SELLING LUMBER 



169 



So must you! NOW! Conditions in the world are absolutely 

 identical with those that existed at this moment one hundred years 

 ago ; one man capitalized aggressiveness. Today thousands of men 

 are actively upon the alert, planning to make a life's growth within 

 a few months not by the aid of horses, not by slow-moving boats, 

 but by the aid of the telegraph, the telephone and myriad means 

 of their own mental ingenuity. 



Some of these aggressive thousands will gather in Detroit, on 

 July 9th at the first World's Salesmanship Congress for the de- 

 liberate purpose of preparing to cash in on the golden opportunities 

 of our own hour. Those who come to Detroit will be the repre- 

 sentatives of one million two hundred' and fifty thousand pro- 

 fessional salespeople in the United States. Upon the efficiency 

 of those producers depends the prosperity of the rest of us. And 

 yet, there has never been to date any concerted effort by, or on 

 behalf of, salespeople to methodically increase their efficiency and 

 thereby add to the happiness of us all. Many of us have been 

 prejudiced against the possibility of perfecting a salesman, and 

 this bigotry has been a brake upon the wheel of progress. For 

 the most part we are loose and desultory in our selling methods. 

 We have considerable knowledge about all other forms of human 

 striving, but very little about salesmanship. We know definitely 

 just how to select horses, dogs and cows, but we haven't the faintest xhe Training 

 definite idea about how to select salespeople. We know precisely of Salesmen 

 how to educate stenographers, barbers and plumbers, but there 

 aren't many of us who know how to educate a salesman. We 

 know exactly how to manage students, convicts, and laborers, but 

 it is the rare man who knows how to manage his order-getters. 

 As a consequence, our American salesmen are, for the most part, 

 nondescript, undefined, questionable products, constantly trouble- 

 some to their employers, persistently pestiferous to the public, dis- 

 counted, discredited and degraded to the level of general nuisances 

 while foreign salesmen, in the guise of diplomats, ambassadors 

 and gentlemen of leisure, methodically selected, well educated, and 

 capably directed, are poaching at this moment upon what we have 

 fancied to be our protected preserves. Once upon a time these for- 

 eign salesmen used to be distant six months from America. Those 

 were the days when we had to sail around the world today we 

 think around it. Those were the days when America was arbi- 

 trarily conceded to have peculiar commercial advantages of its own. 

 Those were the days when vast stretches of country and the seas 



Neglected 



