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?

He worked at a single dealership in Detroit and still holds the record for cars sold in a year: 1,425 in 1973, mostly one at a time to retail buyers.

How many cars did Joe Girard sell in his record year of 1973?

That is about six a day, every working day; he sent every customer a greeting card every month, 13,000 cards a month at his peak.

Who first played Willy Loman on Broadway in 1949?

The play won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Play; Hoffman and Dennehy played Willy in later revivals.

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

Mamet wrote the part specially for the film; Pacino was Oscar-nominated and Jack Lemmon won the Volpi Cup at Venice for the same movie.

What do the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross sell?

Mamet's 1984 play about desperate Chicago land salesmen won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

In which year was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People published?

It has sold more than 30 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time.

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

Earl Tupper had made the first Tupperware in 1946 but it sat on shelves until Wise showed housewives how to 'burp' the seal in living rooms.

Avon's founder David H. McConnell sold what door to door before switching to perfume in 1886?

He noticed customers liked the free perfume samples more than the books; the firm was first called the California Perfume Company.

Mary Kay Ash started her cosmetics company in Dallas in 1963 with how much money?

The stake came from her son Ben; her husband died a month before the launch, and she went ahead anyway.

The colour of the Cadillacs Mary Kay awards its top sellers was matched to what?

She had her own Cadillac repainted 'Mountain Laurel Blush' in 1968 and gave the top five salespeople matching 1970 Coupe de Villes the next year.

The first known Girl Scout cookie sale, in December 1917, was held in which state?

The Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee sold them at their high school; by the 2020s more than a million girls were moving over 200 million packages a season.

Which Girl Scout cookie is the perennial best seller?

The programme raises more than $800 million a year, and the girls doing the selling are often described as the largest entrepreneurial training scheme in the US.

Salesforce, the CRM giant, was founded on 8 March 1999 by which former Oracle executive?

He and three co-founders launched it as a software-as-a-service company and hired actors to picket a Siebel conference with 'end of software' signs.

The first contact-management software, ACT!, released in 1987, was based on the principle of what office staple?

Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney's digital card index is the ancestor of every CRM; the term itself was popularised in 1997 by Siebel, Gartner and IBM.

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

He also popularised 'But wait, there's more!'; the rotisserie sold more than eight million units in the US.

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

He learned the trade selling a portable washing gadget on the Atlantic City boardwalk and starred in Discovery's PitchMen with Anthony Sullivan.

Where did the OxiClean pitchman with the beard and the bellow start out as a salesman before television?

He sold the Washmatik portable washer to passers-by; the shouting style came from needing to be heard over the crowd.

John H. Patterson, who founded the world's first sales training school, ran which company?

NCR's Dayton campus taught the canned pitch, the quota and the sales territory; Patterson famously fired Thomas Watson Sr., who went on to run IBM.

Which future IBM chief was famously fired by NCR's John H. Patterson?

Watson took Patterson's sales methods, and his 'THINK' signs, to the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed it IBM.

Before he became a motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar dropped out of college in 1947 to sell what?

He worked for WearEver Cookware in South Carolina; his 1975 book See You at the Top launched the speaking career.

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

Belfort also claimed the 2000 film Boiler Room, about a pump-and-dump brokerage called J. T. Marlin, was loosely based on his rise and fall.

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

Meredith Willson's 1957 show won five Tonys including Best Musical; Robert Preston played Hill on stage and in the 1962 film.

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

He pitches them as a handy improvement over standard X-rays while chasing an unpaid Dean Witter internship; his real son Jaden plays his son.

In which year was the Fuller Brush Company, famous for its door-to-door salesmen, founded?

Alfred Fuller started with brushes carrying a lifetime guarantee; the phrase 'Fuller Brush man' became shorthand for any door-to-door salesman.

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

Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos built it into the model for the whole MLM industry, for better and worse.

According to a study of 350 US multi-level marketing companies, what share of recruits lose money?

Another study put it at 99.6 percent; the FTC has ordered some MLMs to prove most sales go to the public rather than to other distributors.

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

It set a record for a new public company's first full-year sales, $112 million, and now reaches more than 350 million households.

Neil Rackham's 1988 book SPIN Selling was based on a study of roughly how many sales calls?

Thirty researchers watched calls in more than 20 countries; SPIN stands for Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff questions.

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

The sequence runs Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff, moving the buyer from facts to feeling the cost of inaction.

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

The US National Do Not Call list, enacted in 2003, put limits on the practice; sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer has argued its return on investment is under zero.

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

Cross-selling is different: offering something else entirely, like ice cream to go with the cake.

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

Hence 'Always Be Closing' and 'coffee is for closers'; most modern methodologies treat it as the natural end of a well-run conversation rather than a trick.

Reps who sell away from their employer's premises, visiting customers in person, are known by what term?

Inside sales reps work from the employer's location, by phone and screen; the pandemic blurred the line for good.

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

Vector Marketing's summer recruiting of students has made the Cutco pitch a rite of passage on many campuses.

Which Cleveland-based vacuum brand is sold only door-to-door or by in-home demonstration?

Berkshire Hathaway owned it from 1986 until selling it to Right Lane Industries in 2021.

For most of the 20th century the Encyclopaedia Britannica was sold almost exclusively how?

Commissions in 1971 ran $120 to $200 a set; the last print edition, 32 volumes, appeared in 2010 and the company went online-only in 2012.

Where were the knives from the 1978 Ginsu commercials actually made?

The Japanese-sounding name was invented for TV; the product line came from the Clyde Castings Company and production moved to Walnut Ridge, Arkansas in 1972.

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

Historians have found no evidence the two ever met; biographers say the book sold 20 million copies over 50 years, a figure also disputed.

Dunder Mifflin, TV's famous fictional paper company, is based in which Pennsylvania city?

The Office's Scranton branch was bought by printer-maker Sabre in seasons six to eight; the real Scranton has since sold Dunder Mifflin merchandise to tourists.

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

'Tin men' was the trade's own nickname; the plot begins when their Cadillacs collide.

Vince Offer's $20,000 infomercial for which super-absorbent towel became a 2007 pop-culture fixture?

He had spotted the towels at flea markets; his follow-up Slap Chop ad was even more quotable.

Which two major honours did Death of a Salesman win in 1949?

Arthur Miller's tragedy ran for 742 performances at the Morosco Theatre and is subtitled 'Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem'.

Which film star played Willy Loman in the Tony-winning 1984 Broadway revival?

The Broadhurst Theatre production won the Tony for Best Revival; Brian Dennehy led the 1999 revival that also took the award.

Glengarry Glen Ross takes its title from what?

Glengarry Highlands is the prime land everyone wants to sell, while Glen Ross Farms was the lucrative development of years past.

Where did David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross premiere in September 1983?

Bill Bryden's staging in the tiny Cottesloe auditorium was hailed as a triumph of ensemble acting before the play reached Broadway in 1984.

Who won the 1984 Tony for Best Featured Actor as top salesman Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross?

Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the same year, and Al Pacino took the Roma role in the 1992 film.

Earl Tupper refined which plastic while working as a chemist at DuPont before founding Tupperware?

He formed the Tupperware Plastics Company in 1938 and sold his first airtight container in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1946.

What was 'carrot calling', a door-to-door technique used by party-plan kitchenware reps in the 1960s?

The comparison was designed to get a Tupperware party scheduled; the brand reached Europe with parties in Weybridge, England, in 1960.

Who designed the first CRM product in 1993, which carried his own surname?

The term was popularised in 1997 through the work of Siebel, Gartner and IBM, and the first mobile CRM app arrived in 1999.

Who created the AIDA model of how an advert drives awareness, interest, desire and action?

Marketers later repurposed the hierarchy to describe the first stages of the customer journey, sometimes swapping attention for awareness.