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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
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.
Q 02How many cars did Joe Girard sell in his record year of 1973?
1,425
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.
Q 03Who first played Willy Loman on Broadway in 1949?
Lee J. Cobb
The play won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Play; Hoffman and Dennehy played Willy in later revivals.
Q 04Which actor delivers the 'ABC' speech as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), a role absent from Mamet's play?
Alec Baldwin
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.
Q 05What do the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross sell?
Real estate
Mamet's 1984 play about desperate Chicago land salesmen won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Q 06In which year was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People published?
1936
It has sold more than 30 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time.
Q 07Which former Stanley Home Products rep turned Tupperware's home 'party plan' into a phenomenon?
Brownie Wise
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.
Q 08Avon's founder David H. McConnell sold what door to door before switching to perfume in 1886?
Books
He noticed customers liked the free perfume samples more than the books; the firm was first called the California Perfume Company.
Q 09Mary Kay Ash started her cosmetics company in Dallas in 1963 with how much money?
$5,000
The stake came from her son Ben; her husband died a month before the launch, and she went ahead anyway.
Q 10The colour of the Cadillacs Mary Kay awards its top sellers was matched to what?
A blush shade in her compact
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.
Q 11The first known Girl Scout cookie sale, in December 1917, was held in which state?
Oklahoma
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.
Q 12Which Girl Scout cookie is the perennial best seller?
Thin Mints
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.
Q 13Salesforce, the CRM giant, was founded on 8 March 1999 by which former Oracle executive?
Marc Benioff
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.
Q 21Which real stockbroker does DiCaprio play in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)?
Jordan Belfort
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.
Q 22In The Music Man, con man Harold Hill arrives in River City, Iowa, to sell what?
Band instruments and uniforms
Meredith Willson's 1957 show won five Tonys including Best Musical; Robert Preston played Hill on stage and in the 1962 film.
Q 23In The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), Chris Gardner sinks his savings into selling what?
Portable bone-density scanners
Q 14The first contact-management software, ACT!, released in 1987, was based on the principle of what office staple?
The Rolodex
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.
Q 15Ron Popeil, founder of Ronco, coined which catchphrase for his Showtime Rotisserie?
Set it, and forget it!
He also popularised 'But wait, there's more!'; the rotisserie sold more than eight million units in the US.
Q 16Which bearded, bellowing pitchman fronted OxiClean, Orange Glo and Kaboom until his death in 2009?
Billy Mays
He learned the trade selling a portable washing gadget on the Atlantic City boardwalk and starred in Discovery's PitchMen with Anthony Sullivan.
Q 17Where did the OxiClean pitchman with the beard and the bellow start out as a salesman before television?
The Atlantic City boardwalk
He sold the Washmatik portable washer to passers-by; the shouting style came from needing to be heard over the crowd.
Q 18John H. Patterson, who founded the world's first sales training school, ran which company?
National Cash Register
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.
Q 19Which future IBM chief was famously fired by NCR's John H. Patterson?
Thomas Watson Sr.
Watson took Patterson's sales methods, and his 'THINK' signs, to the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed it IBM.
Q 20Before he became a motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar dropped out of college in 1947 to sell what?
Cookware
He worked for WearEver Cookware in South Carolina; his 1975 book See You at the Top launched the speaking career.
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.
Q 24In which year was the Fuller Brush Company, famous for its door-to-door salesmen, founded?
1906
Alfred Fuller started with brushes carrying a lifetime guarantee; the phrase 'Fuller Brush man' became shorthand for any door-to-door salesman.
Q 25Amway, founded in 1959 in Ada, Michigan, takes its name from what?
'American Way'
Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos built it into the model for the whole MLM industry, for better and worse.
Q 26According to a study of 350 US multi-level marketing companies, what share of recruits lose money?
At least 99%
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.
Q 27The home-shopping channel QVC takes its letters from which three words?
Quality, Value, Convenience
It set a record for a new public company's first full-year sales, $112 million, and now reaches more than 350 million households.
Q 28Neil Rackham's 1988 book SPIN Selling was based on a study of roughly how many sales calls?
35,000
Thirty researchers watched calls in more than 20 countries; SPIN stands for Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff questions.
Q 29In SPIN Selling, what does the 'N' stand for?
Need-payoff
The sequence runs Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff, moving the buyer from facts to feeling the cost of inaction.
Q 30What is the sales term for soliciting prospects who have never had contact with the seller?
Cold calling
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.