The best commercial executives agree that the most effective selling

representative of a house is not the "natural born" salesman, but the

salesman who is made highly efficient by training. So every big,

successful business conducts a course in salesmanship. Thorough tests

have proved that particular principles and methods of selling are sure

to produce the highest average of orders. Therefore these principles and

methods are followed as standard practice in the sales department.

That is, in order to assure the success of an individual salesman, he

is required and aided to develop particular qualifications and to do

certain things that master executives have learned will get the orders

and hold the trade of buyers. The qualified professional salesman is

drilled thoroughly in tested principles and methods of selling. He is

trained to use this standard sales knowledge skillfully. As a result he

works in the field with complete confidence.

Why should he doubt that he will succeed? He knows his own limitations

and capabilities; knows the true worth of his line; knows there is a

market in his territory; knows how to sell in the ways that have been

proved most effective; and knows that practice of right salesmanship

will make him skillful in getting and holding business. Verily such

"knowledge is power."

Certain Success With the Selling Process

Your success in selling yourself can be made as certain as is a

successful career to the first-class professional salesman. You will be given the

principles and methods employed by the expert salesman in marketing any

kind of right goods. You will also be shown how to sell yourself by

adapting his practices to your "goods of sale."

When you comprehend, and employ as second nature, the usages of the

finest sales art, your success in life, like that of the master

professional salesman, will be certain.

Ideas of Goods Not the Goods Themselves Are Sold

If you have not called yourself a salesman, perhaps you doubt the

value to you of skill in selling. All you have to market is the best

that is in yourself. Your ambition may be to succeed as a doctor, or

lawyer, or preacher, or clerk, or mechanic, or farmer, or banker. You do

not see how salesmanship could assure your success, however much it

might help some one with commercial ambitions.

If you think it would not be worth while for you to master the selling

process, since you do not expect to engage in the profession of

selling, you misconceive the functions and work of the salesman. You

have thought he sells "goods;" and that as you do not deal in

commodities, you would have no practical use for the selling process he

employs to assure his success. But even the shoe salesman, or grocery

salesman, or real estate salesman, or insurance salesman does not really

sell goods. He sells ideas about goods. Similarly you sell ideas

about yourself in order to succeed.