Sales Moves Beyond Face-to-Face Deals, Onto the Web

Patricia Sims spent most of the past 20 years on the road, pitching software products. Two years ago she traded frequent-flier perks for a job that relies on Internet meetings and social media to woo new customers. “When I started in sales, anyone who did inside sales was thought of more as a telemarketer, someone who would call on consumers and bother people eating dinner,” says Sims, 51, who now works in Charlotte for ON24 selling services such as webcasting to businesses. “As time and technology progressed, it’s just made sense to do that big presentation virtually.”

From itinerant Yankee peddlers crisscrossing the U.S. after the Civil War to Dale Carnegie’s best-selling books on the art of salesmanship, American capitalism has often been driven by advances in the plying of wares. Arthur Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Death of a Salesman, placed the occupation at the heart of the American middle class and its longing for social mobility. “By the mid-20th century, the salesman is really the center of what the country is all about and becomes sort of the archetypal American,” says Walter Friedman, author of Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America and director of the Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School.