214 



SELLING LUMBER 



dustries. It will pay all of us to look through these books. I am 

 quite sure you will find one or two people listed here who use 

 lumber. Take a city like one I make, how many concerns do we 

 call on, twenty or twenty-five perhaps. Well, aside from the yards 

 and planing mills, there are sixty-four factories that I know buy 

 yellow pine in carload lots, twelve box factories that use yellow 

 pine and sixteen builders' supply companies that use yellow pine 

 lath. One hundred and sixteen concerns that I know of to call on, 

 and I expect fully half as many more that I never heard of and 

 this town is usually worked in three days. 



There are probably twenty jobbers located in this town and 

 I know at least six or eight men who sell lumber on commission 

 here and hardly ever leave the town. One young fellow I know 

 making this same town told me once that he called on a few peo- 

 ple, but the town was drummed to death. I asked him if he called 

 on any of the factories and he told me three or four, but if he 

 had to call on all of them he wouldn't have time to see his regular 

 trade. Anyway, he said, this factory business ought to be a sep- 

 arate business from the regular lumber business. Well, I could tell 

 you of two concerns who have made a separate business of it and 

 grown rich doing it. Get a memorandum book and list these dif- 

 ferent concerns with the kind of stock they buy, and when they 

 buy, and by keeping in touch with them you can gradually work 

 in, provided always your sawmill will occasionally go to the 

 trouble to get something out special for them, when they want to 

 buy fifty or one hundred and fifty cars for delivery through the 

 year. 



While you are expected to cover your territory and see as 

 many customers as possible in the week, don't hurry your men too 

 fast, if you feel there is a possibility of landing an order. If you 

 get the fidgets and keep pulling your watch out or following your 

 man around the yard while he is waiting on someone, he will get 

 Don't iHurry nervous also, and take 'the first chance he can get to tell you he 

 the Customer is not needing a thing, and so help you to make your schedule. The 

 probabilities are that the next fellow who calls on him will get 

 an order for a car of yellow pine and will be told that "Bill Smith 

 was here this morning and would have had the order, but he was 

 too anxious to make a train to give me time to see what I wanted/' 

 and this yard man will lay it up against Bill for a long time. In 

 the larger towns you will find the buyer will like quick action, and 



"Separate" 

 Business 

 That Became 

 Regular 

 Business 



