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RIDING ON A SMILE AND A SHOESHINE

BE IT CADILLACS OR CHRYSANTHEMUMS, WHAT THEY’RE REALLY SELLING IS THEMSELVES.
By Amy Cunningham |

The stereotypical salesman leaves scuff-marks on your linoleum. His shoes have a slight heel, and his big, blubbery body seems moored with gold-filled jewelry: a bracelet, two rings, a choker, and the wrist-watch he won as a cor pany incentive prize last year He uses expressions like “lady of the house,” “talking product,” “copping a plea,” and “bird-dogging your bird dogs.” His hair is smoothed over his shiny forehead in long strands and stuck there with a tonic that imparts a peculiar aroma which, when mixed with the smell of a recently dissolved breath mint, is enough to make you want to lie down for a few minutes after he leaves the house. You’ll see the same kind of guy in stores every now and then. He and his pleasantly plump wife are hoping the company will send them to the big convention in Vegas next year.

Toward the end of the week, around Thursday, the stereotypical salesman gets nervous. He hasn’t been selling as well as he’d like. He talks to a friend about it. “Maybe I’m losing it, Larry,” he says to the friend. “Naaw,” says Larry. “Relax.”

The next day, he makes a big sale in a rundown part of town. Now all he has to hope is that the customer’s credit is good. And as he smokes a cigarette and drives his car-a Monte Carlo that’s seen over 125,000 miles-he thinks: “This is not such a bad life.” He likes the people. He likes the freedom. Before long he’s opening his own front door, and the house smells like supper. Selling has been good to him. After all, it’s all he knows how to do.

Arthur Miller hasn’t been the only person to predict the death of our salesmen. E. B. Weiss wrote in The Vanishing Salesman around 1962 that “with the advent of other forms of selling, and particularly with the advent of mass pre-slling first in print and later in broadcast media) some-and in certain instances major parts-of the selling, in its traditional connotations was taken over by new impersonal techniques.”

Because the salesman is an American institution on the wane, winging it in a society that seems to prefer cash-registered transactions and cheap, disposable goods, we thought it was time to honor the artisans of commerce, the real salesmen. The people we have chosen are not your gumshoed hucksters, but the crème de la crème of the foot-in-the-door fraternity. These are the people who not only can sell you their products, they can leave you feeling good about the transaction. The people we have chosen are each in the top echelon of their chosen field. They vary from the stereotypes because they come in all ages with differing convictions and priorities. But they all sell hard, and have purged their lives with their sales pitch. Some of them do it because the money is good, but none of them stay in sales for that reason alone. They do it because it’s what they think they do best. They are their product, and they sell themselves by articulating their interpretation of your needs. Real salespeople like these aren’t taught their craft, they’re naturals.

SHANNON ROBERTS



Girl Scout



Shannon Roberts was 71 pulsating pounds of achievement-greedy Girl Scout during this year’s cookie campaign. The goal was to beat her 1980 record of 556 boxes ordered over a period of two weeks. She sold562 this year by delegating the legwork to her father and grandmother who strode into their respective offices with order forms in hand. Now Shannon is the proud owner of two TV sets won from her council and 19 more merit badges than can fit on her sash. She may miss out on scouting this fall because her troop in Piano hasn’t got a leader. That’s okay, Shannon says. She already has too much to do. She’s started clarinet lessons (she wanted to take saxophone, but couldn’t get her lips to rest comfortably around the mouthpiece) and her

homework and soccer practices will keep her off the streets and out of cookies. She doesn’t want to be a salesperson when she grows up, but she’d consider becoming a doctor if she didn’t have to go through ’ ’all that school.’’

TONY VASTARDIS



Electrolux Vacuum Salesman



Tony What’s-My-Name-Again Vastardis will make about $40,000 this year selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners. If that sounds like easy money, consider this: To earn his living. Tony works 13 hours a day. six days a week in the homes of strangers. His gross sales have been the best in the division for two years running, and the secret, Tony says, is not to concentrate on selling, but to dwell on getting into the home and just demonstrating the gear. Then all Tony has to do is rap about how any vacuum cleaner can pick up surface dirt, but real suction- deep cleaning- well that’s where Electro-lux comes in. Tony’s closing average after 10 vears with the company is about one sale for every four shows. “A salesman must never have dollar signs in his eyes,’’ he says. ’ ’The customer can see them.’’ Tony works in a paneled, windowless office on Live Oak when he’s not out in the van canvassing neighborhoods. He’s a food -and music-loving Greek, and he used to play the bouzouki in an amateur group called the “Yassou’s,” which Tony says means ’ ’Hi Ya’ll.”

JERRY GRIFFIN



Cadillac Salesman



Former Canadian football pro Jerry Griffin came home to Dallas and started selling cars at Sewell Village Cadillac in 1971, the year the oil embargo scared a lot of people into thinking that big cars were passé. That first year he was the number-two salesman in the state, just behind a man who’d worked the full 12 months; Jerry’d been at it only six. In 1976, he became the best Cadillac salesman in the country with 500 sales. In 1979, he broke his all-time high with 700 sales fa gross of approximately $11,200,000). You’d think he’d be banking in Switzerland by now, but Jerry’s just a regular guy, and he’s there at the dealership six and a half days a week-working. He says he’s taken about five lunches in 10 years, and sometimes he never sees the light of day unless he’s accompanying a customer on a test-drive. He’s single, and his Lake Highlands home is not completely furnished because he hardly spends any time there. “I’m just highly competitive,” he says nonchalantly. “I play to win.”

DICK WORLEY



Sunshine Floral Vender



You’ ve probably seen Dick Worley at one time or another dancing down the sidewalk, hollering, and hawking flowers. At 24, he’s made more money in the flower-vending business than the average attorney in Texas makes in a year. Last January, he reported $38,000 to the IRS. One could say Dick has the look of a man who just got back from Woodstock, and that works to his disadvantage in Dallas as often as it works in his favor. His gimmick is to point bunches of flowers at passing cars, jump up and down, and seem preposterous. He gives a lot of flowers away to pretty-girls. He earned the “Hustler’’ tattoo on his left arm one night several years ago when he made 14 dales with 14 different women. He doesn’t like to wear shoes, he smokes Kools, and he frequents a bar on Lemmon Avenue called Mother Blues. Ask him which flowers are his favorites and he’ll say, “They’re these carnations we get sometimes that are almost purple. and they smell like cloves. “

JEWELL MENIHAN



Corsetière



Seventy-four-year-old Jewell Menihan has seen it all. She’s been selling girdles since 1928 and is still working four full days a week at Kit’s Boutique, a shop Jewell sold several years ago because she preferred tugging on girdles to plowing through papers. Now the shop (which stocks bras sized up to 52F) has been through two owners, but Jewell has stayed. She will tell you with a lilt of self-satisfaction in her voice that she’s been wearing a corset since she was 13. The problems with her matronly customers occur when they want a girdle to bind them back to the hourglass figure they had at 16. “I can fit their bodies, but I can’t fit their heads. I’m not in the hat business,’’ Jewell says. Jewell claims she knows her customers so well that she can tell whether or not they’re going to buy anything that day by the way they hold their mouths. “Sometimes, ’’ she says, ’ ’they waddle in here and I say, ’Oh no, I don’t know if I want to deal with you today,’ and they say, ’Oh Jewell, I’ll be good.’ Then I say, ’Well, it’ll be the first time.’ “

BEN SPARKMAN



Funeral Sales Counselor



Ben Sparkman sells peace of mind over your dead body. He sells funerals before the fact. His face has forced thousands of people to face reality during his 16 years at Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park. We all have to go sometime, and Ben thinks you might as well go with him. (He only wants your body, so you can still sell your soul.) It’s a good deal, he says, because living and breathing customers can purchase parts of their inevitable last rites at today’s prices. Customers can save about 12 per cent a year on fixed costs like caskets and vaults. Ben helps people sever their death-fearing emotions from their common business sense. The job takes tact and the softest of pedals. The benefits for Ben include one funeral with all the trimmings, expenses paid. “We’re welt taken care of here,’’ he says.

JEAN JOHNSTON



Avon Representative



You’d expect the best Avon woman in town to be a bumptious bubblehead, or the kind of woman who says things like, “You said it, girl,” but Jean Johnston isn’t that sort of woman at all. She’s straightforward and well-organized. She’s also smart because she pre-stocks Avon items when they’re on sale and then sells them at the original price or slightly lower later in the game. She sells more products (including their most traditionally popular item-bubble bath) than anyone else in Dallas.

Her income is a modest $12,000 a year, but she wins almost $2000 worth of incentive prizes annually. Jean’s 50-hour week is composed of as many 30-minute appointments as she can handle without missing her standing bowling league date, but she sells products up and down the alleys while she’s there. She’s a happily married woman who’s crazy about scented candles, and since she can’t find a stylist who’ll do what she wants, she cuts her own hair.

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