The Sales History Podcast

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...

The Most Significant Sales Keynote In History Picture this. A sales conference featuring the then-sitting president of the United States as the keynote speaker. It happened in July of 1916. It wasn’t because the president had nothing going on that day, happened to...

How Legislation Has Shaped the Sales Profession More Than Technology This may sound crazy, but I truly believe that government legislation has had a larger impact on changing the sales profession than has technology or the proliferation of information available to...

225 Years of Evolving Sales Personas "The selling methods of any period grow out of the economic situation of the time." - H.K. Nixon, Principles of Selling, 1931 Looking back over the past 225 years, the prominent persona in the sales profession has moved from the...

The 100-Year Sales Echo: Repeating History, and What Happens Next In March of 2022, I released an episode of this podcast called "Using History To Predict - The Future of Sales", as we had been repeating the 1920s. Here we are over 3 1/2 years later, and so far,...

The First National Salesforce: How Cooke’s Sales Army Saved the Union You’ve heard about Abraham Lincoln. You’ve heard about Ulysses S. Grant. They’re credited with putting down the rebellion during the Civil War. But there was a forgotten sales master who may have...

Early 1900s Sales Hiring: Timeless, or Taboo? We believe we know today the traits it takes to be a successful salesperson, but do we? In the early 1900s, while many of the thoughts were the same as today, there was some "off-limits" thinking as well. In this...

Episode #50! Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Sales Hasn’t Changed In this, the 50th episode of The Sales History Podcast, I step into the role of prosecuting attorney to put one bold claim on trial: that the sales profession has changed dramatically in the past decade....

The Tales of an 1800s Traveling Salesman - “Uncle Charlie” I got "lit up" by a social media troll...and it turns out, the troll was right! I was complaining about my seat on a plane; a metal tube traveling 500 mph 35,000 feet above the earth. Me, sitting...