Printers' Ink, February 4, 1915 (Vol. 90, No. 5): Handling 1,000 Men Working on Commission
The February 4, 1915 issue of Printers' Ink opens with Bruce Barton's "Handling 1,000 Men Working on Commission and Helping Them Make the Sale", drawn from two years devising methods for subscription book agents.
What it is
The February 4, 1915 issue of Printers' Ink opens with Bruce Barton's "Handling 1,000 Men Working on Commission and Helping Them Make the Sale", drawn from two years devising methods for subscription book agents. Barton argues that proud commission men are led by listening, not orders, and that the one cause of failure a manager can remove is lack of preparation. He gives field detail: openers built on a question, the family-man pitch at fifty cents a week, walking sticks that got a crew past the maids, the agent who called between twelve and two and never said "sign", and renaming Order Blanks as Acceptance Blanks. He closes on one rule: put yourself in the other man's place. The rest of the issue gathers food makers' replies, Earnest Elmo Calkins's among them, to New York's advice to "break the package habit", and debates "Made in U. S. A."
Why read it now
Barton's management advice holds up. Listening before instructing, and letting a seasoned rep show what he knows before you change his method, fits what self-determination research (Deci and Ryan) finds about autonomy and motivation. His point that preparation, not character, is the failure a manager can fix is the case for structured onboarding, which sales teams still underfund. One newspaper's canvassing force he cites kept 35 men out of 5,000 applicants, a reminder of how costly commission hiring is. What has dated is the ethics of tactics he describes with amusement: the gold pencil that gets a woman to sign without hearing the word "sign", and the rep who walks out, comes back and offers "your own terms" at the standard price. These are pressure tricks that consumer rules and public reviews now punish. Renaming the order form, though, is a fair lesson in how one word changes friction at the close. To use it: before you rewrite a sales script, sit with your three best reps, ask what they would change, and build the new onboarding from their answers.
Passages worth keeping
The men who handle commission salesmen most successfully, according to my observation, are almost always good listeners.
أنجح من يديرون مندوبي العمولة هم في الغالب من يحسنون الإصغاء إليهم قبل أن يوجهوهم.
If you are to bind that man to you, if you are to give him any new ideas, you must first convince him that they are better ideas than those he already has.
المندوب المخضرم لا يقبل فكرة جديدة بالأمر، بل حين يقتنع أنها أفضل مما يعرفه، ولن يقتنع ما لم تسمع منه أولًا.
But the one cause of failure which he ought to erase permanently from the list is lack of preparation.
من أسباب فشل المندوبين ما لا يملك المدير تغييره، أما ضعف الإعداد فمسؤوليته هو ويستطيع إنهاءه.
After that I went home and burned up all our Order Blanks and issued Acceptance Blanks instead.
غيّر بارتون اسم نموذج الطلب إلى نموذج القبول، لأن الاسم الثاني يخفف إحساس العميل بأنه يُدفع إلى الشراء.
But the secret of handling men on commission can be condensed into a single line: “Put yourself in the other man’s place.”
سر إدارة مندوبي العمولة أن تتخيل نفسك في ظروفهم وضغوطهم، فتفهم دوافعهم قبل أن تحكم عليهم.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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