Echoes of the Past: Salesmen of the sixties

Echoes of the Past looks at the March 1965 edition of Optician sister title, Manufacturing Optician. That month, Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, left his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space and 3,500 US Marines arrived in South Vietnam – the first US combat troops fighting in the Vietnam War.

Selling is a vital part of the optical industry – whether it’s frames, lenses or equipment. The Shop Talk column gives a small insight into how sales were conducted in the mid-1960s.

‘A good salesman is, I think, an extrovert,’ said the writer. ‘He has to sell himself as well as his products and firm. The introvert finds this difficult: often, impossible. The good salesman needs something needs something that the good actor has, the capacity to project himself across the footlights (the order book), to evoke a response.’