CHAPTER 2: The Evolution of Sales

LEGEND:
 Frank Cespedes = “FC”
 Neil Rackham = “NR”
 Other Person 1 = P1
 Unnamed Person 2 = P2
 Joe Hart = “JH”
 The numbers in parenthesis (0:00) is the time stamp

FC (0:01) At its most basic level, sales is about exchange and markets. That goes way back.
FC (0:09) The earliest written records, what we know, is there are about bills of sales, somebody closed the
sale – the Agora in Ancient Greece, the Forum in Rome, the grand bazaars in Istanbul, and other areas.
They are the foundation of commerce and commerce mean sales.
NR (0:28) Farming has been closely associated with sales way back from about 400 or 500 B.C.
NR (0:35) First chapter of Plato’s “Republic”, Socrates says “Everybody should have a job and should
specialize!”
NR (0:41) So, the farmer shouldn’t make shoes. They should grow more than they need and the surplus
goes to other people, will go for example to the cobbler who makes shoes, in exchange. Sales doesn’t
just progress evenly. What happens is every now and then, maybe every 30, 40 years, there’s a
breakthrough. Something changes the game. Maybe the first time this happened was the birth of
professional sales. That happened in the 1880s. Before then, there was no such thing as full-time sales
people.
NR (1:22) What used to happen is everything was all instalment. So the job of the sales person is to make
the sale and then come every week or every month to collect the instalment money. So those two roles,
collecting the money and selling, were combined.
NR (1:39) Some bright person said, “Hey look, why don’t we split up the role. We’ll have collectors who come
behind them and pick up the money, and producers who do the selling.” That was the birth of full-time
sales people because before then, there was no such thing - First big breakthrough.
NR (1:59) The second happened in the 1920s, the very short period between about 1922 and 1925, when
a number of people, the most famous of them was a professor called E.K. Strong, had a quite brilliant
idea. Before that time, everyone assumed that you had to be born with the capacity to sell. It’s not
something you could learn – you could either do it, you have the gift of the gab, or you couldn’t do it.
NR (2:32) E.K. Strong said “No, no, no, no, no. There are techniques that people can use to let them sell
better, things like closing techniques, giving benefits to other features, handling objections, using open
and close questions. All of those things came in that period of 2 to 3 years and E.K. Strong wrote about
it in 1925, and from then on the game changed. A lot more people could learn techniques to enable them
to sell better.
P1 (3:03) These principles are designed to make your sales more accurate, fool-proof, and faster. Take
principle number one here for example, “Don’t sell the steak. Sell the sizzle!”.
P2 (3:16) I would say that bonded sales management is really an American invention and that’s because of
the scale of American production. When American companies started to mesh mass distribution and
mass production, they needed to train armies of sales people. And that really differentiated selling from
what happened in the United States from other countries.
JH (3:35) So Dale Carnegie came along at a really interesting point in history. There’s a lot of different things
happening. I think if we look at the era before Dale Carnegie and we think about what was sales and
how do people consider sales or refuse sales. I mean it wasn’t that long after people thought about
peddlers, people thought about snake oils sales, people talked about, you know, trying to push things
and door-to-door sales, and these different kinds of things. And really, Dale Carnegie was someone who
introduced really revolutionary ideas. I mean it doesn’t seem revolutionary today. Dale Carnegie believed
in the integrity of sales and Dale Carnegie believed that people had value. And so that a seller in a
buying and selling situation, was that person’s job really to authentically and genuinely try to solve a
problem and to establish a relationship, and really that that would be the way to help better understand
what that buyer’s needs were.
NR (4:30) In the 1970s, people like me came along to start to look at selling, to measure it, to try to see what
the successful people are doing differently. The first thing we discovered was, what made you successful
in a small one call sale was totally different from the things which would make you successful in a multi-
call sale. So in a multi-call sale, for example, enthusiasm didn’t actually help here. In a one call sale, the
high-energy, enthusiastic sales people made a lot more sales.
NR (5:05) Who succeeded in the bigger sale, people are much more strategic - they asked a lot more
questions, they listened very carefully, they responded to the need of their costumer. And we began to
see that the skills you needed and what was then emerging has what became called the “consumptive
sale” – the more complex sale. The skills are entirely different. We began to catalogue them. We began
to understand what has happening.