Here a selection for you to read and put to use.
What is
most important factor in transaction of your business? What medium plays greatest part in selling your goods, collecting your accounts, keeping, you in touch with other elements concerns and individuals-that make your business possible? Run your mind up and down essentials in your every day work and lay your mental finger upon one most indispensable.You cant miss it. Its business letter.
The first claim on your attention each morning after you have hung up your hat and drawn a chair to your desk is mornings mail. You run through it and you are back again in hum of things. It has put you in touch with run of your own affairs, just as your morning paper has laid before you a mental picture of what world did yesterday.
Now you take your turn and you dispose of each of those letters as purposes and policy of your business dictate. Through medium of your replies and your own letters to others you buy and sell, you give directions, counsel and advice, you cover a thousand subjects-you play whole game of business over your own desk. And all through medium of business letter.
If there has been one development in past generation that has contributed more than any other to business growth it has been development of business letter. Letters-right letters-are no longer mere stereotyped paper mediums of solicitation and acknowledgment. They are living, breathing personalities, with all capabilities and characteristics of men behind them.
Forty years ago only letters that showed symptoms of red-blooded authorship were impassioned love missives and opinionated chronicles of statesmanship. Then someone, somewhere, conceived idea that human interest could be woven into a business letter as well as into a personal message, that a business letter, after all, was but a personal message and that it was possible to talk to a man a thousand miles away in same words that you would use if he sat beside your desk.
That discovery, developed, has of itself dissolved distance and placed inter-relationship of business men upon a basis of courtesy and intimacy that no other could accomplish. And more important, it has made possible transaction of an enormous bulk of business at an insignificant fraction of what personal handling of it would have cost. Eighty-five million dollars in sales made by one house last year entirely by mail-that is a specific example of results.
As possibilities of business letter have been realized, it has leaped all restricted boundaries of former usage. Today letter, right letter, remember-does whatever personal representative can do. It sells goods, collects money, adjusts complaints, carries on routine of business with all efficiency of individual behind it.
