A young Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton in the movie The Founder, is striking out time after time as he tries to sell his milkshake machines to fast food owners in the 1950’s. He has a snappy pitch and he has a good product and no one is buying. Time after time he lugs his product back to the trunk of his car, growing more and more dejected.

And immediately I understood the reason for his failures, but I suspect most people did not. He was peddling, not selling, and there is a huge difference between the two.

—————-

His business garb was not slick, but rather a study in disorder. Suitcoat rumpled and not sized to his medium bear-sized frame, slacks wrinkled, tie askew. He smoked cigars and seemed to have one sticking from the side of his mouth more often than not. Long before the onset of modern no smoking laws, his office lay under a cloud of cigar smoke. Most of the rest of us smoked cigarettes at our desks, so it was nowhere near the notable offense it would be today.

His name was Don Bickel, and he made me learn the gift that I carry along with me to this day, a gift most people have difficulty recognizing or appreciating. The gift that I brought to many different positions and which sustained me through some twenty-five years of owning a business. He taught me how to sell.

In June of 1973 I was finishing up my second year of teaching English at Mother Guerin High School. I was paid the princely sum of $6,800 per year, with no health insurance, and had more side jobs going than a crazed gypsy. I was driving a cab, teaching auto mechanics in a junior college, getting my commission in the National Guard, among other gigs. I enjoyed teaching, but with a new baby, it was time to change careers. I answered an ad for a sales position with a new offspring product of the Chicago Tribune called the Little Tribune, which later became the Suburban Trib.

I earned an initial interview with Don and a few others, but they were suspicious that I was looking to take the job just for the summer and then return to teaching. They asked me to come back in a week and make a sales presentation to them. Any topic, any idea, just come in and do it. At the time, a few National Guard OCS buddies and I were fooling around with the idea of starting a garage where you could work on your own car using the garage’s tools. You would rent space, buy your parts from us, and have access to things like air compressors, high lifts, power tools, et al. This was 1973, when cars could still be tuned up, and three years before the automotive industry went from mechanical to digital, and the term “tune-up” passed into history.

So I made up my poster boards, typed up my business concept, and went into the room to make my pitch about the “Do-it-Yourself” garage idea to Mr. Bickel and three others. I was nervous, but hyped, and after about 15 minutes, they stopped me. But they were all smiling. “You’re hired, Mr. Wogan,” Don told me. I think they were sold when they saw the work I had put into the pitch and the level of my excitement. They just wanted to see how badly I wanted the job.

So I was now making an incredible amount of money: $14,000 per year and, wait for it, a new company car, an Olds Cutlass, no less. I had arrived. No one could possibly make more money than $14,000.

On my first day, I met the five people who had been hired with me, all about the same age, none of us with any real newspaper ad sales experience. And so school began. Two weeks of learning about all things advertising: agate lines to the inch, gutters, center spreads, page positioning, half tones, premium placement, camera ready art, deadlines, double trucks, tab vs. broadsheet, screening, and more. And the financial language of display advertising: frequency discounts, co-opt deals, commisionable rates for ad agencies, color charges, column inch rates, automotive rates, and contract commitments. We were young and mentally absorbent and a few days later it was second nature to us all.

Now came the real schooling. We were each assigned a suburb for the soon to be published “Area 5” of the Little Trib. These were the northern suburbs, dominated for years by the powerful Paddock publications, and someone in Tribune Tower wanted a piece of their long undisputed revenues. So we were selling a paper no one had yet seen, for rates about the same as our competitors, to customers much older, more cynical, and far wiser than us. You needed your share of Chutzpah, that Yiddish word for shameless audacity, impudence, cheek, guts, nerve, boldness, and temerity.

Don would pick a salesmen each day and ride with him. On my first day with him, he didn’t say much as I made the rounds from retail stores to banks to car dealerships. Most owners would give you a few minutes to explain what it was you were selling, then accept the materials you had brought along, but not offer much in the way of encouragement. Don hovered in the background, but the customers knew I was being trained. Old Jim Jennings of Jennings Chevrolet was the scariest. He chewed up salesmen for breakfast and you really needed to grow a backbone just to put up with his tirades and insults.

It was over a sandwich on my second ride that Don decided to begin my personal education. “You talk too much,” he said and then stopped and took a bite of his sandwich. I was stopped in my tracks, not knowing where this was going. I asked him what he meant and he explained a few fundamentals to me.

“Rule 1 is that you come to your prospect prepared. You need to have questions to ask.”

“Rule 2 is that you wait for the opportunity to ask one of your questions.”

“Rule 3 is that once you ask it, you don’t talk, you listen.”

He went on at great length to explain the simple truth of selling: ask your customer what is important to him, ask why it’s important, and then listen. Your customer will tell you how to sell him. He asked me about the call to Chips Casual’s, an upscale men’s shop in downtown Glenview we had just come from. “Describe what you did,” he said.

“I introduced myself and told him where I was from and what the paper was about,” I said. “What should I have done?”

He went on. “Here’s what he heard: You know nothing about my business, you probably don’t care to learn about my business  and you just want me to buy ads.” I was confused. “I don’t think I was rude,” I said somewhat defensively.

“You weren’t rude. You were just not selling. Want to know what selling sounds like?” I nodded yes.

“Good morning, Mr. Stevenson (which you got from his business license in the window, by the way), I’m Tom Wogan from the Suburban Trib. I was admiring your store.”

“Is this the original location? Let him talk.”

“How long have you been in business? Let him talk.”

“Most of your customer’s local to Glenview? Let him talk. “

“What does a typical Chips Casual customer look like? Let him talk.”

“At some point, he will get tired of talking and then it’s your turn to talk. But now you know what to talk about. If he’s telling you most of his business is local, you can point to our local circulation, which now makes sense to him. If it’s mostly men buying for themselves or women buying for their men, you can point to our readership demographics, which now means something to him. In other words, you’re not selling advertising, you’re selling increased profit. That’s goal number one.”

“Are there other rules?” I inquired.

“Just two more. First, you’re building relationships.” I asked how you did that.

Did you see that Navy League plaque behind his counter?” I had. “Next visit you inquire about his service in the Navy. Again, let him talk. He’s proud of his service and wants to share it. ”

“You said there were two more, that’s only one.”

“Ask for the order,” he said. I must have looked confused.

“Most sales people leave a lot of potential business on the table because they never ask for the order. You need to find the courage to say, in so many words, “Can I have your business?”

————

There were many more lessons to come over the next year and as time went on, I stopped dreading the “ride along” days with Don and began to look forward to learning more and more of his tradecraft. Under his eye and ear, I learned to seek out hints and clues as to what was important to my customers. I learned to ask questions. I learned to listen. I learned to ask for the order by using a “trial close”, which goes something like this:

“Well, Mr. or Ms. Prospect, you’ve told me that price is important to you, that flexibility is important to you and that ability to make last minute changes is important to you, does that sound about right?

Well if I gave you an ad schedule that was 10% less costly, that allowed you to change your ads up to 12 hour prior to publication, is there any reason you wouldn’t give my paper a try for eight weeks?”

More than anything, I learned that building relationships is a two-way street. You had to be bringing something of “value added” service to your customer in order to be distinguishable from your competitors. In that line of work, it might be an unsolicited ad idea done up by our staff artists, or an idea for a promotion you saw work elsewhere. If showed you cared about more than just his billing.

And to this day, I rank anyone in a leadership position by how many questions they ask of their subordinates and customers, and how well or poorly they listen.

I will always be grateful that I was given the gift of a mentor at a young age. God bless you, Don, wherever you are.