Maslow on Management

The Good Enlightened Salesman and Customer

A good sales person is the eyes and ears of the company . . . he is the ambassador of the enterprise . . . He is the company at a distance . . . any enterprise ought to have a very steady feedback about consumer demand, about needs of markets, about satisfaction and dissatisfaction of product and the salesperson is exactly the person to collect this information and feedback. He is the V.P. in charge of innovation and development of future products as well as just the guy who sells something.

If we start with our standard assumption of the enterprise persisting over a long period of time and remaining healthy, both in the homeostatic sense and in the growth sense, and if we include all the things that we have deduced such an enterprise needs in order to remain healthy, then this will also make a difference in the definition of the salesman and of the customer. The way things stand now, the current conceptions and definitions of salesmen and customer are only slight modifications in principle from that of the snake-oil salesman and the sucker. The relationship is seen very clearly in the language which is used, which implies that either the customer screws the salesman or the salesman screws the customer, and there is much talk about who gets screwed, who gets raped, who gets exploited, or who gets taken advantage of. Or, it is as if the ...