Word: salesmanship
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Driesell should know. A huckster most of his life, he owes his success to a unique mixture of sweat, salesmanship and show biz. Raised in Norfolk, Va., he won a varsity letter as a third-grader for managing the equipment of the Granby High team. At Duke University, he rode the bench as much as he played but figured it helped him become "a better coach 'cause it made me hungrier." After graduation, he coached the Granby High varsity for the princely salary of $4,000 and became a two-time state champion-in the sale of encyclopedias...
...Ypsilanti, Mich., uses it to inspire members to recovery. The Christian Science Monitor has refused to carry ads for it. A manufacturer has declared that it encourages "ambition, attainment, leadership, exploration, excellence, growth, goals, imagination, courage, determination, loyalty, sharing, teaching, involvement and concern"?not to mention more aggressive salesmanship. Critics have variously classified it as Hinduism and Scientology. Recently, a columnist, dismissing the whole thing as "half-baked fantasy," offered its success as proof that America's brains are addled...
...authors even have a word of caution about the professional-looking service managers who greet drivers at the entrance to the service department of auto dealerships: they are often paid by commission and thus have powerful incentive to recommend unneeded repairs. If their persuasive salesmanship fails, they sometimes tack on unauthorized replacement orders. Many garages also make use of "flat-rate manuals" that list labor charges based on highly inflated estimates of the time it takes to do each job. If the repairs are finished in half the stipulated time, the fee remains the same-and the garage may hold...
...only $1,000,000 in tuition when its fulltime enrollment declined by 4,530 this year, but another $2.9 million in state support, which fluctuates according to the number of students enrolled. To recruit new students, some colleges have resorted to colorful brochures, radio commercials and high-pressure salesmanship. At the University of Southern California, professors themselves are making follow-up phone calls to prospective students, and the appeals to ordinary high school graduates have been compared to the recruiting of athletes in previous years...
Management policy has been equally archaic. Railroads have rarely attempted to put an aggressive salesmanship effort behind their services, a trick that truckers were quick to learn. That failure goes far to explain the drop in the railroads' share of intercity freight traffic to 39% now from 56% in 1950. Some railroads also have paid out in dividends more than they earned in profits, a practice that did much to bring the Penn Central down...