Miller’s go-getter philosophy sprang from the optimism and belief in progress that characterized early twentieth-century America. If you have gumption and pluck, you are bound to succeed. Walter Moody shared Miller’s belief that determination was the most important trait of successful salespeople. In Men Who Sell Things (1907), he said, “Pure grit constitutes one of the most essential elements of successful salesmanship. It is the best there is in a man; it is that fine quality that whispers in our ear in moments of discouragement, ‘Never lie down.’ When exhausted and sinking in the mire of Despond, it calls cheerily from the banks of Hope along the shore: ‘Don’t give up! I’ll pull you out.’ ”⁷ Moody’s book is largely a character study of successful and unsuccessful salesmen. The latter he describes as knockers, order-takers, wheelbarrows, sky-rockets, fussies, quick-tempered types, know-it-alls, and old-timers. The former, he says, are the product of positive qualities and intelligent application of principles. Moody was among the earliest twentieth-century sales authors to talk about the science of salesmanship: “I assert without hesitation,” he said, “that the really big men, those who have made the profession worthwhile, are the ones who have employed the highest degree of science in their work.”⁸ He believed that buyers’ motives could be understood scientifically and that salesmen could devise plans for arousing buyers’ interests based on facts about human decision making that enabled salesmen to influence buyers in predictable ways, although his book does not classify buying motives. For that, we have to turn to The System Company.
The crowding of the field of salesmanship, and the exhaustion of old-time resources in the art of selling goods, have forced a revolution in this special branch of industry. The pressure of business has intensified; manufacturers and merchants who employ large forces of traveling salesmen are looking for a new degree of greatness in salesmanship based on scientific methods.—Walter D. Moody, Men Who Sell Things (1907)
The Chicago-based System Company was one of the earliest American firms devoted to the art and science of business and the first to publish extensively about it. In How to Increase Your Sales: 126 Selling Plans Used & Proven by 54 Salesmen & Salesmanagers (1908), The System Company was among the first to lay out a sales system and describe its parts. Its book includes chapters on the steps in a sale; selling to end users; getting past the outposts; answering objections; landing the order; getting reorders; following up between calls; and, significantly, a chapter by W. F. Hypes entitled “The Salesman as the Customer’s Partner.” We used the word significantly because it is generally assumed today that this idea originated with the first book on consultative selling (published in 1970). However, the unfortunately named Mr. Hypes, a sales manager for Marshall Field & Company, argued in 1908:
Help for the dealer, the kind which cements the business relationship and really creates a spirit of co-operation between house and retailer, is generally known to be of two kinds, that which originates with the house itself [the salesman’s company] and that which the salesman himself furnishes independently from his own fund of information in his daily calls. There is no questioning the ultimate value of both kinds, but the latter capacity brings the salesman into so much closer touch with the customer that it frequently proves of far greater and more immediate concrete value to him than he would ever derive through adapting methods on his own initiative from the printed ammunition of the house. In fact, some wholesalers and manufacturers recognize this to the extent that they depend entirely upon their salesmen to aid the trade in a purely personal way.⁹
In Hypes’s view, salespeople can be a clearinghouse of ideas for customers, and the more they know about their customers’ business, the more effective they will be. Readers today should find this perspective familiar. It’s been cited as “news” in at least thirty books on consultative, relationship, or solution selling in the past three decades.
The System Company’s most famous publication on selling was the six-volume The Knack of Selling (1913). What is groundbreaking about this set of books is the formulaic approach to the psychology of selling: “You get an order from a prospect because of what he THINKS,” the first volume argues. “Signing an order or handing over money must be a VOLUNTARY operation. The prospect must be WILLING. To be WILLING he must think certain thoughts. YOU must lead him to think those thoughts.”¹⁰ Here is selling as prescription, and while this may seem arcane today, it was an evolutionary step forward from the character studies and self-help advice offered by Miller and Moody. The Knack of Selling focuses on the salesman’s methods instead of his character and offers a step-by-step process for persuading customers to buy. Although the book does not use the term psychology, it is the first book on selling to address the buyer’s motives directly. “Back of every mental decision a man or woman makes lies a MOTIVE,” volume one says. “Back of every decision a man or woman makes that leaves him willing to BUY something, lies one of these five particular motives: gain of money, gain of utility, satisfaction of pride, satisfaction of caution, and yielding to weakness.”¹¹ Understanding how buyers think, therefore, makes salesmen more effective. “There is the way a Sale is made. The salesman must arouse the motive. The motive creates willingness to buy. The salesman must take advantage of this willingness and turn it into resolve—he must close. Then the way to find what thoughts your prospect must think in order to make him willing to buy your goods, is to find what motive must be aroused.”¹² Much has been made since 1913 about understanding how buyers think. Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling (1988), for instance, has much of this flavor and is based on extensive research of sales calls. In virtually every book on selling written since 1913, authors have acknowledged that understanding buyers’ motives is fundamental to selling.
When a prospect has granted you an interview—when he has given you his attention at his desk, or come into your store, or when a woman has opened her house door to you—that interview is YOURS and you have a right to manage it and to direct it according to your own particular plan. And you not only have a RIGHT to manage it, but it is absolutely NECESSARY for you to manage it, if you are to get in your canvass in an effective manner.—The System Company, The Knack of Selling (1913)
The System Company’s approach to selling would be offensive and dysfunctional to today’s buyers and sellers, but it must have seemed comforting at the time. There is one right way to do it, it claimed, and once you discover that right way, you will succeed: “If one way of canvassing a prospect is the BEST way in the long run, then no other way is so good. And every time a salesman uses a canvass different from the one BEST canvass, he is throwing away chances.” This makes the salesman’s task simple: “The salesman who is willing to work out the BEST canvass for his proposition—work it out along the lines of always leading the prospect to think the thoughts that will make him willing to buy—can sell MORE goods, regardless of how good a salesman he is today.”¹³
The authors advocate what we would recognize today as a very hard-sell approach. The first step is finding something the prospect is interested in and making a remark that will force the prospect to reply. Then you should hold the prospect’s interest by making personal comments or being so assertive that the prospect is compelled to listen. If the prospect raises an objection, use a trick, if necessary, to interrupt and get his mind off what he was saying. “It is only the haphazard salesman who gets mixed—confused—baffled—and finally squelched. The man who knows exactly what he is driving at and has a definite plan for getting there, can be interrupted, bothered, argued with, but he always sticks to the main line and comes out of every difficulty with his face towards the straight course.”¹⁴ Wow. Today, we would call this badgering, and it would get you booted from a buyer’s office faster than you could ask for the order and with enough force to achieve orbit.