A Good Day's Work (28 page)

The Great Depression brought more men into the ranks of commercial travellers. Then came the boom following the Second World War. By 1950, Canada's three commercial travellers associations had roughly one hundred thousand members. Unofficial estimates reach four times as high. That's a head-spinning number considering that the country's population was about fifteen million at that time. “They sold everything,” says Terry Carruthers, chief executive officer of the North West Commercial Travellers' Association of Canada, which today represents all the travelling salesmen in Atlantic Canada
and west of Ontario. “You look at any kind of operation—no matter how big or small—and at one point they had a traveller on the road acting as their sales rep.”

It is hard to see the life as glamorous. Carruthers's outfit was formed in 1882 because so many travelling salesmen were dying in hotel fires that their destitute families needed an insurance policy to cover the cost of getting their bodies home. During the heyday of the travelling salesman most of them spent fifty weeks a year on the road. The average salesman lived in one province and covered the two provinces on either side. Some had even bigger territories—the Maritimes through to Toronto, Vancouver to Thunder Bay. A lot of the travellers would work in tandem. One selling, say, soap for Procter and Gamble would show up in a prairie town and take orders for his own products as well as for a dry goods guy in the employ of Canada Packers—who, at that very moment might have been three hundred miles away returning the favour. When they met up again later on, they would simply swap orders. Everybody would be happy.

In time the travelling salesmen morphed into “account executives” and “district managers.” Whatever their titles they were still salesmen. They were still a brotherhood—and, eventually, a sisterhood as more and more women joined their ranks—even if Arthur Miller's play had turned them into a depressing symbol of the hypocrisy and faded dreams of the industrial age. That clearly wasn't how they saw themselves as they pointed their fin-backed sedans toward the horizon. By hitting the open road with an empty order book, they had no choice but to live in the moment. They were out there, unfettered, without a safety net, the embodiment of Adam
Smith's freewheeling capitalist dream. Until along came the fax machine and screwed everything up.

A BIG paper mill used to be the main employer in these parts. Now the road to Bryson is mostly just empty blacktop lined by spruce and pine until we reach the municipal buildings. Any salesman will tell you that making the right entrance is critical to success. Too pushy and you turn customers off; too meek and you don't get past the front desk. I discover that Steve, who by conservative estimate has made something near sixty thousand pitches to customers, and conceivably many more than that, has a mastery of what Gates considers the first rule of salesmanship: make every call personal. He enters the room like Norm in
Cheers
—a familiar figure talking fast in a flat alto. “What's up? What's new? There he is,” he says. “They haven't fired you yet. Amazing! I mean it.” He customarily greets people by nickname—“Hammerhead,” “Annie Oakley,” “Doc” (who is actually a dentist), “Webster” (because he seems to have an answer for everyone—just like the dictionary) and “Steve” (whose name actually seems to be Billy). The Purolator delivery guy is known as “Puro.” One female customer is called “Happy,” which, from the looks of it, may just be Steve being funny.

Generally speaking, only reporters, lawyers, auto mechanics and telemarketers can rival travelling salesmen when it comes to being held in low public esteem. I find it noteworthy then that when Steve makes his presence known, nobody visibly cringes or whispers
sotto voce
, “Christ, him again.” People look up, wave, nod and then go back to work.
The municipality's director-general, Tracy Herault, makes her way up to the front desk. She and Steve banter a little about things a stranger simply cannot follow. When actual business is transacted, it happens so quickly that you almost miss it.

“Paper towels?”

“Two packages.”

“Garbage bags? Toilet paper?”

“No, I guess we're okay.”

Back in the car Steve takes out a mini-cassette recorder, punches some buttons and repeats the order—“Two packages of paper towels for Bryson”—into the mike. The procedure still seems new to him. When he started out, orders were scribbled down in a rough notebook, then, back at the office, transcribed onto a proper order form, which was mailed or couriered to the manufacturer. Now, at the end of the day he hits the replay button, writes the orders out in pen and then faxes them in to the supplier.

There's an irony there. When the fax machine arrived in the 1980s, a lot of companies concluded that customers would simply fax their orders in. Many salesmen—both freelancers and reps on staff at particular commercial concerns—lost their jobs. When the Internet came along, a lot more of them had to find a new line of work. Getting rid of those salaries immediately improved the bottom line of companies. But when sales started dropping, the owners couldn't quite figure out why. “They finally realized there was value in a salesperson who walks in and sits down across the table and says, ‘This is what I'm selling,' ” notes Carruthers. “Feel its weight. This is what you will get from me. I will be back every four to six weeks. If there is a problem, I will be back.”

Some of the smart marketers agreed and rehired some sales agents. Independents like Steve who handle a number of different product lines are still a dying breed. The small independent retail stores are going out of business; big-box store chains buy their products in huge volumes at trade shows in Vegas rather than from salesmen walking through the door. Real relationships between sellers and buyers—cemented over hundreds of visits over perhaps a couple of generations—are now as passé as Rotary Club lunches. The North West Commercial Travellers' Association—the country's largest commercial travellers' organization—now has just five thousand members. Most of them are paid entirely by commission.

Steve, with a salary, is one of the lucky ones. He mostly looks after existing customers, rather than prospecting for new ones. With the closest Wal-Mart twenty minutes away, a need still exists in his corner of the Pontiac for someone willing to come to the client. For how long that need will exist is undetermined. A little luck and Steve might make it to retirement.

For now it's a pretty good life. Steve and Anne live in a 1,500-square-foot bungalow by the banks of the Ottawa River. Every year they get two weeks in Florida and every decade they buy a new car. When the weather improves, they cruise around in their 115 Yamaha on the Ottawa River or sit out under the stars in their backyard hot tub. They're close to the people who matter to them. On the weekend their house crawls with friends. The step-kids from Anne's first marriage—and the five grandchildren—live nearby. On the first Monday of every month Steve makes his way to Bristol Town Hall; there, as one of the municipality's seven councillors, he considers such matters as where to put deer crossing
signs and how to prevent thumb tacks from damaging the walls at town hall.

Steve flips on the radio: MAJIC 100, an Ottawa soft-rock station. He keeps to the speed limit, which is good, since he's soon pulling into the parking lot at the Sûreté du Québec in Campbell's Bay. As he shoots the breeze with the youngish commander and his detective wife, not a word is said about business. By his very presence, though, Steve is checking up on his customer, building goodwill and fostering loyalty. Because that is how a man gets to grow old in this business.

Moments later, a little farther down the road, Steve is inside one of the Campbell's Bay's municipal buildings, jawing with a woman named Natasha. Years ago some big American company tried writing out spiels, which their travelling salesman had to memorize and recite to customers. Steve wouldn't have lasted a day mouthing someone else's lines. Hearing him talk to a customer is like eavesdropping on a meandering conversation that began, say, fifteen years ago. They gossip and kid. Steve brings up stuff that wound-tight city folk would find unnecessary, perhaps even irritating. As an afterthought—in much the way Peter Falk as Colombo would stop in the doorway and say, “Just one more thing”—he looks back over his shoulder while heading for the exit and asks, “Need anything?”

What I mean to say is that Steve is no practitioner of the hard sell. He's no Sam Slick, the Connecticut clock dealer, putting a timepiece in every farmhouse he visited, through flattery and bullshit; or Willy Loman, embodying all the false promise of the American Dream in a push for another sale. Steve can make a compelling case for his products because, even
after all those years on the road, his enthusiasm for the things is undimmed. He stands there and his aw-shucks smile, easy body language and self-deprecating manner seem to say, “No pressure whatsoever. I'm just here to help if I can.” But look closely: the scent of the sale makes his eyes shine and his shoulders bulge. His fingers, I swear, grow a couple of ring sizes.

Natasha, it turns out, wants file folders, staples, pens, some signs, garbage bags and paper towels. That's precisely the order he takes at his next stop, the Pontiac's business development agency, before we drive through some flat Quebec farmland and pull into Gigi's Café for some coffee. Two Sûreté du Québec police officers and a table of housewives sit in the roomy interior. An approned lady—Gigi?—greets him from behind the counter. Steve orders a doughnut and a cup of coffee, which he douses liberally with cream and sugar (Type 2 diabetes, apparently, being an occupational hazard for the travelling salesman). “Everything here is handmade,” he says. “You know they are never going to stiff you. That's important. It's the same way I do things. When I sell someone something, nobody ever asks me the price. I'm not out to screw them. They know that.”

Back in the car Steve takes out his recorder and repeats, “Disinfectant, dish soap, paper towels and floor cleaner.” The order from Gigi's Café is run-of-the-mill stuff for someone who, when called upon, is capable of so much more. A few weeks back, when a service station up the line needed a baby change table for its washroom, Steve found one. Not too long ago a surveyor in Shawville was burned out in a fire. One day Steve just showed up at his new office with a desk, chair, filing cabinets and assorted other office equipment, along
with a couple of strong lads to install it. “One-stop shopping,” Steve calls it.

You read a lot these days about customer loyalty being dead. Watching Steve makes a person think that's not necessarily the case. “On this job you meet a lot of people and make a lot of friendships,” he says. “I'd say about 98 percent of my customers like me and the other two don't. I can live with that.” Steve may look like a mere order taker, but that's missing his subtle art. Building relationships is what sales is all about. He keeps customers with the small things: if a customer mentions how he likes those little pens he gives away, Steve makes sure he drops a couple off next time he's passing. If someone has a question about how a cleaner works, he hustles over, rolls up his sleeves and shows them. No one, after all, reads directions anymore; they ask questions. When a store owner asks whether he can use this new toilet bowl cleaner in his septic tank, Steve had better know what the answer is.

Steve builds in lots of face time with customers—just appearing at the door for no particular reason other than to ensure they have everything they need. But he makes it a point not to tell a customer everything about a product. “Just give the highlights. Always keep something in reserve,” he says. “I used to sell these shirts that had a double stay in the collar. That mattered because some competitors didn't have stays in their collars, which meant that they got all wrinkly. I didn't tell my customers why ours were better. I wanted to keep their interest. I wanted to keep them asking questions.” As much as anything, he perseveres: last year he went to see a customer every week even though she bought nothing from him. After a year of visits he finally closed a sale.

Not that he ever pressures. “Don't try to sell someone on a Friday,” he says when I ask about his rules for sales success. What he means is that at that point in the week, any self-respecting resident of the Pontiac is thinking about getting their power boat out on the lake, not whether they need more fax toner. Wait until Monday, on the other hand, and the business is yours.

We keep moving. On to a big family-owned épicerie, where Jean-Paul Béland, the proprietor and patriarch, unloads a beer truck in the parking lot. Inside, amid the rows of cheese and the freezers full of Salisbury steaks and peaches-and-cream corn, the first person Steve runs into is a young woman named Francis, whom Steve, for some reason, calls “Sparky.”

“Hey, Steve, we need a new calculator. Can ours be fixed?”