You have to keep up with the available products. Toward the first of the year you get new catalogues. To keep up with it you study them, read them, and remember what is in them. When I go out on call, I take a standard group of catalogues with me if I am not sure what I am going to be faced with: catalogues for coffee mugs, inexpensive ball point pens, pencils, key-chains, portfolios and folders, and buttons and bumper stickers. I usually send out two or three orders week for these types of items, so I know those lines like the front and back of my hand. If I can't sell something right there, than I've got t come back and research it.
One of the best things that ever happened to this industry is the development back in the late 1950s of a company called ASI-Advertising Specialty Institute-and they are really the cataloguing source. ASI i a clearing house; they give distributors like us a number and they give manufacturers a number. They are a profit-making organization, not an association, and what they do is they sell the mailing list. The manufacturers get our correct name and address and send us a catalogue. Also, in the last few years ASI has had all the catalogues put on microfiche. We keep the microfiche in the office, and we have a cross-reference file. So if I want to look up ball point pens, I can look up all the suppliers of ballpoint pens and get the price range for each supplier.
Q - What do you particularly like about the job?
A - As an example, last week a customer called me up and wanted 1,500 pencil pointers by Wednesday. It's kind of satisfying to get then for him. I called the manufacturer and got him to go along with the order. Sometimes manufacturers will even disrupt their normal production schedule to get an order to you and to get it done well. To see an order done well and to have it arrive on time is probably the most satisfying thing about this job.
I have never been bored. It's exciting! The people, the challenges, the tremendous ups and downs. I learned a long time ago though, that you never spend the money that you have made on a sale until the money is in your pocket. The big order that you thought you had and you didn't get just doesn't bother me. I am also a very positive person. I think the people who are in this business are generally very positive. They are exciting, they are creative, they are tremendous fun to be around. We are forever creating a new promotion, and there isn't a day that goes by when someone doesn't come into my office and show me a new idea.
I enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy the creativity. I enjoy the travel I've been able to have during the years. My customers have learned to depend on me. For instance, I met someone who was working with a hotel here, and he was one of my very first customers. I would call him "the golden boy for the corporation." He is going places, and as e goes along, he takes me with him. He called when he opened a new hotel and said, "We have a hotel opening and we need some ideas- something to give the cab drivers in the city and something to go in the Dooms." He knows he can leave it in my hands, and I will come back to him with some ideas. He may not always buy all the ideas I have.... I finish. But he would. But he knows he can depend on me, and that is what it 11 boils down to. I cannot provide any item that someone else can't provide, but I can give the customer the ideas, I can follow the order through, and I can make sure that the customer is not going to have to worry about getting it. That is my position. I just enjoy it. I thrive on it. ? In specialty advertising, all the products are so unusual, it's fun. I feel like I am playing half the time.
