if the clerk had started in on a eulogy of a new shipment of
English tweeds.

An intelligent clerk can usually tell when his customer is in a tearing
hurry. It is an unpropitious time to make suggestions. The clerk must
see things from the customer's point of view. It is permissible to
suggest something else in place of the thing he has asked for but it is
not good manners to make fun of it or to insist upon a substitute.
Recently a woman wanted to buy a rug for her automobile. She knew just
what she wanted, but the bright young clerk insisted that she wanted
something else. She finally bought the rug, but it was in spite of the
clerk rather than because of him. Too many salesmen kill their sales by
thinking and talking only of their product. The customer is not half so
interested in that as he is in himself. Good salesmanship relates the
product to the customer, and does it in such a way that the customer is
hardly aware of how it is done.

XII

A WHILE WITH A TRAVELING MAN

_In a Big City._ We will suppose that our traveling man has his
headquarters in some big city--New York, Chicago, San Francisco, it does
not matter--and that he has several calls to make before he goes out on
the road.

There are two kinds of salesmen, those who make only one sale to a
customer and those who sell something that has to be renewed
periodically. The first sell pianos, real estate, encyclopedias, and so
on; the second sell raw materials and supplies. The salesman whom we are
to follow is in the second group.

He has--and so have most men who do this kind of selling--a regular
routine that he follows, adding new names to the list and deleting old
ones as seems expedient. At this particular time he has several old
customers to visit and one or two new prospects to investigate before he
leaves town.

It is unnecessary for him to make arrangements beforehand to gain
access to the old customers. They know him and they are always glad to
see him. But if there is a chance that the customer may be out of town,
or if it is during a busy season, he telephones ahead to make sure. He
prefers indefinite to definite appointments, especially if he has to see
two or three people during the course of a morning or an afternoon; that
is, he would rather have an appointment to come some time between ten
and eleven or between three and four than to have one for exactly half
past ten or a quarter of three. It is impossible to tell how long