The very model of a modern salesman

Let’s turn back the clock to 1973. Total housing starts are up over 2 million for the year. Workers put the finishing touches on the Sears Tower in Chicago. And a group led by George Steinbrenner buys the New York Yankees for a cool $10 million.

It’s also the year that Lebhar-Friedman, publisher of Home Channel News, hired Jim Malver, who is retiring after 35 years on the job.

Times were different back then, according to Malver, a salesman with the voice of a radio announcer and the manners of a diplomat.

“When I started, it was a relationship business, first and foremost,” he said, in his first official interview with his own editorial team.

The ’70s were the glory days of the martini lunch. One of Malver’s best customers was a cash-register supplier who would do business only if the contract doubled as a coaster for cocktail glasses. “When I met with him, I used to tell my boss, ‘don’t expect me back after lunch,’” Malver remembers. “Those days are long gone.”

Contacts, relationships and people selling to people remain in the forefront of any modern industry, but there’s much more to salesmanship in 2008. The modern salesman must be armed with creative programs, custom-fit ideas and quantifiable value, Malver said. A smile and shoeshine won’t get you very far.

Some things haven’t changed. For instance, the importance of training; the need to spend hours upon hours in stores studying products, presentation and pricing; and the wisdom of finding the time to do nothing but think.

Malver fondly remembers how his mentor, the late Bob Perry, encouraged him to sit with his feet up at his desk at 5 p.m. and do nothing but dream.

“Dream of what?” Malver asked.

“It will come to you,” Perry answered.

What eventually came were ideas, programs, presentations and ways to connect with customers.

Perry also helped Malver in the art of role playing. “He spent months and months with me,” said Malver. “We would practice market presentations on each other all the time. He would have me practice in front of a mirror to see if I would buy from myself.”

Malver’s career coincided with the big three office innovations: the facsimile machine, the cell phone and the e-mail account. The most dramatic of the bunch was the cell phone (coincidentally, the first handheld cellular phone call was made in 1973), because it freed him—and thousands of salesmen like him—from the fixed location phone booth.

“I used to know the location of every phone booth in Massachusetts,” Malver said. “And there was a booth at exit 9 off I-95 where I would spend hours.”

A lot of Malver’s salesmanship lessons can apply to anyone in the home channel who has customers to satisfy and products to sell.

Malver was asked for the worst advice he ever received. He thought about it and said: “An old boss once told me to single out my top 20 accounts and concentrate exclusively on them and nobody else,” he recalls. “I decided not to take that advice. If you don’t continue to go out and find new business, you’re in big trouble.”

And his best advice came from Perry: “He used to always say, ‘Get out there and spill your guts.’”