Sales Compendium

NCR held its fifth Annual Convention of the Hundred Point Club in Dayton, Ohio in early January 1911. For the duration of the convention, the company published a daily broadsheet called The Hundred Point Club Dispatch. Amongst the earnest reporting of each day’s events, and the cartoons and photographs of the club members at work and at play, there was a reprint of an editorial column from The Dayton Herald entitled ‘The College of Advanced Industry’. Below, we have reproduced a lightly edited version of this adulatory paean to The Cash.

There are many valuable lessons to be learned from the convention in Dayton this week of the Hundred Point Club of the National Cash Register company. The club members, as an organization, represent the very acme of modern commercial methods – incomparable methods fostered and perpetuated by the NCR company which have made that concern the pride of Dayton and the envy of the world.

As a selling force, the Hundred Pointers have no superiors. Commercial men generally recognize that fact. We wish there were hundreds of Hundred Point clubs simply for what they would mean to business. Understanding the NCR company one cannot consider the institution alone in the light of a factory. It is more than a manufacturing concern. It is a school, indeed a commercial university, and its 5,700 employees in Dayton and 1,100 employees in other parts of the world are receiving the elements of a generous education. The conditions that attend the mechanical part of the industry are such that conduce to the highest efficiency of the workers. But there is another phase of the situation that is perhaps of even wider significance.

A cash register is entirely unlike any other manufactured article. In a way, it crowns all other products because it records the final word in the barter of other products. A cash register, figuratively, has brains that record and register and inform the customer that the money he has expended for an article has been deposited in the coffers of the merchant of whom he made the purchase. That resembles the tablets of memory as rhetorical teachers would say. Its silvery sound gaily registers the daily human story of buying and selling – a story that has been told from the very infancy of the human race, and which will continue to be told so long as men remain to inhabit the earth. So, sentiment aside, the cash register is a really moral agent. It abridges transactions but it does so with marvellous accuracy. The cash register has done much to render more honest business transactions.

No institution on earth, no matter of what character or what its field, could have attained the prestige of the NCR company without the superior distinctive genius of an idealist like John H Patterson, or the magnificent co-operation of the making and selling divisions such as characterize the big Dayton concern. Thus, the Hundred Pointers are the advance guard of a new commercial age; the harbingers of a business spring time when men realize in all its significance that honesty is the best policy. No longer does fiery oratory appeal to people. Business and professional men, indeed the common people, are not swept away any longer by the smooth tongues of the unscrupulous, or the wild verbal acrobatic display of grandeur, but by simple, unvarnished statements of truth. ‘Show me’ is the world’s inscription, and the National Cash Register company has done the showing.

That’s why the Hundred Pointers’ convention is significant; that’s why the company is spending money liberally to pay for the entertainment of the visitors, its representatives. They have earned what they are being given, and the company is glad to show its appreciation of this vanguard of commercial ideals and morals which combine honesty, fidelity, character and ability.

Source: The Dayton Herald, 11th January 1911 page 6

The death of the salesman has been something of a recurring theme for at least one hundred years. The following article is from The New York Times. It was published on Sunday 18th June 1916.

“The elimination of the salesman by the use of printed matter in the form of circulars or of advertising in periodicals, which is now being tried out in some lines, has its advocates as well as opponents. One of the former, Arthur J Steinfeld of Steinfeld & Co., who is testing out his theory by actual experience, gives his views in the subjoined communication, which is in response to an article that recently appeared in the paper.

You show that, while casual opinion consigns to the wastebasket much of the advertising matter sent to buyers, there are, nevertheless, many instances where proper advertising is producing better results than the old method of personal solicitation – larger volume at lesser cost. You tell only of the advertising matter that goes to waste, but you make no mention of the tremendous and wasteful time and money extravagance of the traveling-salesman system.

The traveling man adds considerable to the cost of goods without adding to its value or selling qualities. His range of territory is relatively small, and therefore relatively costly. While he visits one, advertising reaches thousands. True, it is, that he often puts over sales through samples, plus personality, persuasion, and perseverance, that alone his merchandise could not. He talks the buyer into the purchase, and the passing of the order copy marks the finality of the sale.

Merchandise sells through advertising strictly because of its own intrinsic worth, ungarnished by the spoken word. The goods must talk for themselves and the sale is not concluded until the buyer is satisfied, not just with the samples, but with the actual merchandise delivered.

The economy and the efficiency of the printed word need no eulogy from me. Retailers recognize their need for the daily newspapers by their increasing use of them.

Things were different once upon a time before the railroads turned farms into cities. Then the original retailers were traders and carried their wares cross-country seeking out buyers one at a time. Now the retailer draws the customers to his store in crowds, and advertising is the magnet. Representative retailers are very particular about the goods they advertise; very careful as to the exactness of their printed word. So are representative wholesalers. Buyers know this. That is why they are paying careful attention to advertising matter they receive.

The travelling salesman’s mission is to sell goods. To accomplish this he often employs methods that would not look well in print. On the other hand, an advertising statement must carry the unqualified backing of the concern behind it, and is therefore virtually a guarantee in bold unchanging type.

The travelling man is a middleman, and the evolution of business is gradually eliminating the middleman.

Even now, travelling men’s organizations are endeavoring to discourage the retailer from buying direct. The buyer who must meet the competition of the store across the street that buys direct will himself be compelled to buy direct. The personality of the traveling salesman is rapidly losing its effectiveness. Formerly, the buyer would say, “I buy from So-and-So”. Now the buyer says, “I buy to the best advantage of my concern regardless of from whom”. Economic efficiency is bringing the retailer to the store of the wholesaler just as it brought the consumer to the store of the retailer.”