Exploring Contacts

A major part of the sales man's duty is to prepare the background for a sale. Without a selling shrewdness, a salesman's career cannot be made, and it is for the salesman to increase the field of his customers by attracting new customers. However, the salesman's job does not end there and he has to maintain old customers as also restore the confidence of those who had turned away from him earlier. A salesman who loses hope or is discouraged with setbacks is no salesman at all. He has to keep his composure in the face of all types of disappointment. He should never forget to smile nor lose his amiability. There is a sort of amiability which is equivalent to flattery. The salesman has to avoid that, but in its place he should get himself really concerned with the prospective customer.

It is not that a salesman's, job ends with the sales talk either at the office or elsewhere. Rather, a salesman's is a wholetime occupation, a twenty-four hour plus service to his concern and to his own progressive schemes. A salesman may meet a pros­pective customer on the street, at the market-place or at some other place off-hand and at once he has to switch to his best manners and goodwill for this prospect. Such a behaviour should be sincere and natural and should em anate from the core of his heart and not be shallow or half-hearted. It is also not required for the sale sman to press and pester a prospective customer for a sale, but on the contrary, he should realise the difficulties of this customer and should try to solve them with best practical assistance and suggestions. Since a sale is mainly the result of contacts, the salesman has to go on expanding the area of such contacts and for this he has not only to take into view the immediate sale of the product but the possibilities of future sales. He has to spread the knowledge about the good qualities and the localities of its availability and of the things that he is selling and if he is good in paving the way for such sales at a time in some near or distant future, he may be said to have been doing his duties efficiently. Unless, therefore, a salesman takes his profession with the best of intentions and with utmost sincerity and seriousness, he can hardly shine in his line, because bis taste for his job and the nature of his duties will supply him with the relevant props with which he will be able to increase the extent of his influence.