_Any element of doubt at the final stage will almost surely delay or kill the salesman's chances to close successfully._
[Sidenote: Make Sure of A Good Batting Average]
Recall once more that the measure of success in selling is not 100% of closed sales; every possible order secured and none lost. _Success is made certain when failures are reduced to the minimum and successes are increased to the maximum of practicability._ There can be no question that if you use the _right processes_ in closing, your chances for success will be so greatly increased that your batting average of actual sales should take you far above the failure line. Your career as a salesman involves _continual_ selling. You must make sale after sale.
However skillfully you employ the right process at the closing stage, you may not accomplish your purpose the first time you try. _But if you keep on selling your services in the right way, you will be as absolutely certain to succeed as the master salesman of "goods" is sure of closing his quota every year he works._
CHAPTER XII
_The Celebration Stage_
[Sidenote: What Are You Going to Do With Success?]
You know now the _certain_ way to get your chance to succeed in the vocation of your choice. You are convinced that a _good salesman_ can create and control his opportunities in any field, can bring himself to good luck in the right market for his services. You are resolved to master the art of selling, and so to insure your future against any possibility of failure. You feel confident of success; because you are willing to earn it by the diligent study and practice of salesmanship.
There is no doubt in your mind that when you become a skillful salesman of your best capabilities, you can get a chance to succeed. _Now what are you going to do with success after you gain it?_
Suppose you had sold yourself into the very opportunity you want, suppose you had won the coveted job or promotion, _how would you celebrate_? It has been said that a man shows his real self either in the moment of his failure or in the moment of his success. Let us assume that you have reached your present objective. You stand at the goal, a winner. Does your victory _intoxicate_, or does it _sober_ you with the realization that you have but opened the way to limitless fields of bigger service ahead? Has success gone to your _hands_ and made them tingle with eagerness to grasp more chances to succeed, or has it gone to your _head_?
[Sidenote: The Stepping-Stone to More Sales]
_The celebration stage of the selling process should be the first stepping-stone leading to another successful sale._ Often it proves to be a stumbling block that marks the beginning of a downfall to failure.
Rare is the man who is not spoiled a little by achievement. _Success is the severest test of salesmanship._
[Sidenote: Spoiled by Success]
I recall a chief clerk who worked more than a year for promotion to the position of assistant manager. He earned the better job, and was assigned to the desk toward which he had been looking longingly for sixteen months. Then he "celebrated" by starting to take life easy. He developed a manner of superiority. He acted as if the little foothill he had climbed was a big mountain. He sunned himself on the top, basking in complacency because he had risen above his former clerkship.
One day he was called into the manager's office. He came out chop-fallen and took his personal belongings from the assistant's desk. Another man was promoted to the place he had failed to fill. He went back to his clerk's stool and is roosting there today.
[Sidenote: Egotism's Downfall]
I know a salesman who closed so many orders the first time he covered his territory that he came back to headquarters with an inflated idea of his importance. He strutted into the president's room and boasted of what he had done. The delighted head of the business gave him a cigar and invited him to tell the story. The salesman betrayed such egotism that his employer was disgusted. The president was plain-spoken. He warned the successful salesman against getting a "swelled head."
The egotist felt insulted. He resigned his position, arrogantly declaring that he would not work for a house where results were so little appreciated. He was cocksure of himself. However, when he offered his services to a competing firm, his application was turned down. The rebuff stunned him. He did not realize that his egotism disgusted the second executive as much as the first. The salesman's spirit was broken.
He has never since been more than a fair peddler.
[Sidenote: Giant and Pigmy Successes]
Think of "successful" men you know. _Compare them as they are now with the men they used to be before they succeeded._ As they rose did they loom bigger and bigger in your respect, or grow smaller and smaller in admirable qualities? There are so-called successful men whose characters seem to be dwarfed by the mountain tops they attain. Other men grow to be giants and overshadow any eminences they climb. The littleness of the last Kaiser and Crown Prince of Germany was only emphasized by their elevation above the common people. On the other hand the bigness of Lincoln and Roosevelt was so tremendous that their personalities towered above even the highest honor in the world.
[Sidenote: Breaking Training]
_When football players are fighting_ for the championship of the season, they are governed by rigid rules of living. _They keep themselves fit_ by strict diet, by the avoidance of all dissipations, by hardening exercise, and by recuperative rest. But after the "big game" is won, they break training. They stuff themselves with rich food until their bodies and minds are sluggish. Then they celebrate their victory by some sort of jollification that lasts half the night. _The next day a second-rate team could beat the champions._
A man who has kept himself lean, hard-muscled, and healthy all the way to the achievement of his ambition is apt to take on flabby flesh and gout when he succeeds. The celebration of Thanksgiving is an ordeal from which one does not recover for weeks. Turkey and mince pie immoderately eaten are poisons. Our annual Feast Day is more deadly than the Fourth of July.
[Sidenote: Rusting in Self-Satisfaction]
A great many people "break training" mentally as well as physically at the celebration stage. _Their minds and muscles turn flabby after they succeed. They are so proud of their accomplishments that they rust in self-satisfaction._ Then, usually too late for remedy, they find themselves afflicted by the rheumatic twinges of deep-seated discontent with what they have done.
We are all familiar with the tragedies of the farmer who sells his acres and moves into town "so that he can take life easy," and of the business man who retires from his "daily grind" to enjoy the fortune of success.
So long as they remained at work they were vigorous in mind and body.
But nearly always men who give up their accustomed activities begin to develop mental and physical ailments soon afterward. They age and break down in a few years. _In order to stay well, one must keep going. It is far less wearying to walk than to stand still. Normal fatigue of mind and body are not so exhaustive of mental and physical energy as torpid idleness._
[Sidenote: Advance or You Will Slip Back]
Probably you do not think of quitting work for a long time. You look at your future retirement as a remote possibility. Very likely you feel it is premature to consider "your declining years" now, when you are in the full vigor of ambition. _But if you stop advancing, in order to celebrate your progress thus far, you have quit working your way ahead.
If you stay contented with what you have done, even for a little while, you have temporarily retired from the game of success and are in danger of rusting into a partial failure. If you do not continue moving ever upward, you will slip into a decline without realizing that you are going back and down._
[Sidenote: The Zest for Work]
The successful salesman thrives on his work, and pines for it when he "lays off." He welcomes the end of his annual vacation with more zest than its beginning. He celebrates each order gained by planning at once how he will get another. He is like Alexander, who sighed only when there were no more worlds to conquer. He is as perennially tireless as Edison, the wizard who is never weary. _To the true salesman there is no enjoyment equal to selling._ He often declares that he "would rather sell than eat."
[Sidenote: Pattern after Master Salesmen]
You know the importance of being a _good salesman_. You have studied the methods he uses throughout the selling process. Now at the celebration stage pattern after the _masters_ of the profession. Do not get into the bad habits of the _mediocre fellows who slacken their efforts after each success_, and who need the spur of necessity to make them do their utmost.
When a good salesman has booked an order, and has taken pains to make a fine last impression on his customer, he does not go to his hotel and play Kelly pool, or otherwise spend the rest of the day just loafing around. Only the poor salesman celebrates in such a way; _thereby showing that his successes are so rare he is not used to them_.
[Sidenote: Starting After The Next Chance]
The good salesman looks at his watch the moment he is out of his customer's sight. He makes a swift calculation of the time it will take him to reach and sell the next man on his list. If he has no other prospect nearby, he starts looking for one that minute. His keen eyes catch every name on the business signs he passes. _His imaginative mind is planning how he can use the order he just has closed, to influence some other buyer to make a contract._ If there are no additional customers for his line in the town, he sprints to the station to catch the first train up the road. _He does not waste a minute getting to his next selling opportunity_.
[Sidenote: Pepper and Poppies]
Some pretty good salesmen never win the grand quota prize in a sales contest _because they take so much time out for celebrating the big orders they close_. If they land a fine contract in the morning, they don't try to do much selling that afternoon. The prize-winning salesman, too, is delighted to secure a big order. But he doesn't say to himself, "That will put me 'way ahead on the sales record for today." Instead he grins and thinks, "This is _my day_. I'm going to fatten up my batting average while I'm going good." _Success is pepper to him, not the poppy drug that slackens energy._
[Sidenote: Continual Accumulation]
You have worked hard to get the chance you now have. You have paid for it with your best efforts. _It represents an accumulation of your salesmanship._ The good job or the promotion you have gained is like a savings account. Let us compare it with the first hundred dollars a thrifty man puts into the bank for a rainy day. Would he celebrate the accumulation of that moderate amount of money, the first evidence of his ability to save, by quitting the practice of spending less than his earnings? Would he then say to himself, "I am now successful as a saver"? Would he stop putting a few dollars in the bank every Saturday, just because he already had a hundred?
[Sidenote: The Building Process is Gradual]
No. He would _continue_ to save until he had enough "units of thrift,"
enough hundreds of dollars, to take a _longer_ step toward success. He would invest his accumulated savings in a lot, or house. Perhaps he would start a business of his own. After his investment he still would continue to save. So he would _build_ his success.
_All building is a gradual, continual process_. The bricks are laid _one after another_. It takes many to complete the structure. _Likewise a series of minor successes must be built into a major accomplishment._ It does not rise all at once.
If you are tempted to pause where you are in order to celebrate, ask yourself, "_Is this really the celebration stage_?" Probably you will find you have only laid the corner-stone, or made an excavation for the foundation of your success. You would not think of having a housewarming because you had finished the basement walls. Nor would you consider it an occasion for especial jollification the day you erected the scantlings around the first floor joists. Not until the walls are up and the roof is on, not until the house is plastered and papered and painted, not until it is finished would you think of standing on the sidewalk to look it over pride fully and exult, "I did that. It's a good job."
[Sidenote: Repeated Building]
But if you complete _one_ house, you will not only feel the satisfaction of accomplishment, you will also want to build _another_ that would be a great improvement on the one just finished. You will be _healthily dissatisfied with what you have already done_. Very likely you will sell the first house at a profit, and straightway start to put up a better building on another lot. In time you will sell that, too. You will continue the procedure until you become a master builder of houses, and continually achieve more and more success.
We have assumed that you now are successfully in possession of an opportunity. You have sold yourself into the very job you want, or into a better position that you believe will afford you fine chances to advance. _Do not slump or relax in salesmanship. Do not think back, or spend much time contemplating your present success. Look ahead to your next sale_ of true ideas of your best capabilities. _The successful salesman is a quick repeater._ He counts his accomplishments in _totals_, not by units. He has successful "_years_," each made up of about three hundred successful working days. He plans in _campaigns_; so he is not inclined to over-celebrate the winning of a battle.