The Sales History Podcast

Salesman's Creeds - The "In Thing" of the Early 1900s Salesman's "Creeds" - There was a concept that started popping up around 1905, spreading to individual companies, industries, and eventually to entire cities by the 1910s. Established to change the perception of...

It's the story for so many - great at selling, promoted into leadership without training or a holistic understanding of what the role actually is. In today's episode, I share a parable written by Worthington C. Holman in 1909 about a medieval military leader named...

I went digging...into the origins of email as a communication medium. Along the way, I found a ton of really interesting timeline milestones that are amazing, interesting, and in some cases pretty funny. So, in this episode, we explore those milestones - from...

The Rise of the Roman Empire – and the Deplorable Salesperson Can you imagine - a profession so deplorable that those in it were rounded up and murdered? As crazy as it sounds, I found that it actually happened during the Roman Empire B.C. In an incredible find, I...

Sales tips from 100 years ago   If sales has changed so much, why haven't the #salestips? Reading a collection of the top sales tips in 1913 - and I swear I was reading a collection of the top sales tips today. There's no conflict...at all. What's presented as...

The history of sales management: There's a direct correlation between the difficulty of the selling environment and the need for optimized sales management. There was a lag between the modernization of sales and the modernization of sales management. In this...

“It is far better that the quota be right than that it be simple.” – 1926 Something odd struck me as I was investigating the origins of quotas and variable compensation. 75-100 years ago, organizations did MUCH MORE with MUCH LESS data. Today, not sure anyone could...

The Greatest Sales Books Of All Time - The Snubs Every "greatest sales book of all time" listing has its share of "snubs", or books that should be on it that aren't. Even worse...I have yet to find a list that hasn't snubbed an entire era! In this episode, I...

What was the first sales methodology? In another case of a misguided Google result, it's time to set another record straight. What was the first "modern" sales methodology? What was it? Who developed it? And why did it serve as a baseline for so many companies...