The Harvester World: Volume 7, number 2, February 1916

              The Builders' Club

By F.W. Jones

Kerosene—The New Engine Salesman

When a dealer's engine business shows a large, steady increase for three months or more, there is usually a story behind it—just the kind of story that the live readers of this page want to hear. That is what happened to a dealer of our acquaintance this year and when we got to him we found that it was just another case of a good man getting an idea and putting it to work. But here is the storj'. Read it.
The dealer, one of these quiet fellows who do things rather than talk about them, took his increased engine business very much as a matter of course. "There is nothing much to tell," he said. "I am selling your engines. They burn kerosene instead of gasoline. The difference in running cost is bigger than most engine buyers realize, because they never sat down and figured it out. I simply show my prospects some figures on fuel costs I worked out one day and those figures sell an Inter¬ national engine.    That's all there is to it."
If he had not done so very much more business than the average, we might have taken his modest explanation at its face value, but an increase of several hundred per cent, in a little over three months' time could not be passed over so lightly, so we e.xpressed a desire to see his magic figures. And this is what he told us:
"Gasoline now costs seventeen cents a gallon here, tank wagon price, and is going up right along. The kerosene that International engines will burn costs seven and one-half cents per gallon — a spread of nine and one-half cents in favor of kerosene. I have had to revise my figures twice in three months' time on account of an increased price on gasoline. A farm engine burns about a pint of fuel per horse power per hour. To do the work on an aver¬ age farm the engine runs about a thousand hours each year — one hundred days   of ten
hours each. Knowing these facts, it is an easy matter to figure the difference in fuel cost per year between gasoline and kerosene. That difference is my argument for the kerosene engine.    Here's the way it works out:
"Say a farmer comes in to buy a six-horse skidded engine. I show him the International engine, explain that it is a kerosene burner, and quote him a price of $225 at the store. I always get to the price of the engine quickly because it brings the discussion right down to business at once. I never yet quoted the price on an International engine without getting a landslide of quotations on lower-priced engines made by other concerns. In some cases there is not much difference—$10 or so — but in many cases I get quotations running a hundred dollars less than my price.    But competitive
prices, no matter how low, don't bother me any more. My answer is the question—' What fuel does that engine burn.'" If the prospect says gasoline, as he must in most cases, I nail him then and there with my figures. If he says kerosene, I take another tack, but come back to the figures later. I have lost but one sale since I adopted this plan and the man who bought that gasoline engine about three months ago, after I had showed him my figures, was in here the other day to see what he could do on a trade. They cannot get away from me now.