CHAPTER XVII

THE MAN AT THE OTHER END OF THE BARGAIN

A Golden Rule for every salesman: “Put yourself in your customer’s place.”

When you are in doubt as to how your acts will affect another, you must ask yourself this question, “Would I like to have some one else do this to me?”

Nathan Strauss, when asked what had contributed most to the success of his remarkable career, replied, “I always looked out for the man at the other end of the bargain.” He said that if he got a bad bargain himself he could stand it, even if his losses were heavy, but he could never afford to have the man who dealt with him get a bad bargain.

There is no one thing that has so much to do with a business man’s success as the absolute confidence of the public. Confidence has everything to do with patronage. We like to patronize the firm which has a good reputation, and many prefer to pay more for articles in a reliable store that guarantees their quality than to buy similar articles at a much lower price in an unreliable store. People are afraid to go into unreliable places. They have a feeling that they will be swindled in some way; that the lower price only covers up poor quality.

You may bring customers to your store once by shrewd schemes and advertising, but you cannot hold them by this means alone. Unless you satisfy them, give them good value for their money, you cannot induce them to come again. But the satisfied customer is a perpetual advertisement. He not only comes again, but he sends his friends, and they furnish a perpetual lip-to-lip advertisement which gives stability and permanence to a business.

The man who thinks he is going to make a fortune without considering the man at the other end of the bargain is very short-sighted. In the long run, the customer’s best good is the seller’s best good also; and, other things equal, the man succeeds best who satisfies his customers best, who gains their confidence, so that they will not only come back, but always bring others with them. In the same way, the ideal salesman must impress his customers with his honesty, sincerity and frankness. He must be shrewd and sagacious without being deceptive. Trickiness, dishonest methods, may procure a man’s orders at the start, but before long he will find that in selling goods, as in everything else, honesty is the best policy.

A little while ago I heard a salesman say to a friend, “I don’t care whether a man sells my goods or not, I sell him every dollar’s worth I can, just the same. If he is overstocking the store, that is his business. I push my sales just as far as I can.”

Now, when this young salesman’s customers find that out, as, sooner or later, they will, they will distrust him. They will be on their guard against him, and ultimately he will lose their patronage.

Remember, Mr. Brilliant Salesman, that stuffed, forced orders are dangerous. They are boomerangs. When, by hypnotic over-persuasion, you work off goods upon a customer which he does not need, you are likely to hear from him again. The profits of a single such sale have often lost a salesman the profits of a life customer. There is nothing so disastrous as a disappointed or a deceived customer.

Many people are beguiled into buying what they do not need and cannot afford, because they do not know how to protect themselves from the expertness or hypnotism of unprincipled salesmen. Especially is this true of colored people in the South, whose simple, untrained minds are the easy victims of the smooth oily promoter or salesman.

I have known of negro families who did not have a whole plate, or a knife and fork in the house, to buy from unscrupulous agents plush autograph albums, books which they could not read or understand, pictures, picture frames, organs, pianos, etc., when they were so poor that every member of the family was ragged, and apparently only half nourished.

Many such agents and solicitors, who travel through the country, live upon the gullibility of people who are not mentally equipped to protect themselves against their dishonest wiles.

Every salesman is familiar with the “tricks of the trade” which the unscrupulous practice, but to which the conscientious man will not resort. His clean record, his straightforward methods, his reputation for reliability, mean infinitely more to him than to get an order by driving a sharp bargain, deceiving, taking advantage of, or hypnotizing his customer. His honesty, his character, is dearer to him than any gain, temporary or permanent, however great.

Nor is there any great demand for the man whose sole aim is to “deliver the goods,” regardless of the methods employed. They may be hired by cheap-John concerns which have no reputation to sustain, but high-class houses will have nothing to do with them. They know very well that men who practice real dishonesty in their mental methods, who use unfair means in winning confidence, only to abuse it, who make a business of overcoming weak minds for the purpose of deceiving them—they know that such men would hurt their house, injure their reputation. They know very well that the tricky, dishonest man who deceives or who over-sells his customer, is not a good man for his house.

The high-class salesman, like the high-class house, thinks too much of his good name, too much of his customers’ good opinion of him, to attempt to practice the slightest deception in his dealings with them. Their implicit faith in him, their belief that they can absolutely depend upon what he tells them, that it will not be the near-truth, but the exact truth, his real desire to serve them, these things mean infinitely more to him than the taking of an order. His reputation for straightforwardness, for reliability, his reputation as a man, is his chief capital. He is doing business without money; his only assets are his ability and his character, and he cannot afford to throw these away or vitiate them by dishonest mental practices.

Aside from the vital question of character, he is a very poor salesman who does not study the interest of the man at the other end of the bargain.