_ papers is not so much to sell your product as it is to give you an _authentic_ article in a standard publication which you can refer to and reprint from for distribution to those whom you may want to interest either as partners or shareholders. Reprints are also useful for _circularizing_ agents or consumers after you have your factory in shape to take care of the orders.

Should your invention have to do with mining send in your article and photographs to the mining papers, if it is in the notion line mail it to the dry-goods papers and so on for no matter what you have invented you will find one or more trade papers in that particular field who will give you the desired publicity.

After some good technical, or trade paper has published an account of your invention the daily and weekly papers in your home-town are apt to be impressed with the importance of what you have done and one or all of them will give you quite a write-up.

~Advertising.--~While publicity and advertising are one and the same thing in that both of them make known to the great body of buyers the merits of your invention I have _arbitrarily_ divided them into two classes calling (1) everything that is printed as straight reading matter in a paper and free of charge _publicity_ and (2) all that is displayed to attract the attention of the reader and paid for at space rates as _advertising_.

You can begin an advertising campaign with a very small outlay of capital by running a ½ inch, one column wide ad in ten or a dozen papers or magazines as a starter. To have your ad _displayed_ as you want it, that is the style of type and the illustration that goes with it, get your local printer to set it up and have as many _electrotypes_ made from it as there are papers you intend to buy space in. Then all you have to do is to mail one of these electrotypes to the publisher and it appears in his paper exactly like the type from which it was made and it can be used over and over again.

This _stereotyped_ kind of an ad which meets the reader’s eye in nearly every publication he picks up will finally get through the pores of the calcium salts which form his skull and impress the sensitive area of his brain, or, to use the language Evelyn doesn’t like, it _gets on his nerves_ and he will read it. Every time he sees it after that he will remember its message and then when the _psychological moment_ arrives and he wants your product he will send to you either for a catalogue and price-list or for the thing itself.

Larger ads should have the reading matter and the cut changed frequently, but it is always well to use some design, or a name (see