Will i E
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FENCE in a man with the salesman's temperament and what happens'? Answer: frustration for him and many uncomfortable moments for his firm. That is why William Young couldn't stand banking. It didn't take him long to discover that an organization which promoted officials and raised salaries on an age basis was not for him. Why, he wanted to know, should he receive a smaller pay packet than people who, though older than he, worked under his supervision? Why did the bank refuse to give him that Bombay vacancy because he was only 17+, while admitting that his qualifications were way ahead of other candidates? It all seemed illogical. What is more, the distant view was dreary. He wanted progress and he wanted to see signs of it now.
So he entered industry. He abandoned safety for the market place's hurly-burly and uncertainties—a departure likely to send cold shivers down the spine of your naturalborn bank official, but which to Young was a heartwarming, inspiring release. Pirelli's, he soon discovered, was no ill exchange for the bank.
A banking colleague, also disenchanted with bookkeeping and who had preceded Young in the tyre industry, persuaded him to make the .change and later, by a curious chance, was responsible for his entry to Firestone's. And once arrived there the Young career began in real earnest.
Salesmanship will out in one form or another. The executive with a real urge towards order-getting is never genuinely happy unless he's doing just that. And when the call .to the field came Young was ready for it (and had, I suspect, given some pretty broad hints to his senior colleagues that he was ready and willing). So out to the fields ripening unto harvest went the new tyre sales
nan, humping a heavy bag of samples and a suitcase )acked with the week's necessities.
This, be it remembered, was in the nineteen-twenties.
Firestone's were in a modest way of business in Britain at that time. They had not got around to providing cars for their representatives and Young had to encompass a very wide territory in the North and North-East of England by rail. Anybody who has ever been " on the road" can appreciate that these were days of hard graft for him— the arrival in a town monumentally indifferent to Young and Firestone; the sudden rainstorm overtaking the salesman plodding along with his heavy samples; different hotels each night, long evenings away from home, often in dismal places; the ever-pressing overriding necessity to sell, sell, sell.
And sell he did. During one period he never had a
blank day. Even if to avoid an empty order book, he persuaded some indifferent garage proprietor to buy only a few tubes or went prowling round the town after business hours to see whether there was not at least one garage still open and with an audience for Firestone's eager man. At 60 years of age he remains the same today, though now he works from a handsomely panelled room at the Firestone headquarters on London's Great West Road, and the whole of the United Kingdom, with all its motor construction empires. spreading ever-wider, is his territory.
With the McKenna Duties the pattern of Firestone's business in Britain changed. Local manufacture began in 1928 and with that the need for depots. Thus it was that the next stage in his career was management. He became responsible for depots, first of all in Birmingham and then in Manchester.
Then, in Ireland, he found that salesman's dream, virgin territory. It was with some reluctance that the company sanctioned his Irish Sea crossing, but in the issue they had nothing to regret. Young built up a receptive market, both in the Free State, as it was then, and in the Six Counties, and when he returned to do a senior job in Britain again he did so with some backward glances, an indulgence for which, if I judge him aright, he hurriedly rebuked himself.
It was somewhat surprising to hear from him that during the war, when normal sales ceased, he did a stint in the factory as assistant factory manager, a phase of his career which, he says, added some useful ingredients to his quali fications. It's no use our production boys trying to pull wool over my eyes when some specially awkward thing is asked for. I know what goes on in the works!"
He attaches great importance to the technical knowledge of his salesmen. They must have confidence in themselves, of course, but also they must be " sold" on the products they have to sell. As he sees it, the wise, thrusting executive with ambition ought to find out all he possibly can about the firm for which he works.
When our outside representatives come to me for advice on any given problem I invariably reply: 'Look at it this way----what would you do if this were your own business? '
William Young, now he plans and carries out the whole of Firestone's United Kingdom sales campaign, harbours no restrictive views on (he employment of salesmen. He doesn't demand that before they are taken on the company's payroll they must have had similar experience elsewhere, or that they must be from a narrow circle of schools and colleges. What he does look for is an attractive and confident personality. "One of the questions I put to myself when deciding whether a man is our type or not is: Would I like to have him in my own office?"
It was a good day for the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Co., just over 40 years ago, when they decided that William Young, ex-bank clerk, was the kind of fellow they liked
to have around. H.C.