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THE COST OF FORGETTING THE WRONG THINGS - Part 1

You spend hours coining the exact phrases your salesmen are going to use. You call in an expert and pay him a resound­ing fee to work out a scientific formula, right down to the very gestures and the tone of voice with which these sure-fire phrases are going to be delivered. You call sales meetings of all your representatives and give them the results of all this planning and preparation. You compose pamphlets and letters to out­lying agents who can't attend in person, and lay this new tech­nique at their feet, confident that it is going to double their business, as well as your own. Everything starts off with a bang—and then fizzles out.

All your hours of conference, all your painful thinking, and all of your enthusiasm, together with the money you spent promoting the idea, are simply thrown away.

Why? Merely because the individual salesman who has to be relied upon to put this new plan into actual practice, fails to do so. Why does he fail? Because he is indifferent? Nonsense. No man is indifferent to a plan calculated to earn him more money. No, the real truth is that he cant remember his new routine at the crucial moment of contact with the customer!

I have seen dozens of authentically good ideas fall through in just this manner, not because they couldn’t work, but be­cause no one worked them. And practically every man in business has had a similar experience.

For example, I went to lunch not long ago with two executives of one of the biggest gas and oil companies in America. They were discussing the company's new "All-Round Service," which was aimed at giving each customer just a little more than his money's worth in mere lubricants. The company had gone to extreme pains and considerable expense to work out a routine of ten services that each station attendant could per­form quickly and efficiently while waiting on the customer. These ten services were called the "All-Round Service" because they were so planned that the attendant could complete them all in one circling of the car.

It had seemed a splendid idea—and it was. It had been widely advertised, and showed every promise of pleasing cus­tomers, creating good will, and, naturally, increasing sales.

But the results in actual practice were disappointing. It was the same old story—the service men had been provided with a chart, showing them what to do, but they had failed to learn it. And a chart tacked to the inside wall of the station was of little use to them while they were outside filling up the tank.

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