Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America

by Walter A. Friedman

In this entertaining and informative book, Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.

From book agents flogging Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs to John H. Patterson's famous pyramid strategy at National Cash Register to the determined efforts by Ford and Chevrolet to craft surefire sales pitches for their dealers, selling evolved from an art to a science. "Salesmanship" as a term and a concept arose around the turn of the century, paralleling the new science of mass production. Managers assembled professional forces of neat responsible salesmen who were presented as hardworking pillars of society, no longer the butt of endless "traveling salesmen" jokes. People became prospects; their homes became territories. As an NCR representative said, the modern salesman "let the light of reason into dark places." The study of selling itself became an industry, producing academic disciplines devoted to marketing, consumer behavior, and industrial psychology. At Carnegie Mellon's Bureau of Salesmanship Research, Walter Dill Scott studied the characteristics of successful salesmen and ways to motivate consumers to buy.

Full of engaging portraits and illuminating insights, Birth of a Salesman is a singular contribution that offers a clear understanding of the transformation of salesmanship in modern America.

Genres: Business, History, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2004

Reviews

[Alec L · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this excellent, well-researched and well-sourced book, Walter Friedman gives us a history (mostly from the antebellum era through the Great Depression) of evolution of the archetypes of salespeople, or viewed from another lens, of the Taylorization of sales (indeed, Friedman himself explicitly takes this framing at several points throughout the book). In particular, the decline of Taylorist salesmanship is placed as occurring in the 1930s, with Friedman calling Charles Bennett's Scientific Salesmanship "more as a tombstone for the scientific sales movement than anything else", (234) and while the book does nominally discuss time periods beyond the Great Depression (making special mention of the 2001 and 2002 Nobel prize winners in economics, especially notable given that this book was published in 2004), these are at most brief extensions to the core study of scientific sales. Content wise, there are lots of interesting little historical tidbits (for example, about case-based studies on distribution in the early days of Harvard Business School), but a large portion of the book is fundamentally a series of case studies, with the greatest representation by far given to a study of NCR (National Cash Register); the importance of this single company is seemingly well-justified by noting prominent alumni like Thomas J Watson (who went on to IBM), or Richard H Grant (Chevrolet), but it does stand out as a slightly particular source. The book's focus essentially purely on the US market also seems slightly limiting, especially given how the book starts by mentioning the 1916 First World's Salesmanship Congress at which Woodrow Wilson "urged his audience of salesmen to travel the globe and promote the goods that, he believed, had come to symbolize prosperity and the promise of America itself." (1) Of course, one could get said perspective from things like Andrew Gordon's Fabricating Consumers, but the gap certainly seems apparent. That said, by instead choosing to extend backwards in time and give a good amount of space to early salespeople like drummers and peddlers, Friedman does provide useful pieces of historical background for later in the book. For instance, one sees that the relationship between religion and sales has a history, for example as with the peddler and minister Mason Locke Weems, who wrote to his publisher Matthew Carey in 1800 to say "Thank God, the bible still goes well [...] Good old Book!" (26) Hence, while this book is nothing revolutionary, it serves as an entertaining contribution to the literature with clear academic merit.

[Saif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice read, it describes how salesmanship evolved .