50 Fun Facts About Sales

Joe Girard, recognised by Guinness as the world's greatest salesman, sold 13,001 of what between 1963 and 1978?

Chevrolets, sold one at a time from a single Michigan showroom; he mailed every past customer a greeting card each month, a fresh design every time, to keep his name in front of them.

A travelling milkshake-mixer salesman visited a California burger stand in 1954 and built it into which fast-food chain?

McDonald's: Ray Kroc went to San Bernardino to find out why one small restaurant needed eight of his five-shake mixers, and stayed to talk the McDonald brothers into letting him franchise it.

Which playwright wrote Death of a Salesman, first staged on Broadway in 1949?

Arthur Miller built himself a small writing cabin in Connecticut in 1948 and wrote the entire first act there in a single day; the rest took him six weeks.

Which actor delivers the 'ABC' speech as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), a role absent from Mamet's play?

Alec Baldwin's Blake exists only on screen: Mamet wrote the head-office motivator for him when adapting the play, and Blake warns that all but the top two salesmen will be fired within the week.

What do the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross sell?

Real estate: desperate to hit their numbers, two of the salesmen plot to steal the office's best customer leads and sell them to a rival firm.

How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) grew out of its author's classes in what?

Public speaking was the author's trade, and the book exists because a Simon & Schuster man who took one of his courses talked him into turning the classes into a book.

Which former Stanley Home Products rep turned Tupperware's home 'party plan' into a phenomenon?

Brownie Wise outsold the department stores so thoroughly that Earl Tupper pulled Tupperware from shop shelves to sell it only at home parties, then abruptly fired her in 1958.

Which beauty company began when a door-to-door book salesman found customers preferred his perfume samples to his books?

Avon was David McConnell's California Perfume Company until 1939; from the start he sold through women working part-time from home, beginning with a Mrs Albee of New Hampshire.

Mary Kay Ash launched her cosmetics company from a tiny storefront in 1963 in which Texas city?

Dallas: she quit a direct-sales job after a man hired as her assistant was promoted above her at twice her pay, then opened her own shop with $5,000 and her son Richard's help.

Mary Kay's top sellers have been rewarded since the late 1960s with pink cars of which make?

Cadillac: Mary Kay Ash had her own car painted to match the pale pink make-up she carried in her bag, then gave her five best sellers the use of matching Coupe de Villes.

The first known Girl Scout cookie sale was held in 1917 by the Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, in which state?

Oklahoma: the girls baked the cookies themselves and sold them in their high-school cafeteria, almost two decades before the Girl Scouts began licensing commercial bakers.

Which Girl Scout cookie is the perennial best seller?

Thin Mints head the Girl Scouts' own best-seller list, and because two licensed bakeries each use their own recipe, the cookie is not quite the same everywhere.

Salesforce, the CRM giant, was founded in 1999 by which former Oracle executive?

Marc Benioff started it in a rented one-bedroom San Francisco apartment and hired actors to stage a mock protest outside a rival's conference, waving 'end of software' signs.

ACT!, the pioneering contact-management program of the 1980s, was built as a digital version of what office staple?

The Rolodex itself had a credit mix-up: obituaries called company founder Arnold Neustadter its inventor, but the 1956 patent belonged to an engineer on his staff.

Ron Popeil, founder of Ronco, coined which catchphrase for his Showtime Rotisserie?

'Set it, and forget it!' pitched his countertop rotisserie oven; Popeil had started out as a Chicago teenager, selling kitchen gadgets that came from his father's factory.

Which bearded, bellowing pitchman fronted OxiClean, Orange Glo and Kaboom until his death in 2009?

Billy Mays befriended a rival pitchman on the home-show circuit who turned out to be the founder of Orange Glo, and who later hired him to sell its cleaners on the Home Shopping Network.

Which longtime Shark Tank investor is said to have started in business at 12, selling garbage bags to his neighbours?

Mark Cuban's garbage-bag round went well enough that he moved on to selling other goods door to door; decades later a streaming venture made him a billionaire and the owner of an NBA team.

Which company's founder opened the first sales school to sell the invention that had stopped his shop's pilfering?

National Cash Register: John H. Patterson bought the maker of the machines that had stopped his clerks short-changing the till, then gave each salesman a protected territory and a scripted pitch.

Which future IBM chief was famously fired by his old boss and mentor, John H. Patterson?

Thomas Watson Sr. carried Patterson's sales drills, and his own 'THINK' signs, to the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which he renamed IBM in 1924.

Which motivational speaker started out in 1947 as a cookware salesman in small-town South Carolina?

Zig Ziglar struggled for his first two years selling WearEver pots and pans, then rose through the sales ranks and turned full-time speaker in 1970.

Which real stockbroker does DiCaprio play in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)?

Jordan Belfort says the Black Monday crash of 1987 cost him his first Wall Street job, so he started again selling penny stocks from a Long Island boiler room.

In The Music Man, con man Harold Hill arrives in River City, Iowa, to sell the townsfolk what?

Band instruments, plus uniforms, for a boys' band he has no idea how to teach: Hill means to skip town with the money, until he falls for Marian the librarian.

In The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), Chris Gardner sinks his savings into selling what?

Bone-density scanners, which cost more than most doctors will pay, so he hauls the unsold machines around San Francisco while working an unpaid six-month internship at Dean Witter.

Which company's door-to-door salesmen gave Red Skelton's 1948 comedy its title?

Fuller Brush: in The Fuller Brush Man a sacked street sweeper takes up the sample case to prove himself to his girlfriend, and walks straight into a murder case.

Amway, founded in 1959 in Ada, Michigan, takes its name from what?

'American Way' became Amway, a firm two Michigan friends ran from their basements with a single all-purpose cleaner; in time it bought Nutrilite, the vitamin company they had once sold for.

A study of 350 US companies found that about 99% of people who sign up lose money in which business model?

Multi-level marketing: the report, hosted on the Federal Trade Commission's website, reached the figure after subtracting what recruits must buy just to qualify for commissions.

The home-shopping channel QVC takes its letters from which three words?

'Quality, Value, Convenience' came from Joseph Segel, who launched the channel in 1986 after watching a rival shopping network; he had earlier founded the Franklin Mint, the mail-order collectables firm.

In the 2015 film Joy, Jennifer Lawrence's inventor makes her name selling which product on QVC?

The Miracle Mop, a self-wringing design by the real Joy Mangano, sells poorly in the film until she insists on going in front of the camera to demonstrate it herself.

In SPIN Selling, what does the 'N' stand for?

Need-payoff questions come last, after Situation, Problem and Implication, and ask what a solution would be worth to the buyer; Rackham's team drew the sequence from watching 35,000 sales calls.

What is the sales term for soliciting prospects who have never had contact with the seller?

Cold calling met its match in 2003, when the Federal Trade Commission opened its Do Not Call list so that American households could opt out of telemarketers' calls.

In sales jargon, inviting a customer to buy a more expensive version or upgrade is called what?

Upselling at its bluntest was fast food's 'Would you like to supersize that?', an offer its best-known user dropped in 2004, weeks after the documentary Super Size Me first screened.

What is the stage of a sale where you ask the prospect for a commitment to purchase called?

Closing is the C of 'A-B-C: Always Be Closing', the motto a head-office hotshot drills into the salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross before warning that only the top two will keep their jobs.

Which Latin maxim puts the risk of a bad purchase on the customer rather than the seller?

Caveat emptor, 'let the buyer beware', once meant goods were bought at the buyer's own risk; modern law has cut it back by reading into most sales a promise that the goods are sound and fit for use.

Cutco knives are sold through in-home demonstrations by independent reps who are mostly what?

College students, and some still in high school, are recruited with offers of summer work and usually start by demonstrating the knives to friends and family.

Which Cleveland-based vacuum maker built its business on in-home demonstrations by door-to-door dealers?

Kirby went over to direct selling in the 1920s so that buyers could try the machine at home first; Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owned the firm from 1986 until 2021.

Police in which city popularised the name 'Black Friday' for the day after Thanksgiving, when shoppers and Army–Navy crowds jammed its streets?

Philadelphia merchants hated the gloomy name and tried to rebrand the day 'Big Friday' in 1961; the cheerful story about shops going 'into the black' was attached to it only later.

Ginsu knives, sold on 1970s television as if forged for samurai, were made in which country?

United States: the knives came from a factory in Fremont, Ohio; the marketers who put them on television renamed them with an invented word chosen to sound Japanese.

Napoleon Hill claimed Think and Grow Rich (1937) was inspired by a suggestion from which tycoon?

Andrew Carnegie could not confirm it: he had died in 1919, before Hill began telling the story, and Carnegie's own biographer found no evidence that the two men ever met.

The Office follows the staff of Dunder Mifflin's branch in which Pennsylvania city?

The Scranton office never stood in Pennsylvania: the first season was shot in a real office building in Culver City, California, and later ones on a set in the San Fernando Valley.

In Barry Levinson's Tin Men (1987), Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito play rival Baltimore peddlers of what?

Aluminum siding: 'tin men' was the trade's nickname, and the two salesmen's feud begins with a minor car accident that neither will take the blame for.

Vince Offer, the fast-talking pitchman in a headset microphone, first found television fame selling which product?

ShamWow came only after years of pitching vegetable choppers at swap meets, work that paid for the late-night ads for a comedy film Offer had directed.

Which sitcom dad spends his days as a hard-luck women's shoe salesman in Chicago?

Al Bundy, a one-time football star reduced to fitting shoes, led Married... with Children, the first prime-time series the new Fox network ever aired.

Which film star played Willy Loman in the 1984 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman?

Dustin Hoffman took the production to television the following year, and the CBS film won him both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

In which 1995 comedy do Chris Farley and David Spade hit the road selling brake pads to save a family firm?

Tommy Boy pairs a bumbling heir with a sarcastic company man on a sales trip that has to succeed, or the family's Ohio brake-pad factory, and the town that depends on it, goes under.

David Mamet's sales drama Glengarry Glen Ross had its 1983 world premiere at the National Theatre in which city?

London saw it first, in the National's smallest auditorium, the Cottesloe; the play reached Broadway only the following spring, and won the Pulitzer Prize that year.

In The Office, which Dunder Mifflin salesman is named Salesman of the Year and has to give a speech to hundreds?

Dwight Schrute wins the crowd over with speaking tips from Jim, never realising the lines he is thundering were lifted from the speeches of dictators such as Mussolini.

Earl Tupper moulded the first Tupperware from which plastic, today the stuff of shopping bags and detergent bottles?

Polyethylene reached him from DuPont in a crude form that was hard to mould; he worked out how to turn it into light, unbreakable bowls and gave them an airtight lid.

In Love & Other Drugs (2010), Jake Gyllenhaal's Pfizer salesman finally hits the big time selling which new drug?

Viagra arrives late in the film, after he has struggled to get doctors to prescribe Zoloft over a rival's Prozac; the story comes from Jamie Reidy's memoir of his years as a Pfizer rep.

Which website began with the 1995 sale of a broken laser pointer for $14.83?

eBay, then called AuctionWeb, was a weekend project of programmer Pierre Omidyar; the pointer's buyer kept it and showed it to him twenty years later.

In the classic AIDA model of selling, attention, interest and desire are meant to lead to which final step?

Action, the purchase itself, ends the original four-step formula; later versions stretched it, adding steps such as satisfaction to cover what follows the sale.