This editorial appeared in the July 3rd, 2025, issue of the Topline newsletter.
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When you think of American icons, you probably think of the bald eagle, baseball, and Mount Rushmore.
But there's another cultural icon that deserves a spot on that list: the modern salesperson.
I know, I know. It sounds crazy. But hear me out.
The modern sales profession isn't just in America. It's of America. Born from its economic DNA, shaped by its frontier spirit, and exported to the world like jazz and jeans.
This is where sales transformed from a merchant's side task into a bona fide profession. Where John Patterson invented sales training, quotas, and territories. Where Thomas Watson Sr. created the President's Club. Where Tom Siebel built the first CRM.
Without salespeople, there'd be no IBM, Microsoft, or Salesforce. No trillion-dollar companies at all. Because without someone to sell what you make, you don't have sales. Without sales, you don't have a business. And without America, we wouldn't have sales as we know it today.
So this July 4th, let's celebrate a true American icon - the salesperson - by tracing the wild, weird, and quintessentially American journey that turned peddlers into professionals.
The Pioneer Spirit (Pre-1850s-1880s):
The Age of Drummers
In America's agrarian economy, sales wasn't even a profession. When most Americans lived on farms and produced what they needed, selling was just something merchants did on the side. But as towns grew and people needed goods they couldn't make themselves, enter the peddler. This traveling salesman was the economy's circulatory system, moving products from the East to the West.
These early salesmen emerged because America was expanding faster than its infrastructure. No railroads yet. No mail-order catalogs. Just a growing nation that needed stuff. By the 1850s, these "drummers" (because they drummed up business) numbered in the tens of thousands, each one a one-man distribution network.
The profession was so new that the word "salesman" wouldn't exist until the 1880s. But already, the American economy was teaching its first lesson: where there's distance between makers and buyers, there's opportunity for someone willing to bridge it.
The Industrial Revolution (1880s-1950):
When Sales Became a Science
Then came the factories. And the railroads. And suddenly, American companies could produce way more goods than their local markets could absorb. Which made many think: how do you sell thousands of things when your town only needs ten? John Patterson figured it out. After buying NCR in 1884, he industrialized the entire sales process. That same year, even Mark Twain got in on the action, allegedly writing one of the first sales manuals for 10,000 agents selling President Grant's memoirs.
Mass production demanded mass distribution. Patterson created exclusive territories, quotas to match factory output, and the first corporate sales training school (1894). He turned selling from an art into a science.
By the 1920s, every major corporation copied this playbook. IBM's Watson created President's Clubs. GM used data analytics for territory planning. Even the government published sales training manuals for WWII veterans in 1947, recognizing that converting wartime production to peacetime prosperity required an army of salespeople. The economy had scaled up. Sales had to scale with it.
The Golden Age (1950-2000):
When Sales Became a Profession
The post-war economic boom transformed sales from a job into a profession. In the 1950s, salespeople became corporate celebrities. A 1957 Fortune survey found that 35% of executives under 50 had come up through sales. At IBM, five consecutive presidents started as sales reps. These weren't traveling drummers anymore. They were gray-flannel-suited professionals who could dine with CEOs as easily as they could demonstrate products.
This era birthed the modern sales organization. Companies formalized inside sales (phone-based) versus outside sales (field reps). The 50/50 compensation split became standard. Accelerators, SPIFFs, and team bonuses drove specific behaviors. Sales operations emerged to crunch numbers and set territories. Different industries pioneered various innovations: pharmaceutical "detail men" invented consultative selling, IBM created the sales engineer role, manufacturing developed channel strategies.
But the real shift was economic complexity. Post-war prosperity meant customers needed computer systems, telecommunications networks, integrated solutions. Not just products. This forced salespeople to evolve from order-takers to business advisors. By 2000, American business had created a sales machine so sophisticated that the rest of the world simply adopted it wholesale.
The Silicon Valley Revolution (2000-2024):
The Subscription Economy
Then the internet changed the world but the real disruption to sales came when Salesforce moved software to the cloud in 1999. No more shipping CDs or installing servers. Just log in and go. This shift enabled something radical: subscription pricing. Instead of buying software once for $100,000, companies paid $1,000 monthly. Forever.
This shattered the old sales model. When revenue comes from thousands of small monthly payments instead of dozens of big deals, everything changes. Aaron Ross at Salesforce realized they needed an assembly line. So he invented the SDR role. SDRs generate leads, AEs close new business, Customer Success Managers ensure those monthly payments keep coming. The subscription economy turned one sales job into many specialized roles.
Subscription pricing also made tech companies catnip for venture capitalists. Recurring revenue meant predictable growth. VCs poured billions into SaaS startups. 40% of every dollar went into sales and marketing. Suddenly tech became the promised land for ambitious salespeople. By the end of the era, the cloud had transformed selling from many one-time transactions to building highly predictable recurring revenue machines.
The Age of AI (2025 - ?):
The Next American Revolution
Once again, American innovation is reshaping global sales. This time it's artificial intelligence, and the early signals suggest changes as profound as any we've seen. Some fear AI will replace salespeople entirely. More likely, it will do what every American economic shift has done: transform the profession. How exactly, only time will tell.
But for now, as we celebrate July 4th, let's consider what the journey till here reveals about America itself. Through every era, from peddlers to SaaS specialists, American sales has embodied our national character: relentless optimism, individual initiative, and the unshakeable belief that there's always a better way to do things.
We turned selling from a task into a science, from a job into a profession, from local hustle to global standard. We invented not just the tools and techniques, but the very culture of modern sales. The commission structure that rewards performance. The training systems that create professionals. The technology that scales human connection.
The American salesperson remains what they've always been: the bridge between innovation and adoption, between what's possible and what's profitable. They're the translators who turn features into benefits, products into solutions, technology into transformation.
So this Independence Day, raise a glass to an underappreciated American icon. The salesperson who sold the telegraph that connected the nation. Who sold the computers that powered the space race. Who sold the software that built the internet age. And who will sell whatever comes next.
