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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.
Copyright (c) 2004 by EH.NET. All rights reserved. This work may be
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the
EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2229;
Fax: 513-529-6992). Published by EH.NET (September 2004). All EH.Net
reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/Bookreview.
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