entals of social good manners as well as business good manners.
Rarely, perhaps never, does he succeed. For the successful salesman is
the one who can put himself into his prospect's place and let him know
that he has made a study of his needs and is there to help him.

Carefully prepared approaches and memorized speeches are worth much to
the beginner, but an agility in adapting himself is much more important.
Ludendorff failed to get to Paris because his original plan was upset
and he could not think quickly enough to rally the German army and
attack from a different angle. Most salesmen have to talk to men who are
continually interrupted to attend to something else. And most business
men know what they want, or think they do, and when they ask a direct
question they want a direct answer. Many a young salesman has ruined
himself so far as his career was concerned because he went out with
instructions to keep the interview in his hands and every time the man
he was "selling" asked a question he passed airily over it and kept
stubbornly on the road he had mapped out for himself. The salesman
cannot think in theoretical terms; he must think concretely and from the
point of view of the man he is trying to convince. As one very excellent
salesman has put it, he must get the prospect's own story and tell it to
him in different words, and if he can actually show him a way to
decrease expenses or to increase output he will win not only his
attention, but his heart as well.

The salesman must be absorbed in his commodity, but not to the exclusion
of the man he is trying to "sell." A beginner of this type went into a
man's office some time ago and rattled off a speech he had memorized
about some charts. The man listened until he came to the end--the boy
was talking so rapidly and excitedly that it would have been hard to
interrupt him except by shouting at him--and then quietly told him that
he had not been able to understand a word of what he had said. "You have
not been talking to me," he explained. "You have been talking at me."

Another salesman of the same general kind went into the office of a busy
lawyer one morning recently in a building which happened to be owned by
the lawyer.

"I am going to give you some books," he announced.

The lawyer asked him what they were, but the salesman refused to be
diverted before he had led up to the dramatic moment in his carefully
planned speech at which he thought it best to ment