Birth of the Salesman
On the morning of July 10, 1916, over three thousand salesmen, managers, and executives from many industries gathered in Arcadia Auditorium in Detroit for the first World’s Salesmanship Congress. The event was the brainchild of D. M. Barrett, editor of Salesmanship magazine.
The development of modern sales management is a uniquely American story. The intense effort to standardize salesmanship distinguished the growth of capitalism in America from that in other countries.
The emergence of salesmanship depended on a stable currency, the rule of law, the protection of private property, and the availability of credit-all aspects of the American economic system. Organized selling in America flourished also for cultural reasons.
With more fluid class boundaries than in European countries, the skills of salesmanship, especially beginning in the late nineteenth century, seemed to offer a pathway to personal success.
The Science of Selling
The birth of modern salesmanship occurred in the decades around the turn of the century. Entrepreneurs at the vanguard of selling, who developed modern sales techniques, created procedures for management that paralleled those of the new science of mass production.
Only after the turn of the century did the terms “salesman” and “salesmanship” come into vogue, carrying with them parallels to “workman” and “workmanship,” but also signaling that selling was a male-dominated occupation.’
The revolution in selling had consequences beyond the firm. The growth of systematic methods of sales management gave rise to a number of products and services that supported sales managers, including trade journals and popular magazines, such as Salesmanship (founded in 1903), Salesmen (1909), Salesmanship: Devoted to Success in Selling (1915), Sales Management (1918), and Salesman’s Opportunity (1923).
The creation of methods of sales management also opened up new branches of academic inquiry, such as marketing, consumer behavior, and industrial psychology.’
All the transitions in selling methods-organizational, strategic, and ideological-were central to the growth of the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
People bought for a variety of reasons, including their own rational decision-making and the preferences of taste. They also bought because they were “sold.”” Sales workers played a role that was both informative and persuasive. suasive. They worked to overcome what they saw as the inertia or procrastination of buyers.
The most ardent believers in the power of salesmanship were those, around the turn of the century, who tried to make selling a “science.” Since the earliest days of trade, selling had been viewed as something of an “art.”
With the coming of mass production and the formation of highly managed sales forces at Heinz, National Cash Register, Burroughs Adding Machine, Ford, General Motors, and other firms, entrepreneurs and businessmen began to refer to a “science” of selling. Companies that sold to consumers often had large sales forces, larger than those that sold to businesses. In 1923, Fuller Brush had 3,400 salesmen going door-to-door.
NCR, Heinz, Coca-Cola, Burroughs, and other mass-manufacturing companies did indeed develop comprehensive and systematic methods of sales management. They devised procedures to recruit and train sales workers and published large sales manuals and newsletters (Pickles at Heinz, for example) to keep salesmen men informed and motivated.
Unlike other reform impulses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth eth centuries, efforts to systematize selling originated in domestic strategies for commercial and personal success, rather than in the European intellectual movements that influenced, for instance, city planning, modernist architecture, and social insurance.
Consumption-based economy of the early twentieth century originated in the face-to-face selling strategies of peddlers and book canvassers of previous generations.
The Independent Peddler
Leaving his native Vermont in 1818 at age twenty-one, James Guild decided to pursue life as a peddler, trading in a seventy-dollar bank note for a pack and some merchandise.
Guild was one of a number of Americans who, in the decades following the Revolution, were eager to travel and to engage in commercial activities, and looked to advance themselves through competition petition in the marketplace.’ Peddling was a popular occupation among young unmarried men, for it required little initial investment.
Peddlers had to gain the trust of farmers and other buyers. This was not easy, for peddlers were, essentially, strangers coming to town to make a series of trades and then leave.
The goal of such peddlers engaged gaged in “transactional” selling differed from that of salesmen working for companies later in the nineteenth century, who called upon the same customers repeatedly.
Guild found that customers bargained to get the lowest possible price. Bartering and bargaining were a common part of antebellum New England merchant culture.
The U.S. census listed 10,669 peddlers in 1850 and 16,594 in 1860; most came from the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio.
Guild worked out his own methods to overcome the resistance that greeted him-and he delighted in the process. Wit and humor were his allies when visiting farms. Guild’s sentiment of projecting confidence-of “putting oneself self forward” in a bold way-became common advice in how-to-sell books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He realized that there was economic value in entertaining and in using less orthodox ways of sparking interest. Guild also saw selling as a form of seduction. Guild flirted and joked with his female customers, who saw an opportunity to trade their rags, food, or currency for tinware and other goods. He found that the way he presented the scissors determined their price, rather than some objective sense of what they were worth,
The issues that confronted Guild, such as how to overcome suspicion, how to talk to different types of customers and how to make sense of the occupation itself, also challenged other peddlers. Despite these problems, peddlers and peddling networks flourished in America.
Peddlers were an indispensable part of early America’s market revolution, carrying manufactured goods, imports, books, and broadsides. They formed networks that tied together the agricultural areas, hinterlands, lands, and cities. Peddlers and artisan-entrepreneurs were partners in the transformation of rural life.
There were three types of peddlers:
- those who traveled independently
- peddlers who worked for an artisan-entrepreneur or storekeeper keeper on some kind of salary or commission
- and a third type, who were hired by peddling organizations that distributed manufacturers’ or merchants’ goods
There were various other “hawkers and walkers” in early America whose work prefigured modern salesmanship. The selling, promoting, and preaching of ideas had an important place in a country.
As early as 1805, the Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey, who hired peddlers to sell his books, noted that
It was no longer possible to rely on simple retail sales in his own shop to stay in business. Instead, he had to turn to the “forced trade” by taking orders for books through traveling agents-he employed the colorful Mason Locke Weems, the most famous peddler in early America.
An evangelical model of selling-in which selling was a form of conversion-helped version-helped salesmen steel themselves for the frequent rejection they inevitably faced and infused them with zeal for pursuing their targets. The roots of commercial salesmanship, argued Thorstein Veblen in 1923, were found in the history of evangelism.
Along with difficulties of shipping and receiving goods, trade was also inhibited by the lack of a federal currency; until the National Banking Acts of 1863-1864 and the printing of greenbacks, state and private banks printed their own notes.
Another problem for peddlers was the imposition of state and county taxes on their trade.
Haliburton, a Canadian who created the fictitious character Sam Slick, delighted in satirizing the techniques of clock peddlers.
The stories of Sam Slick popularized the image of the Yankee peddler as an overly clever tradesman. As Slick himself admitted, the key was not to have great goods, but to know how to sell them:
Beginning in the 1840s, several entrepreneurs sought ways to overcome come the impediments and suspicions that hindered peddlers’ work. They began to study selling more closely and gave salesmen detailed instructions, while at the same time gathering more information from the field.
Salesmen and their employers in this period tried to make sense of the rules of persuasion. Even the critics of peddlers expressed fascination with their ability to sway an audience.
Both popular and professional interest in salesmanship and promotion continued to increase in the years after the Civil War, as manufacturers in several industries hired large canvassing forces and undertook to overcome impediments to canvassing.
The Art of the Canvasser
After the Civil War, more specialized canvassers traveled through the landscape, visiting farmers or working out of stores. There were 53,500 hucksters and peddlers in 1880 according to the census: of these, 51,000 were male and 2,500, female.
Manufacturers of more expensive machinery, such as weighing scales, sewing machines, chines, and harvesting equipment had begun to deploy canvassers by the mid-nineteenth century.
The early sales strategies of these machinery manufacturers influenced selling methods at large companies throughout the twentieth century.
Selling, like most aspects of business, was bound by a series of formal relationships-whether verbal agreements or written contracts-between employers and workers.
Canvassers had to master, and exploit, common customs of human interaction.
After mid-century, manufacturers and other employers began to rely less on the wit of canvassers and adopted more systematic approaches, publishing sales scripts for distribution to their sales forces. These scripts codified the techniques (or, as critics said, the “tricks”) of canvassing.
Salesmen went by a variety of names in the years following the Civil War. Canvasser and agent, the most common terms, usually signified a salesman working on commission.
Peddler, canvasser, or agent could refer to any type of itinerant salesman.
One of the most common figures on the landscape was the book agent. A number of eastern publishers began to hire canvassers to sell books by subscription-that is, to take orders for delivery at a later date.
Hartford, Connecticut, was by far the most important city in the subscription book-publishing industry. At least a dozen subscription houses were located there in the 1860s and 1870s.
Subscription book publishers transferred much of the financial risk onto the book agents.
Success in Canvassing: A Manual of Practical Hints and Instructions, Specially Adapted to the Use of Book Canvassers of the Better Class was originally published in 1875 by Ebenezer Hannaford.
The manual emphasized that salesmen needed to project a professional image and to consider themselves representatives of the company.
The key to a good canvass, the manual suggested, was to maintain control by holding on to the sample book. The agent was supposed to handle the “prospectus”-the name usually given the sample book.
It was also important that the agent avoid discussion of the price. If the prospect offered any objection during the sales pitch, the manual contained ready answers. Winning arguments often meant losing sales.
The details in these scripts underscore the differences between selling and advertising. Advertising reached a mass of people, delivering the message of the manufacturer or advertising agent. It produced no conflict and demanded no direct response. Selling, however, was predicated on give and take. Sales scripts were heuristic devices, written to help salesmen solve the “problem” of selling.
The salesman had to be part “soldier,” following orders, and part “evangelist”-not only a believer, but also one who would get others to believe.
All the elements of standardized canvassing were employed in the campaign to sell Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. Mark Twain helped to orchestrate the sales effort, which became one of the largest and most successful campaigns of the nineteenth century. For the first thirty years of his writing career, Twain used subscriptions alone to sell his books.
Subscription selling could bring high financial returns. Twain’s contract tract for A Tramp Abroad (1879) called for him to receive 50 percent of the profits.
In 1884 Twain formed his own publishing house in Hartford with his nephew, naming it after Webster. Twain eventually persuaded Grant to sign with Webster, promising him an astonishing 70 percent of the profits.
Grant started writing his memoirs in the summer of 1884, after learning he had cancer, and finished the two-volume project in less than a year.
The campaign was a great success.
By early 1886, the sale of Grant’s memoirs had reached 325,000 in the United States.
Some veterans formed canvassing companies. Captain T. H. Thompson son and Major L. H. Everts started an atlas business at the end of the Civil War; they hired canvassers to travel through counties in Iowa to sell county maps-each map, on purchase, could be personalized with a depiction of the farmers’ houses and land.
In 1859, the patent-medicine industry’s output was valued at $3.5 million (about $75 million today) according to the census figures; by 1904, it was more than twenty times that amount.55 As historian James Harvey Young noted, these salesmen were true pioneers in modern ern sales and advertising, handing out almanacs, putting up roadside signs, and printing their claims in joke books and songbooks.
The formal and informal aspects of door-to-door canvassing were well worked out by the 1880s. During the decades after the Civil War, there occurred not only attempts to standardize selling but also a growth in the literature warning against canvassers and increased legislation to address petty swindling.
Yet underlying much of this criticism was an interest in standardizing methods of canvassing and, more broadly, techniques of persuasion-or, or, as it was most often called, “influence.”
The manual advised securing orders from prominent townspeople people and obtaining testimonials. It also presented a theory, called “the philosophy of canvassing,” about three basic steps of selling:
- First-Gaining a Hearing
- Second-Creating Desire
- Third-Taking the Order.
“Influence,” like salesmanship, was a subject of fascination for critics as well as proponents-for.
This simultaneous fascination and criticism was apparent in Bates Harrington’s How ‘Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted by Wandering Canvassers (1879). On another level, Harrington’s book was as much an instruction manual (as its title, How ‘Tis Done, suggests) as an expose. Harrington’s book summed up the ambivalence about salesmanship in this period. It showed not only the interest in methods of selling-out out of which would grow the fascination with selling in the 1910s and 1920s-but also the need to camouflage this interest with moral outrage.
The Traveling Salesman
At the same time that canvassers and book agents were testing their sales pitches on farmers, another kind of salesman was also traversing the landscape. Known as commercial travelers, traveling salesmen, or drummers, they were employed by large wholesale houses, though many also worked independently on commission.’
The new modes of transportation enabled wholesalers to create far-flung distribution networks,
Collectively, these drummers sold the goods that stocked the general stores found at country crossroads.
These “drummers” or “borers,” therefore, fore, remained in the cities waiting for regional merchants to come to them. It was only in the final decades of the nineteenth century that the large wholesale houses sent them on the road to “drum up” business.7
The wholesale firms that hired drummers operated at the center of the nation’s economic activity. The goods they bought and sold came from all over the world.
In 1860 it took three days to ship dry goods from New York to Chicago; in 1880 it took less than twenty-four hours.”
Nearly all commercial travelers were white (more than 99 percent), and the overwhelming majority of commercial travelers were native-born (85 percent in 1890). In contrast, the number of foreign-born within the category of “hucksters and peddlers” was much higher (53 percent in 1890).14 While canvassing had been taken up by Jewish peddlers and female male book agents, traveling salesmen were almost exclusively white, Protestant men.
Commercial travelers redefined the image of salesmen.
Skillful selling was not based on trickery but on establishing trust with the customer-trust that had to be developed over time and through offering advice about business.
The largest wholesalers, like Marshall Field’s (now a large retailer), were major businesses in the late nineteenth century. They often had a common structure, with departments for the purchase, storage, sale, and shipment of goods.
By the 1870s, the credit-rating agencies R. G. Dun and the Bradstreet Agency (which were later to merge) were active enterprises.
Salesmen were monitored and evaluated by a general sales manager. Sales managers created compensation schemes to motivate traveling agents and induce them to work in ways that would satisfy the interests of the firm.
Wholesale drummers, then, developed a particular sales strategy that suited their goals. While petty canvassers formalized techniques for one-time selling, wholesale drummers sought to build a lasting relationship with customers.
Drummers were “big personality” sellers, in part because the goods they sold were often undifferentiated from what other salesmen men had to offer-hence, they felt, their own personality could make the difference.
Almost every industry had its own trade journal. These journals carried stories celebrating commercial traveling-and carefully avoided the term “drummer,” which sounded unprofessional. The magazines also contained articles about new machinery or popular products, and they featured want ads for salesmen and business directories.
The best-known and most powerful wholesalers were in dry goods.
Despite the various types of traveling men, many interests drew them together to form associations and clubs.
Unlike canvassers, who sometimes used the term “evangelist” to describe their role in converting individual customers, drummers’ organizations preached the advantages of commerce itself.
Working out of large wholesale houses and having storekeepers for clients, traveling salesmen developed a form of salesmanship distinct from that practiced by canvassers. Though they did not usually work from scripts, traveling salesmen were aided by a variety of pamphlets, instructional books, and charts.
Wholesalers and drummers were also dependent on reliable information about the financial health of shopkeepers. The reports of Dun, like that of its rival and eventual partner, the Bradstreet Agency, provided essential information to wholesalers, allowing them to decide how much credit, if any, to extend to shopkeepers or other businesses wishing to purchase goods.
Unlike canvassers, drummers operated in a business world that was almost exclusively male-both the salesmen themselves and the customers they met-and drummers’ memoirs comment on the need for a courageous and “manly” frame of mind.
Salesmen gained a reputation for good storytelling.
Experience, in the end, was what drummers claimed to be the most important part of learning to sell.
The work of phrenologists and physiognomists in deciphering the elements of salesmanship continued into the early twentieth century, long after these “sciences” had been discredited. The work helped spread the idea that buyers and sellers could be categorized into a series of types, which became a common device for writers and academics to analyze selling.
In 1879 a high percentage (about 70 percent) of manufactured goods in the economy flowed through wholesalers.” In the years afterward that figure would drop as manufacturers in several industries began to sell goods directly to retailers or to consumers.
Dry-goods wholesalers faced competition from mail-order companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. Department stores also cut into the drummers’ sales, because they bought directly from manufacturers. Macy’s, founded in 1858.
But a more important reason for the decline of drumming had to do with the increasing number of manufacturers who chose to distribute their products themselves, rather than rely on a wholesaler.
The new business organizations that emerged in the late nineteenth century and practiced mass manufacturing called for a different approach, one that made selling more of a “science,” combining production and distribution.
Sales Managers and Branded Goods
In the 1880s the agricultural canvasser and the wholesale drummer were at their peak. But in the late nineteenth century, a newer, more aggressive, and highly managed form of salesmanship emerged. Mass manufacturers began to build their own cadres of salesmen, and in doing so, developed the first modern sales forces-“modern” because their use of salesmen men set the pattern for companies in the decades that followed.
Several companies grew from small entrepreneurial concerns to large enterprises before the turn of the century. National Cash Register, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, Westinghouse Electric, and Carnegie Steel were all founded in the 1880s; in the following decade came Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, General Electric, Burroughs, and Pepsico.
The development of a strong sales department was essential for the success of these large firms, helping them to generate demand and to prevent competitors from entering the industry.
The sales strategies of large industrial manufacturers were different from those of wholesale drummers. They linked the work of their sales forces with their production schedules and sold branded products, rather than generic ones.
The entrepreneurs who founded these large manufacturing companies frequently had forceful personalities.
Several entrepreneurs invented the product that their company sold. A number of them had experience selling. Many of the entrepreneurs were interested in reform of one sort or another. At times, they viewed an entire industry as their personal calling. Drawing on their own experience, entrepreneurs made sense of selling in different ways.
Still, these entrepreneurs-peddlers, evangelists, and inventors-shared shared many characteristics. They built large businesses that combined production with mass distribution. And they usually complemented the work of their sales force with advertising and other promotional devices.
To use a military analogy common in the early twentieth century, advertising was a weapon for waging an air war, while salesmen were deployed as foot soldiers in a ground campaign.
These efforts transformed selling in ways equivalent to Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management movement, which had revolutionized production.
In many ways, large manufacturing companies “branded” their salesmen, men, just as they had their products. They did not hire “canvassers” or “drummers,” but rather Remington salesmen, NCR agents, or Heinz salesmen.
The sales force remained a male preserve. Women seldom were hired for sales work.
The increasing numbers of these “branded” salesmen, however, did not mean a decline in petty canvassers or drummers. The number of “hucksters and peddlers” increased creased from 59,083 in 1890 to 80,415 in 1910, and the number of traveling salesmen grew from 58,691 to 163,620 during the same period.
While the subscription book industry declined, some late-nineteenth-century canvassers of other small items began to sell to the growing urban and suburban markets.
Canvassing also flourished in the industrial insurance industry, which was introduced in the United States in the late 1870s by Metropolitan Life of New York, Prudential Life of Newark, New Jersey, and John Hancock of Boston.
Wholesale drummers continued to distribute many generic products after the turn of the century, including liquor, leather, groceries, jewelry, and furniture-undifferentiated, unbranded goods that were sold through many small retail outlets.’
Salesmen for mass manufacturers sold branded goods to a number of customers-including to the public, retailers, tailers, and business offices-and often advertised widely in magazines, on billboards, and in newspapers.
Many well-known mass-manufacturing companies established sales forces in the 1880s and 1890s, but, as noted earlier, a handful did so before fore then.
Singer Sewing Machine, in particular, had built an especially large and effective sales force by the mid-nineteenth nineteenth century.
Though founded by Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875), the company was effectively headed by Singer’s partner and lawyer, Edward Clark (1811-1882), who became president following Singer’s death.
The sale of the sewing machine paved the way for other expensive or intricate cate machines, including the vacuum cleaner and the automobile, to be sold to consumers at their homes as well as through branch sales offices.
Salesmen for American Tobacco, Heinz, and Kellogg’s sold their goods to retailers, much as wholesaler drummers had; they developed sales forces to solicit orders for their products, but relied on wholesalers to distribute them.
Henry John Heinz, a leading entrepreneur of his day, developed a sales force and marketing campaign to transform his small vegetable-peddling peddling business into an international organization.” After working for a brief time in his father’s brick business, Heinz turned his attention to selling food. Heinz sold his own horseradish to grocers throughout the city in the early 1860s and soon entered into a partnership with his neighbor L. Clarence Noble. The firm prospered until 1875, when, due in part to low agricultural prices and credit problems, Heinz was forced to declare bankruptcy. Undeterred, Heinz started again, this time forming a partnership with his brother and cousin. The F. and J. Heinz Company, founded in 1876, began to market sauerkraut, ketchup, and pickles. Heinz salesmen were paid on commission. In the early 1880s, wagon salesmen were paid a commission of 2.5 percent to 5 percent, depending on the item. Heinz’s sales force grew from 2 in 1877, to 125 in 1893, to 952 in 1919. The size of the sales force was a fraction of Singer’s, which numbered in the tens of thousands.
Other entrepreneurs also “skipped the middleman” to sell soda, chewing gum, and breakfast cereals-though many of these firms continued to rely on wholesalers to ship their products after salesmen had taken the orders. Asa Griggs Candler (1851-1929) exhibited an evangelical zeal in the marketing of Coca-Cola. Candler hired salesmen to promote the sale of Coca-Cola at a variety of venues, including soda fountains, hotels, restaurants, delicatessens, green grocers, and elsewhere. Under Candler’s leadership, sales of Coca-Cola went from $1,500 in 1887 (a year after its founding), to $228,600 in 1897, to $3,363,100 in 1907 (about $64 million today).
James Buchanan Duke (1856-1925), founder of the American Tobacco Company, built a sales organization after he began using high-speed cigarette-making machines in his plant.
Finally, William Wrigley Jr., the chewing-gum magnate, also organized a force of salesmen in the late nineteenth century.
There were many enthusiasts of salesmanship in the branded food, tobacco, and candy industries. They depended on a combination of national advertising, branded products, and face-to-face selling to achieve their goals.
Makers of new office machinery, such as adding machines, typewriters, and cash registers, built their own sales forces to give detailed explanations nations of the machines’ uses and features.
The real pioneer of this type of selling was John H. Patterson, whose company, National Cash Register, ter, dominated its market.
Selling the adding machines was not easy. Salesmen had to make repeated peated calls to a single customer. One obstacle salesmen had to counter was the prejudice of clerks, who resented the new machine and thought it posed a threat to their jobs. This challenge was similar to that faced by cash-register salesmen, who had to persuade clerks that the register did not suggest a distrust of their ability or honesty in handling sales transactions.
The office-machine salesman was critical for the development of American selling. The methods of salesmanship established at Burroughs, roughs, NCR, and other companies greatly influenced methods of selling at IBM and other computer companies.
The commission for Burroughs Adding Machine agents was about 30 percent of the sale price of the machine; this would go to the regional agent, who then paid the salesman, who actually made from the sale only some portion of this amount. The commission rates for salesmen who sold branded grocery items, such as Heinz pickles, to retailers, were much lower. In the case of Heinz, they were about 5 percent of total sales.
The informal aspects of selling included methods of developing the salesman’s confidence, improving sales talks, and building enthusiasm for the job.
Sales departments of the early twentieth century launched the careers of professional motivational speakers and helped formalize the type of advice that Dale Carnegie later popularized in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).
The introduction of contests, scripts, and other routines in an occupation that had once celebrated independence, travel, and wit did not occur without conflict.
Every sales manager grappled with the expensive problem of turnover.
Modern sales management, the most ardent enthusiasts of salesmanship claimed, should be run according to scientific principles. No one pursued this idea more vigorously than John H. Patterson at National Cash Register.
John H. Patterson and the Pursuit of Efficiency
Patterson created a global system of management that pressured salesmen to seek out new customers (and sell replacement merchandise to existing ones) and to quash competitors.
Patterson in some ways resembled the peddler James Guild, who delighted in the cleverness of a sales pitch, and the drummer Saunders Norvell, who saw salesmanship as crucial for building lasting business connections.
Beginning in the mid-1880s and continuing to his death in 1922, Patterson promoted “scientific” salesmanship more than anyone else ever had. Patterson’s ideas about how to run a large sales campaign were no doubt shaped by his military experience. Patterson’s faith in salesmen’s ability to create demand and to stifle competition shaped his entire managerial strategy.
Patterson was determined to create a class of white-collar representatives-salesmen who dressed conservatively, were well rehearsed in company procedures, and issued daily reports to the home office.
In a sense, Patterson combined the canvasser’s persistence and the wholesale drummer’s cultivation of long-term relationships: he worked out a detailed script for salesmen to follow while encouraging his salesmen to develop lasting connections with businessmen and storeowners.
In the 1880s, agents kept about half the money they made on a register sale. The rate of commission would not remain this high, however, and by 1919 it averaged aged 31 percent.”
From the time he founded the company in 1884, Patterson hoped to build an international sales organization. Singer had been the first modern ern American manufacturer to conduct an overseas business, and by the 1880s it already had three decades of foreign sales experience.
To ensure that salesmen communicated all the benefits of the register, Patterson gave them scripts to memorize. The first NCR sales script was the creation of Patterson’s brother-in-law, Joseph H. Crane, in 1887. How I Sell National Cash Registers, which became known as the Primer. The Primer divided a sale into four steps: approach, proposition, demonstration, and close. The Primer instructed salesmen to exert pressure in a forceful yet subtle manner.
Chief among the rules of salesmanship at NCR was the ability to demonstrate “sympathy [toward] … the business and interests of the P. P. [“Probable Purchaser”] and sincerity in presenting [the] machines
In January 1894, NCR produced a more formal Sales Manual. The Manual reached its maximum size in the edition of 1904, with nearly two hundred pages. After that it was condensed so salesmen could master it more easily. The 1910 edition was a booklet of fifty-six pages.
While the Primer provided a way of standardizing the salesmen’s approach, Patterson also looked for new methods to regulate and monitor their day-to-day activities. He had salesmen write out daily reports that were then sent to Dayton.
Most important, Patterson assigned quotas to each agency. Initially quotas were set according to the population of the territory.
Through newsletters, journals, and speeches, Patterson incessantly communicated his theories about work and life to NCR agents and factory tory laborers.
Beginning in the 1890s, Patterson became interested in the pyramid, a common symbol in contemporary spiritual and pseudoscientific literature.
“Mr. Patterson was extremely fond of his complex organizational pyramids,” noted Allyn, “with names arranged in a fine flow downward from his own eminence.”
In time, Patterson came to render nearly all his strategic and instructional charts in the pyramidal shape. One such pyramid plan, labeled the “Science of Selling,” described the five qualities of successful salesmen: men: health, honesty, ability, industry, and knowledge of the business.
Patterson perceived himself as the founder not only of NCR but of the entire cash-register business.
To improve skills further, Patterson in 1894 inaugurated a sales school in Dayton. The initial course lasted six weeks and taught basic retail accounting skills, methods of demonstrating the register, and issues sues of good health and manners.
The demands of selling at NCR increased after the turn of the century.
The establishment of relations between a company and the wives of salesmen was not uncommon. Often the effort was to enlist the wife as a managerial rial accomplice-checking up on the salesman’s progress, spurring him to greater achievement.
Starting in 1906, NCR salesmen who made their quota were allowed to join the newly formed One Hundred Point Club, which held its own annual celebration.
In the 1890s, while Patterson was improving agents’ training and increasing creasing the number of salesmen working overseas, he also stepped up his campaign against competition, enlisting salesmen for this challenge, too.
Such activities, coupled with NCR’s tremendous market share-estimated mated at 80 percent in 1892 and 95 percent a decade later-brought the company legal difficulty on several occasions.
John H. Patterson’s managerial style was in some sense inimitable, being so closely tied to his own personality. Nonetheless, through his own speechmaking and self-promotion, Patterson had tremendous influence fluence on methods of salesmanship and sales management.
E. St. Elmo Lewis, who worked for both NCR and Burroughs, wrote one of the best-known general guides to selling skills. In Creative Salesmanship (1911), Lewis praised Patterson.
Lewis formulated the slogan: “Attract attention, maintain interest, create ate desire.”
Patterson’s efforts, and those of Lewis, were part of a larger movement, undertaken across a widening spectrum of people in the early twentieth century, both to bring a “scientific attitude” to bear on the problems of salesmanship and to give selling an air of professionalism.
Psychologist, Economists, and Other Sales Experts
Business writers, publishers, economists, and psychologists began to analyze selling after the turn of the century. These “experts” became the next wave of sales enthusiasts, following the book campaigners, wholesale drummers, and entrepreneurial mass manufacturers.
The new experts and specialists promised to help entrepreneurs and sales managers confront the problems of low efficiency, high turnover, and public suspicion; they encouraged businessmen to turn to them for answers.
Charles Wilson Hoyt wrote directly about the application of Taylorism to selling in his book Scientific Sales Management (1913). “Scientific Sales Management believes in the proper training of the salesman,” Hoyt claimed.
Economists and other academics at newly established business schools analyzed the different economic functions of salesmen and gathered empirical data about the costs of distribution. Psychologists tested the effectiveness of sales scripts and used their theories of human behavior to make sense of selling; they also tried to discern the qualities of successful salesmen by studying their techniques, intelligence, and personalities.
Printers’ Ink, founded in 1888, was one of the first journals for sales and advertising professionals, and remained in circulation for almost a century.
Several books and magazines displayed the word “science” on their covers. Several publications were intended to teach the rudiments of salesmanship.
Arthur Sheldon, who founded his own school of scientific salesmanship, added a fourth step, “secure satisfaction,” to Lewis’s three in an effort to make the routine seem more ethical. According to one writer of the time, the slogans of Lewis and Sheldon “had a very profound effect on the selling world.”
Norval Hawkins, head of the Sales Department at Ford Motor Company. Hawkins, in The Selling Process (1918), described successful selling as following a sequence of preparatory steps (preparation, prospecting, approach, and audience); presentation steps (sizing up the buyer, gaining attention, and awakening interest); convincing steps (persuading and creating desire, handling objections); and closing steps (securing decision and obtaining signature). These steps were further subdivided. To gain the right type of “attention,” for instance, required moving the prospect through three stages (compulsory attention; curiosity to some degree; intentional or spontaneous attention). The same method was applied to interest, which was broken into attentive interest; associating interest; and personal interest.
More significant for the professionalization of salesmanship (and likely more useful) than these efforts to draft rules of selling were publications cations that spread the principles of sales management.
These magazines carried articles on compensation methods, quotas, pricing, sales conventions, sales campaigns, and selecting salesmen.
Sales-related publications also transformed selling into its own separate rate business function and identified sales management as a discipline with its own tools and vocabulary.
While Wisconsin was distinguished in the field of agricultural marketing, Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration, founded in 1908, became the center for studying the marketing of manufactured goods.
One of Harvard’s most important figures in the study of sales and marketing was not a trained economist, but publisher and businessman Arch W. Shaw. Shaw’s greatest intellectual contribution while at Harvard was his article “Some Problems in Market Distribution,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (1912). Shaw, “We have built up a relatively efficient organization of production.” But while production capacities increased dramatically and a new range of goods was produced, similar improvements in distribution had been neglected. Businessmen needed to find better ways to calibrate demand, wrote Shaw.
Academics at business schools defined the field of selling from the viewpoint of management, and, for the first time, laid out the history of recent changes.
Psychologists made many contributions to the field of selling and advertising in the early twentieth century.
They changed the vocabulary of salesmanship, adding new terms like “suggestion,” gestion,” “instinctual wants,” and “cognition” that had objective and experimental connotations.
Psychologists invented procedures for personnel selection and methods for investigating consumer behavior. They also elevated the status of selling and promoted moted the idea that salesmanship was becoming more efficient and ethical, which for some businessmen was academia’s most important contribution.
F. B. Goddard’s The Art of Selling: With How to Read Character (1889) was only the earliest of many books that relied on phrenology and physiognomy to teach principles of selling.
Studies of sales and advertising were influenced by the work of German man scientist Wilhelm Wundt, who founded a laboratory for psychological logical experimentation in Leipzig in 1879. He performed tests on sensation and perception, measuring in fractions of seconds the reaction times for various mental activities.
The other leading influence was psychologist and philosopher William James.
While Wundt and James did not analyze business, several of their students and followers were instrumental in developing the field of industrial psychology. Among the psychologists who took an early interest in studying business were Ernst Tisher, G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, and Hugo Münsterberg. Münsterberg (1863-1916) is often referred to as the founder of industrial psychology.
Münsterberg envisioned a practical role for psychologists in assisting the study of crime, pedagogy, and business. In particular, he believed that psychologists could improve workplace efficiency and personnel selection.
Other psychologists also established ties with commerce and took up the study of sales and advertising. Harry L. Hollingworth (1880-1956). Hollingworth authored several books on selling, including Advertising and Selling: Principles of Appeal and Response (1913) and The Psychology of Selling and Advertising (1923).
The psychologist who had the most sustained interest in the subject of selling was Walter Dill Scott. He promoted the idea that human economic nomic behavior was often based on emotion or sentiments, rather than rationality or logic, and worked to enhance the stature of psychology itself self and its application to the problems of business.
Walter Dill Scott and the Bureau of Salesmanship Research
Like other promoters of modern salesmanship-such as Saunders Norvell, Asa Candler, and John H. Patterson-Walter Walter Dill Scott played an important role in the development of modern selling.
Unlike economists at business schools, his focus was not on distribution and consumption but on the personalities, motivations, and capacities of the men and women involved in it.
His study of commerce began in 1901, when a Chicago businessman asked him to address an audience of advertising executives at the Agate Club. He spoke, for instance, of the Law of Habit (“The idea next to enter the mind is the one which has habitually been associated with the one present to the mind”) and the Law of Recency (“If two things have been recently connected in the mind, when one is thought of again it suggests the other also”)
Scott also discussed the workings of human memory and listed three keys to making advertisements more memorable: repetition, intensity, and association.
Critical to Scott’s understanding of the sales process was his view of the nature of human wants and how they are formed. Scott was initially influenced by the idea that perceptions, emotions, and behavior were based primarily on inborn traits, or instincts-a theory developed principally by William McDougall.
“Instinct” psychology claimed that the human mind operated through certain innate tendencies or feelings that were “the essential springs or motive powers of all thought and action”‘.
Scott’s work also provided “evidence” of the ethics of salesmanship. For Scott, selling and advertising were not about manipulation, but motivation.
In order to persuade, and to sell, advertisers and salesmen had to learn the customer’s wants, rather than impose their own; they “must know [the customer’s] habits of thought, for it is too difficult to attempt to get them to think along new lines.”
Questions about manipulation and motivation bothered Scott, for they brought to the surface issues about the role of salesmanship in the economy and society. To Scott, a former football player, a salesman was like an athletic coach, who encouraged people to buy things they wanted and to overcome feelings of inertia, or even fear, about purchasing new goods.
In 1916, Scott became head of the Bureau of Salesmanship Research at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), and undertook a large-scale effort to isolate the characteristics of successful salesmen.
Along with his work in advertising, Scott had made a name for himself in the field of management with his book Increasing Human Efficiency in Business: A Contribution to the Psychology of Business (1911).
He merged Frederick W. Taylor’s belief in simplifying the tasks of labor with William James’s theory of “habit” formation-the idea that individuals could form good habits through the repetition of desirable thoughts and actions.”
Scott laid out five clear aims of the salesmen’s bureau: to “systematize” methods of selecting and training sales recruits; to use the methods of experimental and statistical psychology to determine the mental and personal traits of successful salesmen; to conduct experiments on the selection, training, and motivation of salesmen; to publish the findings of the bureau in academic journals and books; and finally, to offer courses to sales managers that would make use of the bureau’s findings.
Scott’s work on standardized personnel hiring policies, and his methods, caught on. His tests helped to orient the labor market toward personality, education, and the ability to present oneself and away from specific training and skills.
According to Merrill Ream, who worked under Scott, the ideal salesman was an extrovert who disliked “morbid things, such as funerals and spiritualism,” was “intellectually uncritical,” and cared not “to philosophize.” He took “notice of little things” and had “more interest in details than his unsuccessful counterpart”; he was also “more flexible” and “able to modify his usual reactions when the social situation demands.” He did not “care much for reading” and was “a stable conservative citizen” with “faith in the established order.” He was antiradical and believed in religion, liking “ministers, bankers, conservative people” but not “gamblers and spendthrifts.” thrifts.” He was married and opposed to easy divorce and believed in “individual thrift and individual responsibility for one’s self and dependents.” The ideal salesman was a high school graduate with perhaps one or two years of college, rather than a college graduate or the recipient of an advanced degree.
Psychologists encouraged a view of the economy as one filled with undiscovered “wants” waiting to be formulated; salesmanship was about motivating consumers and overcoming their unhealthy inertia to buying. Publisher and Harvard Business School professor Arch W. Shaw described the country as a mass of consumers, whose wants and needs were complex, shifting, and malleable.
By the 1920s businesses themselves, like Procter and Gamble and General Motors, were conducting ducting research on consumers and their habits in the same way that psychologists and academics had done.
Selling Consumer Goods in the 1920s
By the 1920s, American businesses recognized “salesmanship” ship” as an essential component of modern strategy. Indicative of the rising importance of selling within corporations was that nearly one-quarter of the chief executives of the top two hundred industrial firms in 1917 had spent part, or all, of their careers in sales.’
The figure of the salesman, as presented in popular books and magazines, zines, was quickly parodied. Sinclair Lewis’s portrait of the archetypal real estate salesman, George Follansbee Babbitt, was the most effective. Babbitt was the apotheosis of salesmanship.
Interest in salesmanship among academics and popular writers was stimulated by salesmen’s role in the increasing trade in consumer goods following World War I.
Two types of salesmen were especially significant in the sale of consumer goods: automobile dealers and door-to-door salesmen of home products and appliances.
The development of salesmanship in the automobile industry drew on John H. Patterson’s work at NCR.
Richard H. Grant. Grant had been a salesman at NCR before going to Delco, Frigidaire, and then Chevrolet. His special talent was training and motivating new recruits, transforming them into super salesmen. He boiled down Patterson’s teaching to seven laws:
- Have the right product.
- Know the potential of each market area.
- Constantly educate your salesmen on the product, making them listen to canned demonstrations and learn sales talks by heart.
- Constantly stimulate your sales force, and foster competition among them with contests and comparisons …
- Cherish simplicity in all presentations.
- Use all kinds of advertising (Patterson had 104).
- Constantly check up on your salesmen, but be reasonable with them and make no promises you can’t keep.
Door-to-door salesmen also captured popular attention as more companies in the 1920s began selling their goods directly to the public. In many ways, door-to-door salesmen were like the subscription booksellers of the nineteenth century.
The promotion of consumer items had a great influence on the economy. From 1919 to 1929, the share of homes that had washing machines rose from 8 percent to 29 percent; vacuum cleaners, from 4 percent to 20 percent; radios, from 1 percent to 40 percent; and cars, from 26 percent cent to 60 percent.
The total advertising volume in the United States increased from $1.409 billion in 1919 to $2.987 billion in 1929.
But salesmen were also essential in expanding demand for new consumer products, and they served a different role than advertising.
These “mass salesmen” helped to create a market for specialty products like automobiles, radio, and vacuum cleaners, just as they had for brand-name goods like Coca-Cola and Ivory soap in the late nineteenth century.
In particular, salesmen were instrumental in introducing two key elements of consumer culture: planned obsolescence and installment purchase. Moreover, salesmen arranged terms of credit. Installment selling burgeoned throughout the decade.
The experiences of automobile companies and manufacturers of products sold door-to-door reveal the extremes of consumer selling.
Automobile dealers and door-to-door salesmen had different strategies. At the automobile companies, salesmen men explained the options available on cars and arranged credit and service; they also convinced consumers to choose one brand over another. In door-to-door companies, salesmen demonstrated products, tailoring their pitch to the specific needs of a housewife or family. Rather than competing against other brands, they often competed against retailers, in a sense setting one method of distribution against another.
Unlike the car companies, the number of distributors at door-to-door concerns, selling their wares, could be virtually unlimited.
Some firms used door-to-door selling only to introduce their products and then sold them through retail shops. Door-to-door companies tended to maintain their sales volume in times of recession. Even though consumers had fewer dollars to spend, many more recruits were willing and available to go out and sell
The longest lasting and best-known door-to-door sales agency employing women was the California Perfume Company.
One of the most successful door-to-door companies of the period was Fuller Brush, which, although it sold a simple product, succeeded not only in selling brushes but also in popularizing salesmanship.
In 1925, there were 4,200 Fuller salesmen. They were expected to perform form fifteen demonstrations per day-not just calls. Company statistics showed that a relatively high number of demonstrations, nearly half, resulted in some kind of sale. When they did, Fuller salesmen earned a commission rate of about 40 percent. Like patent medicine men, lightning-rod salesmen, and insurance solicitors, Fuller Brush men were supposed to exaggerate fear-fear of dirty brushes. Motivation was critical at Fuller Brush. In his communications with employees, Alfred Fuller tried to give his salesmen a sense of mission.
Automobile companies were much larger than the door-to-door enterprises, but they too used salesmen to generate demand, relay information back to managers, battle the competition, and provide consumers with credit to purchase durable goods.
When Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908, the automobile market was fragmented. But Ford quickly dominated the market with his strategy of high-volume production and low price.
Except for a single, short-lived retail sales facility in Detroit that closed in 1916, the Ford Motor Company did not sell cars directly to consumers. Like other automobile makers, Ford relied on semi-independent pendent dealers.
Because Henry Ford was not particularly interested in marketing and salesmanship-choosing instead to put his faith in low prices and an expanding market-the task of developing an effective sales and distribution organization for the company fell to others.” Norval Hawkins, Ford’s sales manager from 1907 to 1918, devised much of the company’s distribution system, including procedures for selling cars, monitoring dealers, and creating a common company culture through newsletters letters and conventions. Under Hawkins, the number of Ford dealers increased sharply from 215 in 1908 to 6,167 in 1917.
Hawkins looked for ways to establish a common culture among Ford’s network of dealers. To monitor dealers, Hawkins constructed a hierarchical sales organization run by salaried Ford employees.
Hawkins was a powerful motivator. Eventually he wrote two popular books on selling, The Selling Process: A Handbook of Salesmanship Principles (1918) and Certain Success (1920), which taught the idea that anyone one could learn the skills of a master salesman.
This anticipated objection was just one of many listed in the manual that the salesman had to be prepared for. There were fifty-three in all. Answers to all of the objections were written out in detail in the manual. Responses tended to have a predictable format. The salesman began by agreeing with the prospect’s objection, thereby deflating the tension, then redirected the conversation by asking a “positive-response” question to which the “prospect” would have to agree. Handling the prospect’s objections was a very delicate process, and although salesmen were not expected to memorize the answers to all the common objections, reading through enough examples in the manual provided a way to answer a prospect’s complaints plaints without seeming pushy or aggressive.
Despite Ford’s global dealership network, its sales began to lag during the 1920s, largely because of Henry Ford’s rigid adherence to the “universal versal car”-the Model T. The more far-reaching changes in automobile salesmanship occurred at General Motors under the leadership of Alfred Sloan. Sloan was much more concerned than Ford with the health of his dealership network. Sloan also did more than Ford to assist the dealers, particularly in the area of credit.
General Motors collected more statistical information than Ford, gathering data about population distribution, income, and the performance of individual dealers.
In addition, GM began to survey consumers in the 1920s. Much more than Ford, Sloan understood the changing market.
After Norval Hawkins left Ford, he took his talents to General Motors. In fact, Hawkins worked at GM only briefly, sitting in as a member of the executive committee that discussed sales and advertising policy. The growth of Chevrolet was accomplished largely by Richard H. Grant, who set out to challenge Ford directly and eventually developed the most extensive dealer organization in the world.
Like Hawkins at Ford, Grant set up a sales organization to train and monitor dealers. He also developed a manual to teach dealers how to sell. Unlike the Ford manual, however, Selling Chevrolets: A Book of General Information for Chevrolet Retail Salesmen (1926) was filled with illustrations, lustrations, charts, and cartoons to make the sales process seem simple and straightforward. Grant’s manual paid particular attention to selling to women, though he did not hire them to sell cars.
Salesmen at Chevrolet played a similar role to salesmen of other durable consumer goods: they described the product, handled customer objections, gave demonstrations, and outlined terms of credit.
Tendency, which economists label a “path dependency” and marketers call “brand loyalty,” helped to define the way companies competed against each other for the sale of consumer goods in the twentieth century. Establishing this loyalty was a goal of the Chevrolet salesmen.
Public Relations and the Great Depression
The modern salesman was a critical component of the new business machine. The salesman served not only as an “advance agent” for manufacturing companies, but also as “prosperity’s ambassador,” a “counselor who points out directions for our enjoyment of life.”‘
The number of people involved in distribution had greatly increased since the 1870s, when the hardware drummer Saunders Norvell and his traveling fraternity were kings of the road. Overall, about 6 million people worked in “trade” in 1930, including retail shop owners, auctioneers, newsboys, wholesale dealers, and salesmen.
Calling the late 1920s the “Distribution Age,” the business writer Ralph Borsodi noted that the “transformation in methods of salesmanship” at many of the largest firms was startling.
While the scale and reach of American business supported Mears’s idea that a “tremendous business machine” was now in place, any resemblance of the economy to a smoothly functioning mechanism quickly faded in the early 1930s, following the October 1929 stock market crash.
The “Depression sharply lowered the prestige of businessmen,” observed noted writer Frederick Lewis Allen. The “worst sufferers were bankers and brokers,” but “even business executives in general sank in the public regard to a point from which it would take them a long time to recover; and in this decline the conscientious and public-spirited suffered along with the predatory.” The negative images of salesmen, which had turned to satire in the 1920s with Babbitt, also came rushing back.
Traditionally, economists had viewed a depression as a product of fallen production. Increasingly in the 1930s, some began to perceive that the problem with the economy was not a lack of production of capital investment, but inadequate consumption. The key to recovery was to stimulate purchasing power: if people had more money to spend, stores would clear inventory from their shelves, and then factories would produce more. This was a major turn in economic thinking.
During the Depression of the 1930s, therefore, salesmanship was at a crossroads. The context in which sales-oriented companies operated changed markedly: Public confidence and trust in corporate leadership had evaporated. Economists and policymakers had come to the idea that consumption was critical to economic well-being; yet they tended to deny that business was capable of reviving aggregate demand.
These developments-economic, economic, cultural, and intellectual-led some business writers and executives to think about salesmanship in new ways. Not only did they try to solve questions about the “how to” of selling; they also looked for answers to the “why.” That is, they were concerned not just about management and strategy, but also about justifying and explaining the social and economic role of salesmanship. The Depression forced executives to “sell” salesmanship.
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) also expressed a conservative faith in salesmanship.
Carnegie’s book contributed to the idea that “self-worth,” as much as “product value,” was determined by the marketplace, and that individuals, including customers, salesmen, and managers, related to one another through an endlessly shifting and calculated strategy.
Perhaps the most thorough defense of salesmanship in the 1930s was Charles Bennett’s Scientific Salesmanship. Bennett wanted to change the way the public perceived selling. He believed that the role played by salesmen was not appreciated: Salesmanship, he wrote, “is the science of the expansion of meaning of objects jects for the purpose of creating utility for them in legitimate commercial transactions. But Bennett’s theory of the “expansion of meaning” attracted little attention, and his lengthy book, Scientific Salesmanship, appeared more as a tombstone for the scientific sales movement than anything else.
But despite a change in terminology, sales managers did not abandon don the “science of selling” during the Depression-even though the term was heard less often.
Companies continued to consult psychologists on their hiring practices and to gather insights about consumers. Henry C. Link (18891952), 1952), a graduate of Yale University and a former student of Walter Dill Scott at the Bureau of Salesmanship Research, worked as an employment psychologist at Winchester Repeating Arms, U.S. Rubber, and the department stores Gimbel’s and Lord and Taylor. In 1931 he became came secretary-treasurer of the Psychological Corporation, a consulting company, and later its director. Link invented the Psychological Barometer, known informally as the Link Audit, a semiannual survey of popular opinions about products, brand names, and manufacturers.
Overall, the same industrial patterns of investment in sales and advertising in the late 1920s remained at the end of the Depression.
Salesmen who sold food, detergent, and other branded goods to retail stores struggled to gain larger shares of shelf space and pushed retailers to display promotional material, such as clocks or posters bearing a brand name.
Salesmen who sold finished goods, such as office machines, to businesses nesses tried increasingly to interest customers in complete office “systems,” rather than individual, stand-alone products-thereby moving away from one-time sales.
NCR also built a new sales training school in the mid-1930s.
At IBM, Watson responded to the hard times of the Depression by undertaking the most intensified sales effort in the company’s history. Watson created a corporate environment that resembled NCR’s. He observed Patterson’s method of neat dress, as well as his practices of coining inspirational slogans and organizing exercise classes, lectures, and entertainment for workers.
IBM’s blue-suited salesmen, traveling throughout the globe, became the embodiment of American salesmanship.
Overall, the volume of sales of door-to-door companies increased, creased, roughly doubling in size during the 1930s. One reason was that it was much easier to recruit salespeople during these years.
The California Perfume Company, with its flexible sales organization of part-time workers, fared relatively well.
It was a different story at Fuller Brush: total sales at the company fell from $13.8 million in 1927 to $4.8 million in 1933.
Alfred Fuller did not turn the company around until the mid-1930s, when he changed salesmen’s compensation.
During the Depression a new type of “direct selling” began to be developed. In 1932 Frank Beveridge, a former vice president of Fuller Brush, founded Stanley Home Products, a competing door-to-door company. After finding out that one of his leading saleswomen sold products by inviting her friends to her house and hosting a party that included the sale of goods, Beveridge instituted the “party plan” of selling. This eventually became the most common type of direct selling.
While the success of individual automobile companies varied widely during the Depression, the industry suffered miserably. The total number of passenger motor vehicles sold by all manufacturers fell dramatically from 4.6 million in 1929 to 1.6 million by 1933.
Public relations became increasingly sophisticated during the Depression. pression. Ironically, big businesses, which had learned to sell their products, now had to master the art of selling themselves.
As companies labored bored to improve the image of their firms, academics and business writers also tried to explain and justify the economic and social role of sales and advertising-to their colleagues and to the public.
These works highlighted many of the features that had defined the effort fort to make selling more systematic: the growth of market research, the linking of production and distribution schedules, the reliance on psychologists to inform sales campaigns, and the use of a variety of lures to promote goods to consumers-including salesmen, advertising, branding, and premium giveaways. This vision of society featured advertising and salesmanship in their many forms as ubiquitous and manipulative.
In 1957, Tosdal sought to redeem the image of salesmen by publishing Selling in Our Economy: An Economic and Social Analysis of Selling and Advertising. He hoped to refute the “conventional wisdom” of economics, which ignored the role of selling and advertising in the economy. Salesmanship was best regarded as a form of “leadership,” Tosdal concluded, presenting a view not entirely unlike the psychologist Walter Dill Scott’s, in the 1910s, that salesmen were like athletic coaches. Salesmen men motivated people-both consumers and businesspeople-to purchase chase goods. They pushed manufacturers to install new machines, which would improve production methods or cut costs. The result was, according to Tosdal, improved industrial efficiency and a higher standard of living.
Tosdal was not the only one expressing such views. William H. Whyte, writing in the introduction to a series of essays published by Fortune entitled Why Do People Buy? (1956) agreed, seeing something antithetical to selling in the constant emphasis on management and procedure. Whyte saw that, in many ways, pure, hard “salesmanship” was in conflict with the bureaucratic science that had come to guide business operation by the mid-twentieth century.
The work of Tosdal, Whyte, and a few other academics and business writers attempted to explain selling and advertising in a way that emphasized the constructive role of persuasion and enthusiasm in the economy. They moved away from an overly scientific definition of selling, which they felt robbed salesmanship of its creative and essentially human qualities.
To Tosdal and Whyte, the true advances of sales management were in providing salesmen with tools to draw on. The rationalization of the mass market and collection of data gave salesmen the ability to expand demand in new directions. In the end, selling was not itself a “science,” Tosdal wrote, but science (in the form of sales data, managerial policies, insights into consumer behavior, and in other ways) had armed salesmen as never before.
American Salesmanship Today
People have been predicting the demise of salesmen since the early twentieth century. “Are salesmen necessary?” asked a reporter in the New York Times on June 18, 1916.
There was something to this argument, for advertising grew at a tremendous rate in the late twentieth century, changing the way many goods were sold. The reach of advertisers increased substantially throughout the century.
Advertising became increasingly sophisticated in the 1960s, as advertisers carved out market segments based on lifestyles or personality types and “psychographic” groupings, and marketed consumer products as “hip,” aiming their messages at youthful-as opposed to strictly young-audiences.
Although advertising grew in volume and sophistication throughout out the twentieth century, it did not replace salesmen.
Companies today invest in a sales force for many of the same reasons they did in the past. The industries that traditionally relied on salesmen-insurance, men-insurance, automobiles, office machines, branded foods, and pharmaceuticals-did so because they believed salesmen were effective in creating and sustaining demand.
The ability of salesmen to influence buyers should not be overstated. The sales transaction itself-the act of persuading someone to buy-proved proved difficult to systematize and rationalize.
Sales techniques were not simply manipulative or conspiratorial, if only because selling was so difficult. Most of the time salesmen failed at what they tried to do.
But sales managers and salesmen believed that economic behavior followed somewhat predictable patterns and that an awareness of these patterns was helpful in swaying consumers’ buying behavior.
Salesmen learned to sell expectations.
Companies invested in their sales workers because they believed that a strong, inspired sales force was necessary to create demand.
The effort of salesmen men to sell major consumer-durable goods, such as cars and appliances, was significant, for it affected the composition of demand among American consumers.
Large sales forces present a difficult barrier for new companies to overcome.
Today there are more sales workers than ever before. The number of people in sales occupations in 2000 was 16 million, or about 12 percent cent of the total employed workforce.
The modern American economy employs a great variety of salespeople. It still has “peddlers,” such as boardwalkers and pushcart vendors, and “drummers,” who travel for wholesale companies. The names for these sales workers have changed, and their relative place within distribution channels has declined. But the economy is flexible and varied, and the importance of different channels changes with time. Since the early twentieth century, as this book has shown, the trend in large companies has been to favor sales management, branding, consumer research, search, and careful personnel selection.
The demographics of America’s sales workers have changed. Nearly half (49.6 percent) of the total sales workers recorded in the 2000 census were women.
Other changes have occurred in the composition of sales workers. Many more are employed by foreign companies in the United States than at mid-century.
Despite changes in the gender composition of the workforce, and increased creased competition from overseas, many aspects of salesmanship in America remain the same. With changes in demographics, culture, and technology, the methods, intentions, and uses of modern selling have persisted.
Methods of sales management are also similar in many ways to those used before. Most of the innovations in sales management were in place by the early twentieth century.
Salesmen and managers remain hungry for information about customers.
The study of salesmanship has also followed trends established earlier in the century. Sales management at business schools now tends to be subsumed under the larger discipline of marketing.
As relations with customers have become more complex, the language of the study of salesmanship has changed as well. In the 1990s, academics such as Benson Shapiro at Harvard Business School talked not just about transactional selling (one-time quick sales, like those made by canvassers) and system sales (long-term relationships forged between salesperson and buyer, like those developed by NCR), but also strategic selling, in which buyers and sellers formed even closer bonds, by offering joint products or services.
Economists, for their part, still tend to ignore the role of salesmanship ship in the economy.
They have questioned the idea that consumers consistently make logical and rational choices when they buy.
The 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, for instance, went to A. Michael Spence, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and George A. Ackerlof, who studied the way that asymmetric information affected decisions made by buyers and sellers.
The 2002 Nobel Prize for economics was also given to academics who studied market imperfections. Daniel Kahneman, a professor of psychology at Princeton University (who shared the Nobel with Vernon L. Smith) suggested that consumers often acted irrationally or illogically in their decision-making.
The rules of salesmanship, practiced for generations, map out economic nomic behavior along similar terms in sales scripts and strategies.
The new perspective that economists are applying to the study of nonrational buying activity may provide a better understanding of economic behavior, including the interactions between salespeople and buyers.31
Modern salesmanship developed under specific economic and political circumstances, stances, led by entrepreneurs in particular industries who wanted, or needed, to systematize selling. The buildup has been institutional, organizational, and cultural.
The rise of modern salesmanship was “creative” in ways that Harvard professor Harry R. Tosdal and Fortune editor William H. Whyte described scribed in the 1950s.
Modern salesmanship has also been a destructive process, sweeping out products, ideas, and companies. Highly managed sales forces have been relentless in their work.
People hate to be forced to make a decision, or to be talked into anything, and are especially fearful of being duped.
A 2001 Gallup poll of honesty and ethics in professions ranked car salesmen lowest; just above them on the list were advertising writers and insurance salesmen.
The story of American salesmanship is part of the broader history of the country’s unrivaled economic growth. Modern sales methods have been an essential part of the performance of America’s production and service-related industries.
Modern salesmanship arose in America largely because of the country’s scale of production, coupled with its Progressive Era culture of rationalization and system building; it has become an integral part of the global marketplace over the past decades, taking form as marketing research, branding, advertising, and personal selling carried out worldwide.
Popular culture does not recognize the “scientific” seller; the salesperson who makes use of data, works on large accounts over years, and is supported by a large corporation does not hold the same dramatic appeal.
With the development of sales forces at large firms, the United States became distinguished by having armies of individuals with “trained” enthusiasm, replicated sales pitches, and handy credit terms, backed by established organizations.
