A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  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?”

  “A Canon P-23?”

  “Yep. The paper won’t go through.”

  “I’ll bring it this week,” he says.

  Then back in the van and across town to another grocery store. In a second-floor office Raymond and Robbie—two sturdy fellows in their thirties who look like they should be in buckskins out fording a river somewhere—peer glumly into the screens of desktop computers. Steve’s arrival lightens their mood. For a few minutes they kibitz about something called “Bikes in the Bay,” which turns out to be the local motorcycle festival. Somewhere in the conversation Steve reminds them that if they want their regular ad in the Equity’s Pontiac Travel Guide they will have to commit soon. For good measure he hits them up for thirty dozen hamburger patties and twenty dozen hot dogs for the Equity’s annual summer picnic.

  Steve’s exit route takes him down some back stairs and through the butcher shop, where a thick-bodied guy in a hard hat and blood-smeared white coat hacks at meat. Half-assed insults are exchanged: nobody is getting better looking or, from the sounds of it, any thinner. When Steve tells him about the store’s picnic commitment, the butcher, whose name turns out to be Rennie, writes on a chalkboard: “Steve, 30 dozen patties, 20 dozen hot dogs June 30 The Equity.”

  Steve pulls up in front of the local youth employment centre. “Sometimes I get an order here, but usually it’s waiting on the fax machine for me back at the office,” he says. Today they want two packets of 8½ × 14-inch printer paper. He sticks his head inside the office at the local elementary school (“Nothing today.”) and a food bank in the same brick building (“I think we’re good.”). The two sisters who run Kluke Snack—a narrow, elongated old-style diner—want to do some business. Back in the car, he repeats their order into his recorder: a bottle of Merlin cleaner for their fryer and grills. It retails for $9.95.

  Sales folks, it has been my personal experience, are inattentive drivers: they’re always illegally texting, talking to a customer on Bluetooth or mentally calculating a commission. They’re usually running late. Steve is different. He drives within the speed limit, with both hands on the wheel. As we drive, he talks. Not in a wearying oh-my-god-let’s-not-leave-a-second-of-dead-air manner. He makes friends with the pauses. He keeps his eyes on the road, as befitting a man who has seen many things and whose abiding principle is “every day you go to work you never know what is going to happen.”

  Steve had options when he graduated from Woodroffe High School: he could have joined the Mounties or the fire department. Instead, he opted for Art Forbes Enterprises, which his father formed after retail giant Dylex took over John Forsyth Shirts and axed the sales staff. Steve spent the next fifteen years selling Bench Craft leather belts from Kitchener, Ontario, along with trousers made by Rothstein Pants, and swimsuits, robes and pyjamas made by Majestic Industries, both of Montreal.

  He and Art travelled together in his father’s big Buick Estate wagon, then an Electra 225, finally a Pontiac Parisienne. They threw their samples into grips. They placed the bulky suitcases in the trunk—unlike a lot of travelling salesmen, who took out the back seat of the car and replaced it with a piece of plywood for storing samples—and then hit the road. Through the hick towns of eastern Ontario and the mostly English townships of western Quebec they drove. In a cloud of spinning gravel, they’d wheel into places named Arnprior, Renfrew, Deep River, Pembroke, Brockville, Kingston and Belleville and hump their goods into men’s stores that had stood there for generations. “[When I was] growing up, Father was away a lot,” Steve says. “I hated the day he was leaving. But over the years we grew very close. We were more like brothers than father and son. When he died, I lost my best friend and my father in a single day.”

  Travelling with Art, Steve watched, listened and learned. From the age of twelve on Steve had been copying out and memorizing his dad’s motto: “Good, better, best: I will never rest till my good is better and my better best.” As they worked together, Art taught him other things: “The customer isn’t always number one,” for starters. But also that “if a customer has more than three sock companies on the rack, you will have only trouble getting paid,” since the store owner clearly can’t say no to a salesman even if they don’t really think they can move the merchandise. He counselled Steve to trust his own judgment when deciding what merchandise to show customers. (“You may have a shirt in fifty colours and stripe combinations. Pick out the ones you like. Show them to the customer and you’ll build a trust and rapport with them.”) Some of things he urged were self-evident: “Don’t ever slam a door, because you never know when it will open again” and “Don’t try to sell your product by talking down the competition.” When he told Steve to “always be closing,” his father meant that you need to be always closing in on the next step in the sales process.

  Art knew the dangers of overselling. Every Christmas he sent blocks of Black Diamond cheddar cheese to their customers. He never sent booze for the simple reason that if a bottle of Canadian Club rye arrived
at a customer’s place of business, it would almost never make it to their home unopened. The customer, instead, would arrive half in the bag and late on Christmas Eve. The wife would blame it on Art Forbes and Associates. Next thing you knew a competitor would have the business.

  Together Art and Steve spent fifty weeks a year on the road, taking orders, prospecting for new clients and keeping existing accounts happy. “I was in town,” Steve would say to customers when he finally got on his own, “and I just wanted to drop in because I had few things I thought you would like to see.” Like his father before him, he would unsnap his grip and, as if unveiling a saint’s relics, drape a shirt or tie over his arm for the owner’s discerning gaze. Orders would be scribbled down for transcription back at the office. Then, on to the next customer, often a few miles down the highway.

  Sometimes clients would come into the office in Ottawa to see samples. The Forbes boys would set up booths at trade shows. A few times a year they made their way across town to sell to the procurement guy who supplied the Canadian forces bases in Canada, Bermuda and West Germany. Spring, fall and late summer Steve and Art packed up their grips and boarded a plane for the Caribbean. They checked into the Elbow Beach Surf Club in Bermuda—where the seventies potboiler The Deep was filmed—or the Astra Suites in Barbados or the Grand Bahama Hotel on Grand Bahama Island. Sometimes they had a sample room where they could put their clothes on display. Mostly they visited clients: Leo Custodio and Charles Dickens in Bermuda, Michael Lambert in Barbados and Pat Paul in Nassau. “I used to try and get all business done in the first couple of days,” Steve recalls. “I would get there on Tuesday and make appointments for Wednesday. Then Thursday, Friday and Saturday you could put your grips away and relax.” Some 45 percent of their annual sales came from the islands. When their Caribbean customers travelled to Canada, the Forbes boys ensured that they stayed at the stately Rothstein residence in Mount Royal and received a tour of the factories that made the merchandise they sold in their stores.