Hence when they now saw him swank past them full of superior swish and
driving his heels to the floor like a Grenadier Guard, they naturally
began to develop that warmth of fellowship toward him that one feels
for the cramps.
Had Elliott not been by profession a Bookkeeper, he would have made
a good Haberdasher. When it came to practical Salesmanship he had
about as much experience as a sponge diver. Hence he possessed many
essential qualifications of the modern blank-cartridge Sales Director,
as psychically discerned by the President at the outset.
While Elliott might be described as a traveled person, he was not what
you would exactly call a globe-trotter in the strict sense of said
term. He had on several occasions joined the Sunday Excursion to
Churubusco, Indiana, with the white duck panties and the blue serge
Double Breasted. Also he had been twice to Chicago; once during his
honeymoon, and once when he went there to get his teeth filled, and in
so doing made the local horseshoer sore on him for life.
We mention this irrelevancy merely to show that when it came to
skipping here and there over the cornbelt, and getting back to the Home
Town safe and sound and unrobbed, Elliott could hold his own with the
best of them.
Elliott possessed still another essential to successful latter-day
sales management. He was one rhinoceros on System. In less than three
months after he had set sail upon the hazardous sea of Sales Promotion,
he had everything on the premises mapped and charted and indexed and
cross-indexed and sub-indexed and super-indexed forty-seven different
ways.
Any ordinary question put to him about the Business or the Weather
would be followed by the pulling out of numerous little drawers and
card-indexes and files and charts and things until the Questioner had
forgotten what it was he asked about, or had gone on to other matters
or to sleep.
Elliott’s highest qualification for his job, however, lay in his
early-discovered ability to write a very superior quality of nagging
letter to the Salesmen under him. When it came to the Quibble & Nag
stuff, Elliott had every corn-fed Sales Manager in the land rolled up
like a carpet.
Having himself never sold a Bill of Goods in his tiny conventional
life, and being barely able to tell the Goods from a large knobby sack
of apples without first walking all around them and squinting at them
from different angles, he was insured at all times against writing the
Sales Force upon anything that might be of any importance whatever to
the Business.
For instance, when the Firm’s crack salesmanic shot of the Western
Territory was aching like an ingrowing toenail for some constructive
suggestion from Headquarters concerning a Big Deal he was trying
to put across, he would receive a three-page Satire from Ellie
criticizing him for scoring up 168 miles in his Expense Book when the
R. R. Guide showed plainly and Unmistakably that the actual distance
from point to point was only 167 miles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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