The Sales History Podcast

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...

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 be...

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, it's...