The Federal Weight, Scales, and Computing Company was a far-flung empire which had a superficial aspect of great complexity, but in its essence it was really beautifully simple. Its heart and soul — indeed, its very life — was its sales organisation.
The entire country was divided into districts, and over each district an agent was appointed. This agent, in turn, employed salesmen to cover the various portions of his district. Each district also had an “office man” to attend to any business that might come up while the agent and his salesmen were away, and a “repair man” whose duty it was to overhaul damaged or broken-down machines. Together, these comprised the agency, and the country was so divided that there was, on the average, an agency for every unit of half a million people in the total population. Thus there were two hundred and sixty or seventy agencies through the nation, and the agents with their salesmen made up a working force of from twelve to fifteen hundred men.
The higher purposes of this industrial empire, which the employees almost never referred to by name, as who should speak of the deity with coarse directness, but always with a just perceptible lowering and huskiness of the voice as “the Company”— these higher purposes were also beautifully simple. They were summed up in the famous utterance of the Great Man himself, Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, who invariably repeated it every year as a peroration to his hour-long address before the assembled members of the sales organisation at their national convention. Standing before them at the close of each year’s session, he would sweep his arm in a gesture of magnificent command towards an enormous map of the United States of America that covered the whole wall behind him, and say:
“There’s your market! Go out and sell them!”
What could be simpler and more beautiful than this? What could more eloquently indicate that mighty sweep of the imagination which has been celebrated in the annals of modern business under the name of “vision”? The words had the spacious scope and austere directness that have characterised the utterances of great leaders in every epoch of man’s history. It is Napoleon speaking to his troops in Egypt: “Soldiers, from the summit of yonder pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” It is Captain Perry: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” It is Dewey at Manila Bay: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” It is Grant before Spottsylvania Court House: “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”
So when Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, waved his arm at the wall and said: “There’s your market! Go out and sell them!”— the assembled captains, lieutenants, and privates in the ranks of his sales organisation knew that there were still giants in the earth, and that the age of romance was not dead.
True, there had once been a time when the aspirations of the Company had been more limited. That was when the founder of the institution, the grandfather of Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, had expressed his modest hopes by saying: “I should like to see one of my machines in every store, shop, or business that needs one, and that can afford to pay for one.” But the self-denying restrictions implicit in the founder’s statement had long since become so out of date as to seem utterly mid-Victorian. Mr. David Merrit admitted it himself. Much as he hated to speak ill of any man, and especially the founder of the Company, he had to confess that by the standards of 1929 the old gentleman had lacked vision.
“That’s old stuff now,” said Mr. Merrit, shaking his head and winking at George, as though to take the curse off of his treason to the founder by making a joke of it. “We’ve gone way beyond that!” he exclaimed with pardonable pride. “Why, if we waited nowadays to sell a machine to someone who needs one, we’d get nowhere.” He was nodding now at Randy, and speaking with the seriousness of deep conviction. “We don’t wait until he needs one. If he says he’s getting along all right without one, we make him buy one anyhow. We make him see the need, don’t we, Randy? In other words, we create the need.”
This, as Mr. Merrit went on to explain, was what is known in more technical phrase as “creative salesmanship” or “creating the market”. And this poetic conception was the inspired work of one man — none other than the present head of the Company, Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, himself. The idea had come to him in a single blinding flash, born full-blown like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, and Mr. Merrit still remembered the momentous occasion as vividly as if it had been only yesterday. It was at one of the meetings of the assembled parliaments of the Company that Mr. Appleton, soaring in an impassioned flight of oratory, became so intoxicated with the grandeur of his own vision that he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and stood there as one entranced, gazing out dreamily into the unknown vistas of magic Canaan; and when he at last went on again, it was in a voice surcharged with quivering emotion:
“My friends,” he said, “the possibilities of the market, now that we see how to create it, are practically unlimited!” Here he was silent for a moment, and Mr. Merrit said that the Great Man actually paled and seemed to stagger as he tried to speak, and that his voice faltered and sank to an almost inaudible whisper, as if he himself could hardly comprehend the magnitude of his own conception. “My friends”— he muttered thickly, and was seen to clutch the rostrum for support —“my friends — seen properly”— he whispered, and moistened his dry lips —“seen properly — the market we shall create being what it is”— his voice grew stronger, and the clarion words now rang forth —“there is no reason why one of our machines should not be in the possession of every man, woman, and child in the United\ States!” Then came the grand, familiar gesture to the map: “There’s your market, boys! Go out and sell them!”
Henceforth this vision became the stone on which Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, erected the magnificent edifice of the true church and living faith which was called “the Company”. And in the service of this vision Mr. Appleton built up an organisation which worked with the beautiful precision of a locomotive piston. Over the salesman was the agent, and over the agent was the district supervisor, and over the district supervisor was the district manager, and over the district manager was the general manager, and over the general manager was — if not God himself, then the next thing to it, for the agents and salesmen referred to him in tones of proper reverence as “P. S. A.”
Mr. Appleton also invented a special Company Heaven known as the Hundred Club. Its membership was headed by P. S. A., and all the ranks of the sales organisation were eligible, down to the humblest salesman. The Hundred Club was a social order, but it was also a good deal more than that. Each agent and salesman had a “quota”— that is to say, a certain amount of business which was assigned to him as the normal average of his district and capacity. A man’s quota differed from another’s according to the size of his territory, its wealth, and his own experience and ability. One man’s quota would be sixty, another’s eighty, another’s ninety or one hundred, and if he was a district agent, his quota would be higher than that of a mere salesman. Each man, however, no matter how small or how large his quota might be, was eligible for membership in the Hundred Club, the only restriction being that he must average one hundred per cent of his quota. If he averaged more — if he got, say, one hundred and twenty per cent of his quota — there were appropriate honours and rewards, not only social but financial as well. One could be either high up or low down in the Hundred Club, for it had almost as many degrees of merit as the Masonic order.
The unit of the quota system was “the point”, and a point was forty dollars’ worth of business. So if a salesman had a quota of eighty, this meant that he had to sell the products of the Federal Weight, Scales, and Computing Company to the amount of at least $3200 every month, or almost $40,000 a year. The rewards were high. A salesman’s commission was from fifteen to twenty per cent of his sales; an agent’s from, twenty to twenty-five per cent. Beyond this there were bonuses to be earned by achieving or surpassing his quota. Thus it was possible for an ordinary salesman in an average district to earn from $6,000 to $8,000 a year, while an agent could earn from $12,000 to $15,000, and even