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------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- 
Published by EH.Net (September 2004) 
 
Walter A. Freidman, _Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of  
Selling in America_. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University  
Press, 2004. 356 pp. Illustrations, notes and index. (cloth), ISBN  
0-674-01298-4. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Scott J. Vitell, Department of Marketing, The  
University of Mississippi. 
 
In Birth of a Salesman, the author, an historian at Harvard Business  
School, provides an informative and often entertaining narrative of  
the evolution of selling in America from the early itinerant peddlers  
to the well-trained sales professional. The book essentially starts  
with the story of the independent, itinerant merchants who, beginning  
in the early 1800s, traveled from town to town and farm to farm with  
a diversity of goods such as pots, pans, pails and various utensils.  
Freidman touches upon the obstacles that these early salesmen faced  
including the lack of a federal currency prior to the 1860s. Of  
course, they also met with a good deal of customer skepticism and  
were often seen as disruptive by local merchants and politicians.  
Freidman skillfully covers all of this with a large dose of amusing  
and informative anecdotal evidence from peddlers of this era. 
 
The book continues though the latter half of the 1800s explicating  
the roles of the canvasser, a salesman of petty goods, who traveled  
from farmhouse to farmhouse, and the drummer, a salesman either  
employed by a large wholesale house or who worked independently  
calling on businessmen to establish long term customer relationships.  
Both of these sales types were at their peak in the 1880s and both  
were the predecessors of the more modern salesman that was to come in  
the twentieth century. 
 
Freidman continues with the development of the "modern" sales force  
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These sales  
forces were primarily the product of mass manufacturing operations  
that attempted to produce uniform salesmen using uniform arguments.  
Contrary to the drummers and canvassers, these salesmen represented  
the manufacturer not themselves. This led to the creation of the  
sales manager position -- someone who was responsible for the  
training and managing of the sales force through quotas, commission  
rates and territorial assignments. 
 
Freidman extensively covers the selling activities at companies such  
as Heinz and National Cash Register (NCR), among others, as well as  
the dynamic and innovative personalities behind these extremely  
successful sales organizations. Also covered thoroughly are the early  
years of sales as a "science." The contributions of sociologists and  
psychologists, such as Walter D. Scott, to the sales profession are  
cited. Scott, who became head of the Bureau of Salesmanship Research  
at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1916, worked on various  
projects that resulted in isolating the characteristics of the  
successful salesman and systematizing the sales personnel selection  
process. 
 
In the 1920s, the importance of selling and "salesmanship" became  
widely recognized by almost all successful businesses. Freidman  
highlights this era with examples from companies such as General  
Motors and the Fuller Brush Company and includes details about the  
leading sales personalities at these organizations and many of their  
sales tactics and strategies. He continues his narrative into the  
1930s discussing the impact of the great depression on the personal  
selling field. During this decade, the prestige of salesmen faded  
significantly; however, later individuals such as Dale Carnegie,  
among others, helped to redeem the image of the salesman. 
 
The narrative concludes with a brief look at salesmanship today,  
including the advent of the infomercial, the actual study of  
salesmanship today, and data such as the percent of the work force  
currently in sales (12%) and the number of people in sales-related  
jobs (16 million). 
 
If Freidman's text has any flaws, and they are few, it might be that  
the book is almost too detailed in his narrative of the "birth" of  
modern selling. That is, there is an almost too abundant plethora of  
examples throughout the text which are used to illustrate his various  
points, including copious endnotes for those interested in delving  
further into particular issues. Nevertheless, he does provide the  
reader with an interesting and compelling history of the birth and  
development of selling in America, and he does an excellent job of  
recreating the growth and metamorphosis of modern salesmanship over  
the years. Marketing professors, among others, should find this to be  
a valuable supplemental read for their students in a marketing  
history or sales course. 
 
 
Scott J. Vitell is the Phil B. Hardin Professor of Marketing at the  
University of Mississippi. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from  
Texas Tech University. Currently he is the Marketing Section Editor  
for the Journal of Business Ethics and serves on the editorial review  
boards of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the  
Journal of Business Research. His recent publications have appeared  
in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of  
Retailing, the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly,  
Business Ethics: A European Review, International Business Review and  
the Journal of Consumer Marketing, among others. He has also  
published in many national and international conferences. 
 
 
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