The Winning Advantage - Tap Into Your Richest Resources

During the fall of my sophomore year, I developed a friendship with a veterinary student named Jim Cane. I met him at supper where we ate at the same boarding house on campus at Auburn. One night he told me of an opportunity. He had signed up, for the upcoming summer of 1966, to sell books door to door for the Southwestern Company in Nashville, Tennessee. The Southwestern Company at that time, and for many years thereafter, was the largest employer of college students.

It sounded wonderful. The job would give me the opportunity to get paid what I would be worth, according to the effort I exerted. I was very excited about the prospect and I asked him who I needed to see. He gave me the name of the student manager who was putting together a team. I called and was given the whole sales pitch and informed about all that was involved in selling the books door to door. The first summer you went as a member of a team, and if you qualified, you would get to come back and become a team leader. That next summer they were going to a school district in Chicago, and I’d be selling Webster’s Student Handbooks at $19.95 plus tax for the two-volume set. In the back were study notes on subjects while Webster’s Student Dictionary was in the front of each of the two books.

The subject the books covered were English, science, and math, the basic subjects that every student takes in junior high and high school. The books could also be used for college because the main points of each subject were covered.

That summer I went to a weeklong motivational training sales school in Nashville. Over 7,200 students attended sales school at different times over a six-week period. At that time all of the students were male mainly because most parents wouldn’t let their daughter travel halfway across the country to go door to door and sell books. The trainees were introduced to everything on how to be successful in business to goal setting, the value of persistence, the ability to work and deal with people, and discipline. Text from Norman Vincent Peale’s writings to Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich was used as examples to follow. Later we adopted the advice of Zig Ziglar, Joel Weldon, Wayne Dyer and a lot of other successful people who promoted self-improvement. The principles we learned were applied repeatedly daily, and they helped to motivate us.

I was so driven and impressed I couldn’t have been more excited. Yet I was also very aware of some personal drawbacks to selling books door to door. I was so introverted, I never went on a date in high school. Other than two friends and fellow baseball team members, nobody knew me. There was a reason for this.

Prior to my family’s move from Texas to Alabama, I was outgoing and popular. My father was an engineering graduate of Texas A&M and worked in the oil business, but lost his job and was later hired at a company in Alabama. We moved to a neighborhood of blue-collar mill workers. No one living there had a college degree and since my father had gone to college, some of the kids verbally bullied me. They would look at me, whisper things to one another, and laugh. I didn’t feel accepted in that environment and this created some insecurity within me. Some of it might have been self-imposed feelings, but nevertheless, as a result, I became more withdrawn and introverted. I felt rejected because my daddy was an engineer and had a degree and everyone else’s dad worked at the mill. I felt very inferior to my peers. This inferiority complex hindered me from ever asking a girl out because I was afraid I’d be rejected.

Consequently, knocking on doors was very difficult for me. Plus, being dyslexic, I didn’t understand all the structures of the sales talk although it was an extremely intensive introductory week. We got up at 5:30 a.m., ate breakfast, met in the sales auditorium at 8 a.m. and were allowed a lunch break at 12:30. Then we returned to the hotel to practice the script and sales talk.

We learned how to handle objections, demonstrate using mental verbal pictures and close the sale. Replies to all kinds of comments a person could possibly say like, “I’ve got to talk to my husband,” or “I don’t know if they’ll use these books” were taught to us. We’d stay up and practice until midnight every night starting with the Sunday after we checked in and would continue through the orientation week. It was a powerful sales school that built up confidence, especially for someone like me who feared rejection.

We practiced the sales talk, which lasted about 15 minutes, repeatedly. For instance, we were supposed to ask questions about the next potential buyer: “Mrs. Jones who lives next door? Does she have any kids in junior or high school?” Finding out the names of people was crucial. We didn’t just go up to the door and ask, “Do you want to buy some books today?” Getting pertinent information about a family allowed us to walk up and say, “Hi Ms. Smith. I was talking with Ms. Johnson next door, and she told me you have some kids in high school so I want to show you this new study guide. Is there a place we could sit down for a second? Is it safe to come inside?” If she didn’t let me in I would show her the books one at a time through the screen from the front porch. I sold a lot of two-volume set books without ever entering the house.

Some people made comments that they were not so sure their kids would use the books. If that happened I’d say, “I agree with that in some respect because most kids would use them, but there are those that don’t after you have them.” But one lady told me that by getting the books she knew that as a parent she could say that she had done everything possible to provide the best education for her kids. And that was a motivating factor for her as a mother. Because if her kids didn’t have them, they couldn’t use them and if they did, they might. But even if they didn’t, at least she knew that she did everything to provide the very best education possible. “Is that not so Mrs. Jones?” I was shown if I shook my head in a favorable way up and down it was hard for the person I was addressing to shake their head “no.”

And that was true. I found out later, when I was selling, that usually within 15 or 20 minutes of talking with a potential buyer, I’d be holding a check for an order.

We didn’t worry about making the sales because we were told that the sales would come. And that was true. Once I got in the habit of making the calls and demonstrations, I became a professional at it. And because it was a 20 to 30-minute visit during a13-hour workday six days a week, I could give up to 20 to 24 demonstrations a day.

We attended four days of training and on Friday of that week the student sales force headed out, all over the nation, to the territory where we were assigned. Each salesperson’s territory would always be 1,000 miles or more away from home. It was always a part of the country we’d never visited. The salesmen were typically not familiar with the territory they were given. There was psychology behind that decision. The company wanted the salesmen to be a long way from home, far away from the distraction of family and friends so they could focus on knocking on doors and selling books. The company didn’t want to make it easy for us to quit the job because we might go a few days without making a sale and that could be discouraging enough to make someone want to quit and go home. And if you worked around your hometown, you might never stay on the job.

It could be difficult to recruit salesmen in the spring to sell in the summer. The boys might tell their parents what they are going to do for the summer and their parents might think their son was out of his mind to sell books 1,000 miles away from home without guaranteed income when they could get an hourly paid or salaried job for the summer close to home. We had to be prepared to answer all the negative comments and responses from parents and girlfriends. Not surprisingly, half the people signed up in March for the job were gone by the time we left in June for the territories.

The first summer I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I had an idea about it. After a week of intensive training, I was so motivated I could walk through walls, metaphorically speaking. First, I was going to leave home and my parents for the summer. I was going to pay my own expenses with no guaranteed income. Like me, for most of the students it was the first time they had ever done these things so there were a lot of new hurdles to jump over. These challenges required a very unusual high achiever type to be successful and for those, the prospects delivered a real thrill.

A team of six students plus a student manager, a seven-man team in all, covered the territories, and we would typically work two junior high and one high school district all summer. We didn’t move around. We’d take orders from residents of...