Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America1
Walter A. Friedman
In the 1880s the agricultural canvasser and the wholesale drummer were at their peak.
Canvassers toured from farmhouse to farmhouse, either on foot or in a wagon, carrying books or
other small items, taking instruction from a sales outfit, and selling goods on commission. At the
same time, drummers worked for wholesale houses, which bought goods from a range of small
manufacturers, sorted and repackaged them, and sold them to retail stores or to other, usually
smaller, wholesalers. Wholesale drummers traveled on trains and wagons, hauling trunks filled
with merchandise samples or carrying thick catalogs, and were usually paid a mixture of salary
and commission.
But in the late nineteenth century, a newer, more aggressive, and highly managed form of
salesmanship emerged. Mass manufacturers began to build their own cadres of salesmen, and in
doing so, developed the first modern sales forces—"modern" because their use of salesmen set
the pattern for companies in the decades that followed. The final decades of the nineteenth
century were an unusually fertile period for American business. The economy was changing
rapidly, propelled by the emergence of large industrial manufacturers. Several companies grew
from small entrepreneurial concerns to large enterprises including Heinz, Kellogg, Duke, and
Post—also attended local schools for business, learning accounting and other aspects of
commerce.
Many of the entrepreneurs were interested in reform of one sort or another: William K.
Kellogg and C. W. Post advocated nutritional and dietary reform; Henry Heinz lobbied for the
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; John H. Patterson, of National Cash Register, pioneered in
"welfare work," or the creation of healthy work environments, with parks, exercise facilities, and
public lecture halls. This did not mean that these businessmen were not primarily interested in
profit, but rather that they harbored a deep enthusiasm and personal zeal for their enterprises,
which they communicated to their sales forces. At times, they viewed an entire industry as their
personal calling.
Drawing on their own experience, entrepreneurs made sense of selling in different ways.
Henry Heinz came out of a peddling tradition, selling vegetables off the back of his wagon, and
built an organization that sold ketchup, pickles, baked beans, and other packaged food around the
world. Asa Candler, a devout Methodist and pharmaceutical salesman, combined the zeal of his
religion with the advertising acumen of patent medicine makers in his promotion of Coca-Cola.
William S. Burroughs, grandfather of the writer of the same name, was a tinkerer and inventor
who fielded a team of salesmen to hawk his ingenious adding machine and explain its many
features.
Still, these entrepreneurs—peddlers, evangelists, and inventors—shared many
characteristics. They built large businesses that combined production with mass distribution. And
they usually complemented the work of their sales force with advertising and other promotional
devices. Significantly, the salesman's role in promoting goods was very different from that of
advertising. To use a military analogy common in the early twentieth century, advertising was a
weapon for waging an air war, while salesmen were deployed as foot soldiers in a ground
campaign.
1
Excerpted from Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America, by Walter A. Friedman, Harvard
University Press, 2004.
To orchestrate their sales campaigns, entrepreneurs increasingly turned to sales managers,
who had control over the intricacies of the sales process. Managers oversaw every detail of
selling—assigning territory, setting up sales quotas, and establishing compensation schemes.
These efforts transformed selling in ways equivalent to Frederick W. Taylor's scientific
management movement, which had revolutionized production. Taylor instructed managers to
analyze and standardize all work routines, making them as efficient as possible and giving
workers clear guidelines and timetables for the completion of tasks. Taylorism was a way for
managers to seize control of every aspect of the production process. Around the turn of the
century, "scientific sales management," as one business writer called it, had somewhat similar
implications for selling.
In many ways, large manufacturing companies "branded" their salesmen, just as they had
their products. Mass manufacturers were not only trying to turn out uniform sales arguments, as
book companies had done by distributing detailed manuals, but uniform salesmen as well. They
did not hire "canvassers" or "drummers," but rather Remington salesmen, NCR agents, or Heinz
salesmen. The company name, or brand, was paramount in the salesmen's identity, for they
represented the manufacturer, not themselves. They were integrated into a large corporate system
that began with gathering raw materials and continued through to the sale of products.
Systems of sales management at large companies altered not only the day-to-day
responsibilities of the occupation, but also, at times, the appearance of the salesmen themselves,
as employers demanded conservative dress and a healthy diet to distinguish their representatives
from the stereotypical corpulent traveling salesman. Manufacturers tried to raise the status of
their salesmen by belittling the common "drummer"—often their main competitor for the
attention of shopkeepers. One article in a Heinz company newsletter in 1905 claimed that the
loudly dressed and vulgar drummer was a thing of the past. "Specimens of this type should be
stuffed and mounted and exhibited in museums, simply as a matter of historical record, along
with stage coaches, muzzle-loading guns, and other relics." The modern salesman bore no
relation, it claimed. "He is polished, intelligent, energetic; a man of affairs; a student of human
nature; an observer of conditions; alert, affable, dignified, enthusiastic. He is trained for his
work."
The sales force remained a male preserve. Women seldom were hired for sales work, but
occasionally were hired as demonstrators at machinery companies like Burroughs and Singer
Sewing Machine. Yet the masculinity of the manufacturer's salesman, as revealed in house
journals, was supposed to be restrained and professional, rather than exuberant and aggressive.