Sales Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
50 free Sales trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
41 free sales trivia questions with answers. These sales trivia questions are built for sales kick-offs, Friday team meetings and anyone who has ever hit quota with a day to spare. They cover the legends of the trade: Joe Girard's 13,001 Chevrolets, John Patterson's first sales school at NCR, Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar and Napoleon Hill, the women who built empires from home parties (Brownie Wise, Mary Kay Ash) and the door-to-door armies of Avon, Fuller Brush, Kirby, Cutco and Britannica. Pop culture gets a big share: Willy Loman, Harold Hill, the Always Be Closing speech that was not in the play, The Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, Tin Men, The Pursuit of Happyness and Dunder Mifflin. Then the craft itself: SPIN Selling's 35,000 calls, cold calling, upselling versus cross-selling, inside versus outside sales, closing, CRM's Rolodex origins and the founding of Salesforce. Pitchmen Ron Popeil, Billy Mays and Vince Offer round it out. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
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Q 01Joe Girard, recognised by Guinness as the world's greatest salesman, sold 13,001 of what between 1963 and 1978?
Chevrolets
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.
Q 02A travelling milkshake-mixer salesman visited a California burger stand in 1954 and built it into which fast-food chain?
McDonald's
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.
Q 03Which playwright wrote Death of a Salesman, first staged on Broadway in 1949?
Arthur Miller
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.
Q 04Which actor delivers the 'ABC' speech as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), a role absent from Mamet's play?
Alec Baldwin
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.
Q 05What do the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross sell?
Real estate
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.
Q 06How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) grew out of its author's classes in what?
Public speaking
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.
Q 07Which former Stanley Home Products rep turned Tupperware's home 'party plan' into a phenomenon?
Brownie Wise
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.
Q 08Which beauty company began when a door-to-door book salesman found customers preferred his perfume samples to his books?
Avon
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.
Q 09Mary Kay Ash launched her cosmetics company from a tiny storefront in 1963 in which Texas city?
Dallas
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.
Q 10Mary Kay's top sellers have been rewarded since the late 1960s with pink cars of which make?
Cadillac
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.
Q 11The first known Girl Scout cookie sale was held in 1917 by the Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, in which state?
Oklahoma
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.
Q 12Which Girl Scout cookie is the perennial best seller?
Thin Mints
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.
Q 13Salesforce, the CRM giant, was founded in 1999 by which former Oracle executive?
Marc Benioff
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.
Q 21Which real stockbroker does DiCaprio play in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)?
Jordan Belfort
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.
Q 22In The Music Man, con man Harold Hill arrives in River City, Iowa, to sell the townsfolk what?
Band instruments
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.
Q 23In The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), Chris Gardner sinks his savings into selling what?
Bone-density scanners
Q 14ACT!, the pioneering contact-management program of the 1980s, was built as a digital version of what office staple?
The Rolodex
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.
Q 15Ron Popeil, founder of Ronco, coined which catchphrase for his Showtime Rotisserie?
Set it, and forget it!
'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.
Q 16Which bearded, bellowing pitchman fronted OxiClean, Orange Glo and Kaboom until his death in 2009?
Billy Mays
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.
Q 17Which longtime Shark Tank investor is said to have started in business at 12, selling garbage bags to his neighbours?
Mark Cuban
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.
Q 18Which company's founder opened the first sales school to sell the invention that had stopped his shop's pilfering?
National Cash Register
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.
Q 19Which future IBM chief was famously fired by his old boss and mentor, John H. Patterson?
Thomas Watson Sr.
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.
Q 20Which motivational speaker started out in 1947 as a cookware salesman in small-town South Carolina?
Zig Ziglar
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.
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.
Q 24Which company's door-to-door salesmen gave Red Skelton's 1948 comedy its title?
Fuller Brush
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.
Q 25Amway, founded in 1959 in Ada, Michigan, takes its name from what?
'American Way'
'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.
Q 26A study of 350 US companies found that about 99% of people who sign up lose money in which business model?
Multi-level marketing
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.
Q 27The home-shopping channel QVC takes its letters from which three words?
Quality, Value, Convenience
'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.
Q 28In the 2015 film Joy, Jennifer Lawrence's inventor makes her name selling which product on QVC?
The Miracle Mop
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.
Q 29In SPIN Selling, what does the 'N' stand for?
Need-payoff
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.
Q 30What is the sales term for soliciting prospects who have never had contact with the seller?
Cold calling
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.