Give Me That Old-Time Motivation

American business has a great tradition of salesmanship. Connecticut Yankees lugged tin pots and wooden clocks to remote farmhouses. Chevrolet dealers went door-to-door in their campaign to beat Ford in the 1920s. While tales of salesmen and their exploits are often recounted, far less attention is paid to the work of sales managers. Starting in the late nineteenth century, they carved up the nation into sales territories, assigned quotas, and set commission rates. They provided their sales forces with product descriptions and data. In looking for ways to measure the success of their teams’ efforts, they counted leads, items sold, and revenues. The most successful sales leaders also offered inspiration, enthusiasm, and an effective sales message. Selling the sales force—motivating it by giving it a clear mission—often proved tougher than selling the product. But the return on their efforts was good: Turnover rates stayed low, and performance remained high. One of the early masters of motivation was John H. Patterson, who founded National Cash Register in 1884. Patterson was determined to create a force of white-collar representatives, removed from the ranks of peddlers and drummers. He urged his salesmen to wear good suits and to stay in the best hotels, and he lectured them on health and manners. He also gave them solid training in the use of the product. Starting in 1906, salesmen who made their quotas were allowed to join the company’s prestigious Hundred Point Club, whose members were rewarded with an all-expenses-paid trip to the factory and a prize of $150 in gold. Annual conventions lasted a week and featured talks by Patterson and the other officers of the company. At the factory, the “Hundred Pointers” were greeted with celebratory flags and posters and were cheered by NCR’s thousands of employees. Patterson also tried other tricks, including enlisting the help of the salesmen’s wives. He ran contests in which salesmen competed for dining tables or china sets, and he invited the wives to come to the factory to see plays and hear lectures. Hanging on the walls were lists of things a wife could do to help her husband succeed, including instructions to “serve simple, well-cooked food,” “see that he gets enough sleep,” and “take a real interest in his sales record.” But Patterson believed that the best way to motivate salespeople was to give them an arsenal of meaningful sales arguments. In 1894, he inaugurated one of the nation’s first company-run sales schools. The initial course lasted six weeks and covered basic retail accounting skills and methods of demonstrating the product. As the school grew, it added a mock grocery store and butcher shop. Sales recruits were required to describe to the “proprietors” why they needed to buy a cash register and what differentiated the NCR machine from its (usually less expensive) competitors. Patterson was ahead of his time in realizing that the key to salesmanship was not in selling things—whether they were books, lightning rods, or cash registers—but in selling solutions. NCR agents were told never to push the product during their initial sales call but instead to ask questions about the way a shop owner kept receipts and monitored inventory; they could discuss the machine on the next call. The least effective agents, Patterson thought, were those who felt they had nothing practical to offer customers or who felt they had to rely on personality to close a sale. Better to find out what the customer needed. Patterson was fanatical and autocratic (he consistently fired his best executives when they got too powerful). But his approach to sales management was tremendously influential. A remarkable number of former NCR employees became leaders at other concerns, including Charles F. Kettering and Richard H. Grant of General Motors and, most famously, Thomas Watson, Sr. IBM’s blue-suited sales force owed a lot to NCR’s early sales management strategies. Things have changed since Patterson’s time (he died in 1922), but leaders who know how to inspire are no less crucial to sales teams today. It’s a message Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer understands well: He ruptured a vocal cord during one of his enthusiastic exhortations of his sales force. IBM gets it, too: In 2003, it revived its annual One Hundred Percent Club celebration, which had been discontinued in the 1990s. As Patterson grasped more than a century ago, however, if a sales force feels that its product is hard to distinguish from the competitor’s or that the sales message is murky, exhortations won’t help much. Patterson’s techniques may seem quaint today, but his strategy is more relevant than ever: Teach recruits effective arguments, and work with veterans to keep sales messages current. Then, sell the sales force with everything you’ve got.

Give Me That Old-Time Motivation

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