Sales Talk from the White House

Like a sales manager calling in his men for a pep talk, President Kennedy summoned 300 top businessmen to Washington to hear him and his top Cabinet officers whip up a bit of enthusiasm. His message: get out there--away out there--and sell. The two-day White House Conference on Export Expansion was attended last week by some pretty good salesmen, including IBM's Thomas Watson Jr., RCA's David Sarnoff, Raytheon's Charles Francis Adams and Gillette's Carl Gilbert--all of whom paid $50 for the privilege of attending. But the President complained that U.S. businessmen often do not try hard enough to get their foot in the door when it comes to selling abroad. "American businessmen," said he, "have lost their traditional spirit of daring and ingenuity in world commerce."

Maintaining an Image. That was hard language, especially since the "Made in U.S.A." label has won worldwide respect--but it was buttressed by some hard statistics. By its sheer size, the U.S. leads the world in total exports, and still it sells only 4% of its gross national product abroad, v. 9% for Japan, 16% for West Germany, 19% for Sweden. In the face of increased competition by Japan, Britain and the Common Market, the U.S. share of world exports has shriveled from 26% in 1953 to 20%. Moreover, only U.S. exports tied to foreign aid are actually increasing, and straight commercial exports are declining. The Administration had hoped for a 10% increase in trade this year; instead, it will get only 2% .

If U.S. companies had just held the share of world sales they had six years ago, said the President, that would have been "more than enough to eliminate our entire balance-of-payments deficit." Greater export volume can also dramatically help the U.S. unemployment situation, since every $1 billion in exports means the creation of 150,000 new jobs.

The U.S. also needs a stepped-up sales effort overseas if it is to maintain its image as the world's most advanced industrial nation, an image that is being chipped at by less advanced but more aggressive export countries.

Affronts Abroad. Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges cited examples of affronts to foreign buyers that no wise U.S. businessmen would think of making at home. Technical instructions are frequently printed in English instead of the local language, prices are quoted only in dollars, and English measurements given where the metric system is used. U.S. appliance makers are missing a booming market overseas because they refuse to adjust to the varying electric voltages abroad. Electric turbine makers often do not gear their powerful and complicated products down to the more modest needs of emerging nations. There are, said Hodges, "many cases of just plain incompetent or careless business practices."

The President had his own suggestion about how to raise exports: cut prices. Europe does well in many export areas, he said, "because European producers, unlike American producers, respond to excess capacity by reducing prices in order to maintain production, rather than reducing production to maintain prices."

The businessmen took all this with good grace. None of them question the need to step up exports, but they feel that the government should be doing something about the situation--as most other governments are. They asked for a tax incentive such as European countries give their exporters, for freedom from criminal anti-trust prosecution for ventures abroad, and for the assignment of higher caliber commercial attaches at U.S. embassies to provide market information. In perhaps the most surprising request of all, they called for a reappraisal of the U.S. policy against selling to the Soviet bloc, hoping to free more nonstrategic goods for sale.

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