Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THREE A SALES CAMPAIGN-HOW TO START IT JUST as the Lusitania and the Singer Tower and the Brooklyn Bridges were planned by experts and architects, so a Sales Campaign should be planned by experts and architects. It should be structural. At least as much attention should be given to the selling of an article as was given to the inventing and the manufacturing of it. No great achievement, and certainly not the winning of an indifferent public, can be done without a Plan. This is one of the most important principles of Efficiency. To present an article to the public in the right way, by the right name, and at the right time, requires skill and forethought of the highest degree. This may seem to be kindergarten talk, but kindergarten talk is necessary in the case of many corporations. Four-fifths of our selling is still of the slam-bang, hit-or-miss species. Its main aim is usually speed, as though it were better to do a thing wrongly to-day than to do it rightly in six 12 months. There is seldom a Plan that is worthy of the name. The three main points to be considered are: (1) the article itself; (2) the possible buyers; and (3) the general trade conditions. The name, in the first place, may make or mar the sale. One tobacco company and one biscuit company recently put out new articles, with a big blaze of advertising, before they found out that the articles had been given names that were already copyrighted by other dealers. The appearance of the article must be studied, as the superintendent of the factory has seldom an eye for good looks. Then there are the labels, usually of the plainest and most uninteresting sort. All these are the dress in which the new article appears, and they go far to determine whether or not it receives a welcome. The...