The Sales History Podcast

Selling - During the Great Depression   | What would it have been like to sell during a depression, and specifically, the Great Depression? In this episode of The Sales History Podcast, I take you through it, starting with the boom and prosperity of 1926, then...

Worthington C. Holman - The Ginger Man | In the category of foundation builders in the sales profession that you've got to know, there's Worthington C. Holman. He'd be my fourth on the Mount Rushmore of sales goats. Why? Holman taught an emerging sales profession how...

The 1926 Sales Dictionary: The Sales Terminology of 100 Years Ago | In 1926, W.L. Barnhart began publishing something called the Salesman’s Dictionary in How to Sell magazine into 1927. Some of the terms are still familiar today. Others, like “swindle sheet,” “ginger...

Tin Men: The Scams of the 1960s Aluminum Siding Salespeople In the 1950s and 1960s, aluminum siding salespeople, known as “Tin Men”, became infamous for some of the most creative and dishonest sales tactics in American history. Bait-and-switch advertising. Fake “model...

Women in Sales in the 1800s - Their Stories & Lessons - A hundred years before many (including myself) thought women really entered sales offices in the 1980s, they were traveling America’s railroads, dirt roads, mining towns, and rural communities, selling books...

The Sales Genius of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin is known as an inventor, printer, scientist, and Founding Father. In this episode, we look at him through a lens he rarely gets credit for - and I had no idea about: sales savant. Turns out, Franklin was a master...

The 1908 Broadway Play That Put Sales on Trial In 1908, Broadway audiences packed theaters to see The Traveling Salesman, a comedy built on something really familiar - the fact that nobody trusted salespeople. In this episode, I take you through the play, exploring...

The Great Sales Irony of Prohibition The sales profession spent the early 1900s trying to shed the stereotype of the hard-drinking, back-slapping salesman. Then came Prohibition...and suddenly, and ironically, booze became more valuable to the sales profession than...

The Salesman Who Lacked Courage - A Negotiating Story from 1907 Anxiety in negotiating is timeless. In this episode, I tell a story written in 1907 about a salesperson who lacked courage as it relates to delivering and negotiating price. It has so many lessons that...