So, with that as a back trap, let's now turn to one slice of management, sales management. The development of modern salesmanship was born in America where unlike the rest of the world, there was an intense effort to upgrade salesmanship. European nations had peddling networks. Some of which had existed for hundreds of years, but none created organized sales forces to the same degree as what happened in the United States. It is universally accepted that there are several reasons for this. First, all of industry and sales, in particular, depended at upon a stable and widely used currency, which was the case in the United States. But in Europe, in those days, there were dozens of currencies. Because of this and the enormous size, the scale of American firms was greater than Europe. In the US, this produced tremendous numbers of products like business machines, appliances, and cars that required hired salespeople to move these products. Organized selling`an America flourished. Also, for cultural reasons. Salesmanship especially beginning in the late 19th century seemed to offer a pathway to personal success. Perhaps, PW Searles said it best. In 1904, the businessmen described in System Magazine, the changes that he had seen in selling over the past several years. As he put it, "In the past, a salesman traveled as his own boss. Now his routes were planned, his customers evaluated before his departure, and a trail of sales slips and reports established a record of his every move. Sales managers at large corporations assigned salesman specific territories and gave them monthly or weekly quotas to meet. They aimed to make salesmanship uniform, predictable, and capable of being taught to new recruits. They even instructed salesmen on how to stand while talking to a customer, or how to hand over a pen at the closing." Now, most turn of the century salespeople were paid straight commission and they were very independent of the companies that employed them. So, as these trends that I've mentioned became more entrenched, the role of an overseer of this, in other words, a sales manager naturally arose out of these necessities. Earlier, I discussed Frederick W. Taylor and interestingly, Taylor's scientific management concepts sort of came late to the management of personal selling. This occurred because most companies believed that selling was an art or a natural ability. You know the saying, "Good salesmen are born, not made." As a result, it was thought that sales could not benefit from management. Many also believed that supervision wasn't really necessary for commissioned salespeople and under the straight commission method of payment. Good sales people would automatically be rewarded and stay with the firm. Poor ones, well, they would be unable to support themselves and eventually, would resign. Therefore, the commission compensation plan sort of made supervision unnecessary. The idea that sales people are born, not made began to change around the turn of the century. For example, companies often allowed numerous sales people to work in one territory, so that poor performing sales people would be offset by better performing sales people, but the problems associated with this Stacher system were obvious. The company NCR just before the turn of the century was the first company to offer exclusive territories and unlimited earning potential to it's sales people. Seems like a good idea, but it took a long, long time for this idea to come to fruition. At the time, there were also new psychological theories that suggested the possibility of understanding behavior in order to improve salesperson's selection and performance. Partly because of this, business people were increasingly convinced of the need to focus their efforts on the management of sales forces. Another perhaps more important influence was the changing economy.
