Cover of Specialty Salesman Magazine March 1921

The Tendency Toward Better Salesmen – 1921

Jan 22, 2025 | Blog

The Tendency Toward Better Salesmen

Below is a selection of paragraphs from an article I found in the March 1921 edition of Specialty Salesman Magazine by Edgar J. Mills.

Here’s the TL:DR:

  • As a sales profession, we are reliving the 1920s right now. We have relived the 1920s before, and we will again.
  • For an extended period during the first part of the 20th century before World War I, the sales profession was building its reputation from the ground up. Companies had shifted during the Progressive Era of the Industrial Revolution from using independent salespeople to hiring, training, and developing their own. They had to!
  • This organization-specific sales approach was founded on trust, a focus on customer outcomes, and a mantra that the sales profession was a “service” profession.
  • When the United States entered the World War, it sent the pendulum swinging. The economy shut off, and when it turned back on after the war, selling was easy. Salespeople forgot about their focus on effort. Salespeople forgot about self-development…or development at all for that matter.
  • Then, the pendulum swung the other way. At the time of this article’s writing, the economy was just realizing it was in the midst of a little known Depression (the Forgotten Depression of the early 1920s)
  • Mills writes of the need to get back to pre-war thinking – in terms of effort, development, trust, and service.

Unfortunately, what happened next set the profession back to a level we still struggle with today. Manufacturers kept manufacturing, which led to a rise in inventories well beyond demand. This was the first time this happened during that Progressive Era of manufacturing growth. It meant many bad actors began to prioritize high pressure selling. This meant aggressive selling techniques, and in many cases, hiding or stretching the truth. 

Every time our economy has experienced a pendulum effect beginning with a shut down, we’ve experienced this type of environment. When Covid hit in 2020, the economy shut off. This was followed by a period of “boom”, where selling was easy. That immediately was followed by an inflation spike, and poor economy, and a considerable number of layoffs. It also meant selling became quite difficult, and once again gave rise to desparate approaches to bring products to market in order to survive.

Read through the paragraphs below…the writing is fantastic, the advice is spot on, and the story of what happened is both clear and familiar.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

“In the days before the war, business had run along in the same groove for so many years, that we had all oriented ourselves almost automatically. We had grown up with these conditions, and it was becoming popular to become a better salesman, to tell the exact truth about all goods, and to consider the customer and his interests, and to deliver value and service. We thought we had traveled a long way when we had reached the point – and we really had.

“Then came the war, and we found out that we had to orient ourselves all over, but it was delightfully easy for we were in the buyers’ market. People had the money and were ready to spend it, and we could sell all the goods and service we could get hold of or have time to present. The tendency was to make the specialty salesman take things a bit easy. He could coin money with relatively little effort, and there were so many chances for him to spend his own coin, that he reasoned he might as well do as the Romans did while he was in Rome.

“But let us not forget that we have reached an entirely different stage in the game. Conditions have changed. We have now come in the process of after-war readjustment, to the sellers’ market, and we can no longer take it easy and expect to make a good showing. This is where we have got to find our bearings or reorient ourselves all over. 

“During the war, the only cheap thing was money. Now the money market is getting very strong and firm, and business houses are running their expenses in every direction and are demanding results of employees, and in many cases, business depression has necessitated large numbers of good men being laid off, and naturally, the process of selection has been gone through very carefully and the best ones retained. 

“During the war, many workers felt that they were so valuable and their places so difficult to fill, that they could be rather indifferent to their work. Now, workers are taking a more serious view of their jobs, knowing that their places can be easily filled, and that they in turn, will have difficult placing themselves satisfactorily.”

“Difficulty is a real challenge which brings out the best that is in a man. Today as never before, there are opportunities for training, for study, for observation, and for re-orienting ourselves if we will but make the best of them. There is an abundance of high-class magazine literature which is of the most constructive and inspiring type. There are wideawke men with whom to associate.

“If a man cannot get someone else to educate him, he can educate himself. He can keep himself well-groomed and be thoroughly self-respecting. If he goes after a chance to do business, he can either land that through impressing someone else as to his ability and earnestness and sincerity, or he can go into business on his own account.

Table of Contents from March 1921's Specialty Salesman Magazine

Table of Contents from March 1921’s Specialty Salesman Magazine

“The individual requisites for success may briefly be listed as: (1) personal development in salesmanship, in character, in general acquaintance with business conditions; (2) a special knowledge of the goods or service you offer, with the ability to present these to the individual prospect in the most compelling manner.

“There are those who always bemoan and bewail new tendencies or marked changes in the business stream or current; but those of us who are wiser, welcome such changes. We know that while a certain period of stress may prevail, in the end there will be a splendid weeding out of those plants which sap the soil and yield no harvest. We know that this weeding-out process will give the true and the worthy a chance to grow healthy and strong, and to do that amount of business to which they are entitled. 

“So let us not regret this new tendency of modern business. Let us get ready to be leaders in the field. Years of prosperity stretch ahead.

“Oh yes, it is necessary that we become imbued with the dignity and importance of our work – and that we equip ourselves to do our work so well that the modern tendency will prove a blessing to one and all.”


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I’m a sales keynote speaker who also teaches revenue organizations how to leverage transparency and decision science to maximize their revenue capacity. It’s what I do…teach sellers, their leaders, well…entire revenue organizations how we as human beings make decisions, then how to use that knowledge for good (not evil) in their messaging (informal and formal), negotiations, and revenue leadership. I wrote a book Book Authority listed as the 6th best sales book of all time (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦), and a second award-winning book (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳).

Reach out if you want to discuss The Transparency Sale sales methodology, or really…anything else (sales kickoffs, workshopskeynotes, the economy, history, etc.)! Email info@toddcaponi.com or call 847-999-0420.

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