When you sell a product costing upwards of $10 million, you have to be the best, and James B. Taylor has been at the pinnacle in the rarefied atmosphere of executive jet aircraft sales for more than 20 years.

As president of Canadair Inc., Taylor, who grew up around airplanes, heads the United States subsidiary of Canadair Ltd., the Canadian government firm which builds the Challenger business jet.

From his office in Westport, Conn., Taylor, 61, who brought direct sales of executive aircraft to Pan Am, then Cessna and now Canadair, directs the team responsible for worldwide marketing of the Challenger.

Selling a business jet isn’t like selling shoes or shaving cream. For one thing, the numbers aren’t the same. It may take months or years to close a sale, but the stakes are high, and only the best survive.

Taylor, whose easy-going manner masks a quick wit, terms himself “more a marketeer” than a salesman because “there’s a lot of softening up the beach-head” in selling expensive jets. “Our marketing includes the worldwide support of converted customers who become our best salespeople.”

As marketeer or salesman supreme, Taylor managed the impossible: he and his team got 56 firm order when the Challenger was still a paper airplane and over 100 before its first flight. His marketing team has, to date, contracted over 300 orders.

Direct sales is “a heck-of-a-lot more effective way” to sell a high-ticket item like a business jet than conventional dealer marketing networks are, Taylor told Personal Selling Power. “People prefer to deal direct with the manufacturer and it also give you complete control over the selecting and training of your people, the territories and the price.”

When he left his job as VP of Cessna’s Commercial Jet Marketing Division in 1976 to join Canadair, Taylor took his direct sales and support ideas for the technologically advanced Challenger with him. “I took some of their best people along, too,” he quipped, “to build the nucleus of the Challenger marketing team.”

“Everybody sells business jets direct now,” notes Taylor. But it wasn’t always so. Taylor remembers meeting Charles Gates just after Gates had bought the Learjet from Bill Lear.

At the time, Taylor was Vice President and General Manager of Pan American Business Jet Division, which in 1976 had sold 44 aircrafts in the Western Hemisphere alone. Gates’ Learjet, with 200 dealers worldwide, had sold only 33 worldwide that same year, so he asked Taylor how many salesmen he had. “When I told him we had four people, he almost fell over,” said Taylor with a laugh. Taylor’s toughest sales job may have been selling the direct marketing concept. That was the case when he joined Cessna to market their new Citation jet in 1969. In 1972, the year the Citation was certified, Taylor predicted sales of 1,000 within a decade. A major national business magazine scoffed at the prediction but last year publicly ate its words as the company moved beyond that mark.

Despite the high cost of corporate jets, the field is crowded with competitors and both Taylor and others in the business say prospects for sales look excellent when the economic recovery takes hold fully. “We’re already getting a lot more interest” he noted.

Just over half the Fortune 1,000 top corporations currently operate aircraft, and that means that thousands of other companies do not, but may have an interest in adding on or in moving up. For Taylor, that means they have the potential to be moved up into the wide bodied cabin of Canadair’s top-of-the-line Challenger. The Challenger, which comes in two versions, is the first commercial plan designed and built from scratch by Canadair, which was founded in 1944 and, from then until it developed the Challenger in the late 1970’s, had built planes for other manufacturers under sub-contract.

Taylor, a former Navy pilot with deep roots in aviation, had some say in the new airplane’s design and proudly calls it the first marketing oriented business jet. In addition to its roominess, he says his product offers advantages in fuel efficiency and low noise levels, both inside and out. “It’s quiet enough to be allowed to run out of Washington’s National Airport 24 hours every day,” comments Taylor.

But that is Jim Taylor the indefatigable salesman. How he got there is another story. Taylor grew up in Long Island. His father, a renowned test pilot of the same name, as a Navy pilot in both world wars and died in the second.

The younger Taylor likewise took to the air, becoming a Navy pilot in World War II. When he was mustered out of the service it was only natural that he continue to fly, and he briefly took a job flying nonscheduled airlines. That didn’t last long, and soon afterward he found himself selling the then-new North American Navion personal/business aircraft at Teterboro, NJ.

“I sold Arthur Godfrey his first plane,” Taylor recalls.

When the bottom fell out of the postwar civil aviation boom in 1949, Taylor decided to look elsewhere for sustenance. He joined a small firm making metal caps for containers as Vice President of Sales, and he convinced the board to let him buy a plan for his own business and travel needs. It was during this time that he hatched his ideas about direct selling. He was elected President of the company in 1951.

Soon afterward the cap company was sold, and for a time Taylor went with a firm that sold airplanes. In 1962, he heard that Pan Am intended to establish a Business Jet Division. Taylor had a long talk with Pan Am’s legendary founder Juan Trippe and was hired as VP of the company’s new business jet division to market the French Falcon Jet in the Western Hemisphere.

Taylor has seen many changes in the marketing of corporate aircraft in the past two decades. In the early days, selling an airplane often involved little more than making contacts with a lot of pilots, taking them for a spin in the plane and perhaps doing the same thing with the pilots’ bosses. The boss, in those years, was usually the top man, and the world of his pilot carried a lot of weight.

It still carries a lot of weight, explained Taylor, but more often than not the company pilot or flight department nowadays reports to someone like the vice president for transportation.

However, pilots remain a key contact point. “They can help a lot, but they can also hurt a lot.”

Today, with the price of airplanes a major expense even for a large corporation and with competition for sales fierce, the marketing picture has changed dramatically.

“It has matured a lot the last 15 years,” is the way Taylor puts it.

Anyone needing instant gratification from a sale won’t last long in the field. Taylor says the average sale takes eight to ten months, and some take years for consummation.

Leads come the say way they do in many other marketing environments, through extensive advertising and direct mail, and from direct personal contacts.

“A ;lot of it is still word-of-mouth and getting around and meeting people is darned important.”

Taylor compares selling expensive airplanes to courting: “You’ve got to get ’em in the mood first.”

That means flights play a role today as they did in the past. But now it’s as important to impress the CEO and the chief financial officer as it is the chief pilot. Taylor says Canadair’s seven full-time salespeople keep the two Challenger demonstrators booked up solid.

Clients fall into three categories: those wishing to upgrade their existing air fleet, those who want to add to their inventory of aircraft or diversify them, and the “concept customers” – those who haven’t had a plane.

Most Challengers are sold to corporations – Xerox was the first buyer when initial deliveries were made in 1980 – but a military version is also made, and a few have been sold to both governments and private individuals.

During the long months when a prospective buyer is making a choice, Taylor and his staff are supplying information, doing research on their requirements and the way the product can be a benefit to the company. “We often do computer runs on what our plane will do versus the competition’s plane.”

Aircraft costing millions of dollars can’t be justified without a lot of convincing spadework. This means expensive and time consuming research and providing answers when the client calls.

The underlying idea is to sell the plane “as a piece of communications equipment, really. It’s a tool to increase the productivity of key people.”

With such high stakes, believability and integrity play important roles. They are at the core of Taylor’s view of selling, which consists of three fundamental elements: “You’ve got to work a little harder than the next guy, be honest, and back up what you sell.”

Self-trained in selling, Taylor has nonetheless refined his methods over the years. He has enrolled in a few seminars, and found them helpful. By and large, though, he sees “a certain type of personality” as essential for sales success, one with “a lot of drive. You also have to like people, and you have to know when to ask for the order.”

An easy-going, deliberate man, Taylor describes himself as competitive, and that quality carries over into his personal life. A top-notch skeet shooter, he frequently looks up the local gun club when out of town and loses few chances to compete. Besides skeet, he enjoys hunting in the fall and swims every day.

“I used to fly a lot, too, but that’s too expensive,” he adds.

A family man, Taylor and his wife, Peg, have been married 36 years and have four children, ages 27 to 35. His youngest son has also gone into the aircraft business, working for Sikorsky.

Taylor is up early every day, at work in his office in Westport by 4 a.m. He likes that time of day, finding he can get a lot accomplished when it is quiet, often making calls to Europe, where it is later, and planning his schedule for the day.

Besides his responsibilities marketing the Challenger, he and his people spend a lot of time at the plant in Montreal, working with engineers and design experts to help improve the airplane and make sure it is what consumers want. He notes that direct feedback from sales to engineering is essential to ensure that buyers are satisfied and that operational problems that develop in the field are correctly promptly and efficiently.

Taylor is also in charge of maintenance and service operations for Challenger. “We have service centers that support Challenger exclusively in Hartford, Conn. and Munich, Germany. One is planned in Houston as soon as the traffic warrants. Service is a part of marketing,” he emphasizes.

Jim Taylor thrives on his work, but it isn’t money or being at the top that fuels his drive. Asked his definition of success, he replied:

“A lot more than money. The satisfaction of doing a job well and recognition for doing it properly – better than anyone else.”

“I’ve been fortunate enough to find and select the right people to help me get the job done. They all enjoy what they’re doing, as do I. Remember: Nothing ever happens until somebody sells something. You can usually make what you have sold, but you can’t always sell what you have made.”