Topical Guide 304

Mark Dorset

Information: Gathering, Exploiting
Salesmanship: Techniques

HERB’S WORK at the clam-packing plant was noticed from the start; he seemed to have a talent for culling, and he was so dexterous that he came to be regarded with the kind of awe and envy that athletes inspire when they perform feats so far beyond the capabilities of the average person that they seem by performing them to be enlarging the aspirations of the species, to be outlining a new bulge along the frontier of human endeavor. Herb enjoyed his growing reputation, and he was surprised to find how content he was to do this work, this work that required so little of him. He hid his true ambitions well, so well that Lorna hardly saw any evidence of them herself. She saw him reading the Reporter every day, but never looking at the help-wanted ads, and she wondered whether he really meant what he said when he told her that he’d been inspired by what Dan Whitley had told him that very first night when they arrived in Babbington: that it’s amazing how much you learn about a person from an obituary, amazing how much you didn’t know or didn’t notice when the person was alive. From that, Herb had gone on to the realization that in a small town the key to selling, or any kind of advancement, was information, information that an outsider had to make a special effort to acquire. Much later, when he and Lorna were retired in Punta Cachazuda, he put the idea this way: “You’ve heard people say, ‘It’s not what you know that counts; it’s who you know.’ Well, that’s not quite right. I found that it’s what you know about who you know that counts.” Herb was finding out a great deal about the people of Babbington, but the more he found out, the more he found there was to find out. He began keeping notes, on cards.

Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8

     Guppa was working on what he called his pigeonholes. One reason that Guppa was so phenomenally successful a Studebaker salesman was that he developed individual sales pitches to suit each potential customer. He didn’t wait for those potential customers to walk into the showroom, either; he went right out into the field after them and ran them down. …
     To make certain that no potential buyer was overlooked, Guppa kept a card file with information about everyone in Babbington who might eventually be made, in one way or another, to become a Studebaker owner. Guppa had a lot of confidence in himself and in Studebakers. He would eliminate a person from the file only if he was convinced that there was no hope whatsoever of an eventual sale. I know, for instance, that he kept a small stack of cards with the names of the crippled and blind in the pocket of his Sunday suit, and he would take these out after communion and say a silent prayer for the cure of each. 
     Guppa believed that every one of the people in his active file would buy a car from him sooner or later, and that belief was the real secret of his success. It was, as he saw it, just a matter of catching the prey at the right moment or using the right lure. …
     As soon as I was able to print neatly enough to satisfy Guppa, I got even more responsibility: Guppa would save the birth announcements and obituary notices from the Babbington Reporter, and I made out cards for new-born Babbingtonians and drew black borders around the cards of the deceased. Guppa didn’t discard the dead prospects’ cards, however. He used them to warm up before he got down to serious pigeonholing, pulling a card or two from the stack of black-bordered ones and thinking about what he might have done to snare the pigeon before he or she had dropped off.

Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” Chapter 6

See also:

Salesmanship TG 75; Salesmanship; Persuasion, The Art of: Appeal to Ego or Pride TG 77

[more to come on Thursday, July 28, 2022]

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