100 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.

A chainsaw tycoon bought a famous Thames bridge in 1968 and moved it to a town he founded in which US state?

Arizona got it because the buyer wanted to lure tourists and home buyers to Lake Havasu City. Only the exterior masonry made the trip, cladding a new concrete structure.

Which reindeer was invented in 1939 for a free holiday booklet handed out by the retailer Montgomery Ward?

Rudolph was a money-saver: the store had been buying giveaway booklets every year and decided that writing its own would be cheaper. It handed out 2.4 million copies in the first year.

Which landmark did con artist Victor Lustig pretend to sell for scrap to a group of metal dealers?

The Eiffel Tower was costly to maintain, so Lustig posed as a government official and told the dealers it was quietly up for sale. He is remembered as the man who sold it twice.

Which former heavyweight boxing champion was paid $138 million in 1999 for the right to put his name on a grill?

George Foreman fronted a countertop grill that sold over 100 million in a little over 15 years, and he never confirmed exactly how much the endorsement earned him in all.

The first barcode ever scanned at a supermarket checkout, in Ohio in 1974, was on a pack of what?

Chewing gum made history at a Marsh supermarket in Troy: a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit. A facsimile of the packet later went on display at the Smithsonian.

Which street artist's painting shredded itself seconds after the hammer fell at a Sotheby's auction in 2018?

Banksy had hidden a shredder in the frame, and later said it was meant to destroy the whole canvas instead of stopping halfway. The half-shredded piece was renamed Love Is in the Bin.

In The Simpsons, fast-talking salesman Lyle Lanley sings Springfield into buying which costly transport scheme?

A monorail won the town over after Lanley's song-and-dance routine, in an episode written by Conan O'Brien. The townspeople had been about to spend the money repairing Main Street.

In Twain's classic novel, Tom Sawyer cons other children into paying him for the privilege of doing which chore?

Whitewashing a fence was Tom's punishment from Aunt Polly, until he made the job look so enjoyable that the neighbourhood children handed over trinkets and treasures for a turn.

Which New York department store first staged its Thanksgiving Day parade in 1924, with its own employees marching?

Macy's sent its staff, many of them European immigrants, marching to Herald Square in costume, joined by floats and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo.

Which 1975 fad, dreamed up in a bar by adman Gary Dahl, came in a cardboard carrier with ventilation holes?

Pet Rock buyers got a plain stone on straw bedding for just under $4, and Dahl sold nearly 1.5 million of them, becoming a millionaire.

Which country sold the vast Louisiana Territory in 1803 for $15 million, nearly doubling the size of the young US?

France let it go after failing to put down a revolt in Saint-Domingue, and with a new war against Britain looming, Napoleon decided to sell. The price worked out at about $18 a square mile.

Which country sold Alaska to the US in 1867 for $7.2 million, a purchase some opponents labelled a folly?

Russia needed money after its defeat in the Crimean War and doubted it could defend Alaska in any future conflict, so it accepted about 2 cents an acre.

What did Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit famously buy from the Lenape people for trade goods valued at 60 guilders?

Manhattan changed hands for goods later reckoned at $24, the figure of popular legend. The price comes from a 1626 letter by a Dutch official passing on news from a ship just back from the colony.

Which baseball club sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 in a deal announced in January 1920?

The Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee took what was then the largest sum ever paid for a baseball player, three-quarters of it in notes that he sold on to banks.

In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, what does John Candy's overly friendly Del Griffith travel the country selling?

Shower curtain rings are Del's line, and his company maddens Steve Martin's uptight advertising executive as the stranded pair try to reach Chicago in time for Thanksgiving.

In King of the Hill, hard-working family man Hank Hill is a proud salesman of which fuel for boss Buck Strickland?

Propane is Hank's vocation as much as his job at Strickland, and he is voiced by Mike Judge, who also plays the ever-responsible salesman's neighbour Boomhauer.

In Mad Men, Don Draper uses his own family photos to pitch the Carousel slide projector to which company?

Kodak signed with Sterling Cooper after the pitch, which tied the machine to nostalgia and moved one of Don's own colleagues to tears.

Which company replaced its flagship drink's formula in 1985, then brought the original back within three months?

Coca-Cola relaunched the old recipe with the word Classic on the label and saw a notable rise in sales. Even Fidel Castro, a longtime drinker, had joined the backlash against the new version.

Which carmaker lost $350 million on the Edsel, a 1958 line that became a byword for commercial failure?

Ford named the line after Edsel Ford and hoped a fourth brand would win buyers from Chrysler and General Motors. Its launch became symbolic of misreading what customers wanted.

Railroad station agent Richard Sears got his start in 1886 by selling off a refused shipment of what?

Watches turned away by a local jeweller were his first stock, and they sold easily because the railways and their new time zones had made keeping exact time matter.

Which grocery chain opened the first true self-service store in 1916, with customers entering through a turnstile?

Piggly Wiggly let customers walk the aisles and pick their own goods instead of handing a list to a clerk, and founder Clarence Saunders patented the idea in 1917.

The first shopping cart, built by grocer Sylvan Goldman in 1937, was modelled on which piece of furniture?

A folding chair gave Goldman the frame: with a mechanic's help he added two large wire baskets and four wheels, then launched it in his own Humpty Dumpty supermarkets.

The first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall in the US, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 in which chilly state?

Minnesota's Southdale, in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, was the work of architect Victor Gruen, who designed it as a challenge to the car-centric country rising around him.

Which San Francisco dry-goods wholesaler went into business with a Nevada customer to mass-produce riveted work pants?

Levi Strauss was approached because the customer, who had worked out how to strengthen pants with rivets, could not afford a patent himself. The two men received it in May 1873.

Which Swedish company's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, started out as a five-year-old selling matches to his neighbours?

IKEA is built from his initials plus Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Agunnaryd, his home village. As a boy he bought matches in bulk in Stockholm and sold them singly at a profit.

Which retail giant did brothers Sam and Bud Walton found in 1962 in the small town of Rogers, Arkansas?

Walmart began under the longer name Wal-Mart Discount City, first as a single store. It grew out of an earlier shop, Walton's Five and Dime in nearby Bentonville, which is now the company's museum.

Jeff Bezos first incorporated Amazon in 1994 under which magic-word name, dropped after a lawyer misheard it?

Cadabra lasted only a few months: the lawyer heard it as 'cadaver', so Bezos changed the company's name to Amazon.

A pivotal 1994 purchase, often cited as the first online sale, was of an album by which British singer?

Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales was the album, sold just as secure connections made paying over the web practical. Two rival firms each lay claim to that first secure retail sale.

Which name for a day of online bargains was coined in a 2005 press release by a US retail trade group?

Cyber Monday was named for a workplace habit: people back from Thanksgiving weekend used the high-speed internet connections at their desks to buy what they had window-shopped.

Which Chinese e-commerce giant turned Singles' Day into a 24-hour festival of online discounts, starting in 2009?

Alibaba borrowed a date that a small group of university bachelors had been celebrating, and its rivals went on to host their own festivals on the same day.

Which diamond company's advertising campaign, begun in 1938, persuaded couples that an engagement ring was essential?

De Beers also planted the idea that a man should spend a significant fraction of his annual income on the ring, all in an effort to sell more stones.

Which mouthwash became a runaway success in the 1920s by pitching itself as the answer to 'chronic halitosis'?

Listerine took a then-obscure medical term for bad breath and made it a household worry. One historian of advertising said the brand made halitosis more than it made mouthwash.

Which tyre company began publishing a guide for motorists in 1900, hoping to boost demand for cars and tyres?

Michelin launched its guide when its home country had fewer than 3,000 cars on the road, and the booklet grew into an international reference for restaurants and hotels.

Which drinks brand was sued after a viewer tried to redeem 7,000,000 points for the Harrier jet in its commercial?

Pepsi had shown the ad's hero flying the $37.4 million jet to school, so a viewer named Leonard sent in a check for $700,008.50 to buy the points and claim one.

Which vacuum-cleaner maker's 1992 British offer of two free transatlantic flights with a £100 purchase backfired badly?

Hoover was counting on few customers jumping through the hoops to claim tickets worth about £600. So many did that its European arm never recovered and was sold to a competitor.

Which film director made Apple's '1984' commercial, shown during the Super Bowl to introduce the Macintosh computer?

Ridley Scott was hired a year and a half after his dystopian Blade Runner came out, and the ad drew on Orwell's novel of a future ruled by a televised Big Brother.

Which psychologist spent three years undercover at used car dealerships and telemarketing firms for the book Influence?

Robert Cialdini boiled what he saw on those sales floors down to six principles of persuasion, among them reciprocity, social proof and scarcity.

Who wrote The Greatest Salesman in the World, a bestselling parable about a poor camel boy named Hafid?

Og Mandino meant the book to be taken slowly: read on the schedule he suggests, it takes about 10 months to finish. He returned to Hafid in a sequel two decades later.

Which flower's bulbs sold for over ten times a skilled artisan's yearly income at the peak of a 1630s speculative craze?

Tulip prices collapsed in February 1637. The costliest of all, Semper Augustus, was not a true variety but a flower infected with a mosaic virus.

Which Renaissance master is credited with Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million at Christie's in 2017?

Leonardo got the credit only in 2011: the same panel, heavily overpainted, had sold at auction in 1958 for £45 as the work of one of his pupils.

What did the Praetorian Guard auction to the highest bidder in AD 193, selling it to one Didius Julianus?

The Roman throne went for 25,000 sesterces per soldier after hours of bidding. The buyer was soon abandoned by the Guard and killed in the palace as a rival general marched on the capital.

Which western US state has no sales tax, its voters having rejected one all nine times it reached the ballot?

Oregon leans largely on income taxes instead, which is why its two-year budgets often land well over or under target. Only four others in the country do without the tax.

Which Caribbean territory did Denmark sell to the US for $25 million in gold under a treaty signed in 1916?

The Virgin Islands deal came with a side promise: Washington agreed not to object to Denmark extending its interests over the whole of Greenland.

The investor-pitch show Dragons' Den began life in 2001 as The Tigers of Money in which country?

Japan's original took its title from a pun on a wartime general's nickname. The British remake of 2005 was the first version to air anywhere else, and later ones swapped in lions and sharks.

In the Book of Genesis, Esau gives up his birthright to his twin brother Jacob for a bowl of what?

Lentil stew was the price, a red dish that Genesis ties to Esau's own redness. The story gave English 'a mess of pottage' as a phrase for a short-sighted bargain.

Before co-founding the Home Shopping Network, Bud Paxson had a radio host sell an advertiser's stock of what on air?

Can openers in avocado green: the whole stock sold out on air, to the amazement of Paxson and his host. The advertiser had run out of money to pay for airtime.

Which Bing Crosby recording is the world's best-selling physical single, with sales estimated at over 50 million copies?

White Christmas has travelled so far that one edition of the Guinness record book listed it as a 100-million seller once every version and album was counted.

Which executive fronted Chrysler's 1980s TV commercials after reviving the carmaker with government-backed loans?

Lee Iacocca had Chrysler repay those loans seven years earlier than expected, a turnaround built on its K-cars and minivans.

Which album became the best-selling of all time by early 1984 and has since sold an estimated 70 million copies?

Thriller surged after Michael Jackson unveiled his moonwalk on a Motown television special and the title track's video premiered on MTV.

Which sandwich cookie, introduced by Nabisco in 1912, began as an imitation of an older rival called Hydrox?

Oreo so outstripped the chocolate cream-centred biscuit it copied that most people now believe the imitation ran the other way round.