Certain Success | Page 3

potentially rich. If you possess the generally recognized fundamentals of success; such as characteristic honesty, intelligence, energy, etc., you are not handicapped for want of a market. Even though you now may seem to lack some of the essential qualifications, you are capable of succeeding. Every necessary characteristic of the successful man is latent in your nature and can be brought out by development. You have not yet done your utmost with the best that is in you.
[Sidenote: Your Market Not Lacking]
First you should resolve to make yourself completely worthy to succeed. Meanwhile you should be learning how to sell your "goods." On every hand there are markets in which qualities like yours are being sold successfully by other men. Undoubtedly there will be a purchaser for the best that is in you when you bring it out; provided you present your "goods of sale" in the most skillful way. All about you are highly prosperous people with no more innate merits than you have. Certainly the market for your particular abilities is within reach. Golden opportunities of which you have not taken the fullest advantage surround you and touch your daily activities. If you have not grasped your chance, it was because you did not know how to reach out with all your capabilities. In other words, possessing the fundamental qualifications for success, you have stood in the midst of the world's need for such capabilities as yours, but you have not gone through the selling process.
You have failed thus far to achieve your ambition, simply because you have been an unsuccessful salesman of yourself to the world.
Perhaps you never have thought of yourself as a salesman. You may not have realized the importance to you of knowing and practicing the principles of skillful selling. Only one per cent of the people in the United States call themselves salesmen or saleswomen. Yet in order to succeed, each of us must sell his or her particular qualifications. Your knowledge and use of the selling process are essential to assure your success in life.
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[Sidenote: Master Salesmen Made, Not Born]
The best commercial executives agree that the most effective selling representative of a house is not the "natural born" salesman, but the salesman who is made highly efficient by training. So every big, successful business conducts a course in salesmanship. Thorough tests have proved that particular principles and methods of selling are sure to produce the highest average of orders. Therefore these principles and methods are followed as standard practice in the sales department.
That is, in order to assure the success of an individual salesman, he is required and aided to develop particular qualifications and to do certain things that master executives have learned will get the orders and hold the trade of buyers. The qualified professional salesman is drilled thoroughly in tested principles and methods of selling. He is trained to use this standard sales knowledge skillfully. As a result he works in the field with complete confidence.
Why should he doubt that he will succeed? He knows his own limitations and capabilities; knows the true worth of his line; knows there is a market in his territory; knows how to sell in the ways that have been proved most effective; and knows that practice of right salesmanship will make him skillful in getting and holding business. Verily such "knowledge is power."
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[Sidenote: Certain Success With the Selling Process]
Your success in selling yourself can be made as certain as is a successful career to the first-class professional salesman. This book and its companion volume will explain in detail salesmanship ways to develop your best capabilities most effectively. You will be given the principles and methods employed by the expert salesman in marketing any kind of right goods. You will also be shown how to sell yourself by adapting his practices to your "goods of sale."
When you comprehend, and employ as second nature, the usages of the finest sales art, your success in life, like that of the master professional salesman, will be certain.
[Sidenote: Ideas of Goods Not the Goods Themselves Are Sold]
If you have not called yourself a salesman, perhaps you doubt the value to you of skill in selling. All you have to market is the best that is in yourself. Your ambition may be to succeed as a doctor, or lawyer, or preacher, or clerk, or mechanic, or farmer, or banker. You do not see how salesmanship could assure your success, however much it might help some one with commercial ambitions.
If you think it would not be worth while for you to master the selling process, since you do not expect to engage in the profession of selling, you misconceive the functions and work of the salesman. You have thought he sells "_goods_;" and