for a million dollars, and that after it was canceled, he had had it framed.
“So the first thing I did when I entered his office was to ask to see the check. A check for a million dollars! I told him I never knew that anybody had ever written such a check, and that I wanted to tell my boys that I had actually seen a check for a million dollars. He gladly showed it to me; I admired it and asked him to tell me all about how it happened to be drawn.” You notice, don’t you, that Mr. Chalif didn’t begin by talking about the Boy Scouts, or the jamboree in Europe, or what it was he wanted? He talked in terms of what interested the other man. Here’s the result:
“Presently, the man I was interviewing said: ‘Oh, by the way, what was it you wanted to see me about?’ So I told him.
“To my vast surprise,” Mr. Chalif continues, “he not only granted immediately what I asked for, but much more. I had asked him to send only one boy to Europe, but he sent five boys and myself, gave me a letter of credit for a thousand dollars and told us to stay in Europe for seven weeks. He also gave me letters of introduction to his branch presidents, putting them at our service, and he himself met us in Paris and showed us the town.
Since then, he has given jobs to some of the boys whose parents were in want, and he is still active in our group.
“Yet I know if I hadn’t found out what he was interested in, and got him warmed up first, I wouldn’t have found him one-tenth as easy to approach.”
Is this a valuable technique to use in business? Is it? Let’s see, Take Henry G. Duvernoy of Duvemoy and Sons, a wholesale baking firm in New York.
Mr. Duvernoy had been trying to sell bread to a certain New York hotel. He had called on the manager every week for four years. He went to the same social affairs the manager attended. He even took rooms in the hotel and lived there in order to get the business. But he failed. “Then,” said Mr. Duvernoy, “after studying human relations, I resolved to change my tactics. I decided to find out what interested this man - what caught his enthusiasm.
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