Sales Compendium

“Years ago I had the responsibility of calling on a big railroad company. We received all of their inquiries, and after we quoted, I’d interview the superintendent of motor power, the master mechanic, the superintendent of the shop, and various foremen, but always lost the orders. While I had a lot to learn about selling, I knew I couldn’t be that bad. I finally learned from a lathe operator the name of a man in the shop who was considered an authority on machine tools by all his superiors. He was making the actual decisions.”

This comes from observations made by Robert L Giebel, Chairman of Giebel, Inc. and a past President of the American Machine Tool Distributor’s Association, in a talk to a group of sales engineers.

Source: Bernard Lester | Sales Engineering, 2nd Edition (1950) pp 67 – 68