Roundabout
What came in with the aspirins, apparently, is something much subtler in the way of salesman- ship; and Mr. Borden, along with his colleague Professor Alvin C. Busse, was lecturing to a massed audience of sales managers" (at two guineas a head)' to prove it. These two, whose sales-teaching films are apparently well known here, are not as one Might expect simply two sharp salesmen who have talked their way off the road and on to the rostrum. They are serious graduates in Speech and Public Speaking: Higginses whose job it is to teach Pickering to teach Eliza to sell flowers better. Does she know hOw to overcome sales-resistance? Has she got product knowledge as applied to Consumer Problems? Can she make user-benefit step out of the cold catalogue and come warmly alive?
'He's already gat Fielding, R. C. Shcrrifl and Dickens : if they grant him a Sunday bear-baiting licence, this game's finished.' Determined to make themselves plain, Messrs. Borden and Busse had sent on a 'props' list ahead of them, and reinforced their speeches with twenty-three separate demonstration objects, in- cluding a target (to be aimed at), bows, arrows, a whistle, a bell and cymbal; two hammers (one for hammering home points), shoes (for putting yourself in the other fellow's), a nine-foot ladder (importance of first rung of), and two .pingpong bats labelled P and D: Price for downing and Desire for upping (a desire-upping conference of salesmen must be even more impressive than a swan-upping). They also promised false whiskers; but Professor Busse, after fifty panting seconds under the reading desk,'had finally to surface ivithout them.
Their techniques were admirably simple and clear, and their command of their audience was such that at one point they had every other row of sales managers chatting happily with the strangers behind them; all achieved with an case that would be envied by prison warders and nursery-school attendants alike. Possibly the demonstrators were too inclined, for British tastes, to beat each other heartily on the chest, possibly there was a little too much alliteration: salesmen were urged to Ask for orders with Fear- Free Frankness—ask without Fear, without Fumbling, Without Fail; to put the Fun in Fundamentals, to use Laughter as a Lubricant. Possibly none of it was wholly new. But the closing speech of the President of the sponsoring association, at once Parochial, Patronising and Pedestrian, showed there is still plenty to learn.
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