Copies in Seconds by David Owen

Author:David Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

To SELL THE MODEL A and its immediate successors, Haloid hired fifteen new salesmen, all of them young men—primarily because the company’s existing sales force, most of whom had been selling photographic paper and Rectigraph supplies for years, if not decades, were suspicious of the new technology. “Each got $50 a week plus a 3 percent commission,” John Hartnett said later. The entire sales operation had an improvised feel. Hartnett did his hiring in a shabby office, where he used an upturned orange crate as a bookcase and as a place to keep his lunch pail. Early in 1950, as the first production models of the new copier were becoming available, he took his new salesmen to Philadelphia for a month-long single-market test. To save money and simplify nighttime supervision of his (mostly unmarried) sales force, he booked the group into the local YMCA, where rooms cost $1.50 a night.

“I guess the boys were not too charmed when they saw their quarters,” he said in the 1970s. “A room was just wide enough for a bed and a dresser, and you had to walk about a block to get to the toilet. Anyway, when I got to my room I found they had all stuffed their bags in there—all fifteen of them—bags stacked right up to the ceiling.” Hartnett relented eventually, under continued pressure from the new salesmen, and moved the group to the Adelphia Hotel, where, in the meantime, he had managed to negotiate the same room rate.

While in Philadelphia, the Haloid crew, in conjunction with representatives from Addressograph-Multigraph, held a series of Model A demonstrations, to which Hartnett had nearly three thousand local businesspeople. The shows were held two or three times a day for a week and attracted eight hundred visitors. Many complications arose. The machines had a tendency to stop working suddenly, especially when cool weather drove down the humidity. Even under ideal conditions, the results were inconsistent. Most of the training the new salesmen received during the trip was in maintenance and repair. And even when the machines were working, selling them was arduous.

“These were the days when one fellow would have a territory that included San Francisco plus all of Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho,” Hartnett recalled. “He lived in his car. I mean literally. He would place one of those units in an office someplace, and then he would have to see that it kept on working. The poor guy would beat his brains out. Winter would come along, the box would stop working. Then he would have to tell his customer: ‘Stick with us for a little while. We’re working on that problem. We’ll lick it.’ Of course, he had no idea whether we could ever solve the problem, but he just had to have faith that our scientists and engineers would find a way out.”

Completing a sale sometimes required a high level of determination on the part of the customer. Haloid’s branch office in Boston was situated in a run-down building in an unattractive part of town.

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