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.”

* * * * *

[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 that as you do not deal in commodities, you would have no practical use for the selling process he employs to assure his success.  But even the shoe salesman, or grocery salesman, or real estate salesman, or insurance salesman does not really sell goods.  He sells ideas about goods.  Similarly you sell ideas about yourself in order to succeed.

[Sidenote:  When the Goods and the Ideas Are Different]

A sale is often completed in business without any inspection of the actual “goods” by the purchaser; as when a quantity of standard sheet copper is specified, or when the salesman describes a piece of machinery or shows a picture of it with a catalogue number.  The “goods” are to be delivered later.  However, the selling process is finished; though only the mind’s eye of the buyer has seen what he anticipates getting on his order.  The salesman has presented nothing except certain ideas to the mental vision of the prospect.  But these ideas have been sold so realistically to the imagination of the purchaser that he gives his order for what he expects.