Once upon a time in America the city streets, office complexes and skyscrapers, the small towns’ main streets and farmlands, the shopping centers’ and malls’ shops were alive with a veritable army of sales professionals calling on them by appointment or ‘cold’, selling goods and services, equipment and technology, ad media, insurance, and, well, you-name-it. Sales was a career for tens of millions of people, from college grads to high school grads, selling for IBM or for the local auto dealer or insurance agency. We hummed and throbbed with selling.
This meant, of course, that a great many people knew how to sell. Read books, listened to audio courses, went to seminars, and got training in every aspect of selling. From the “sales girl” at the department store cosmetic counter to the sales technician selling new technology to airplane manufacturers to the medical equipment sales rep working with hospitals, they all learned and understood the science and art of selling. They knew how to frame an argument, organize information and ideas into a cohesive presentation, how to get on the phone and talk to a gatekeeper and secure an appointment, how to talk, how to listen, how to make a presentation confidently to 1 or 10 or 100. Each became an artist, with a presenting and communicating style. Truly great sales pros were human relations and communications experts but also entertainers, magicians, even poets waxing romantic about countertop blenders and every other seemingly mundane and inherently uninteresting product.
There was no opportunity to isolate and hide behind email, texts, LinkedIn, or even web sites. The sales pro had to get nose to nose, toes to toes with real people in real world environments. Selling was all about human connection and interaction. Across a desk or at a kitchen table, lunch meetings or living room ‘home parties’, people engaging with people.
Kids were exposed to selling starting early. Odds were, Dad or Grandpa or a family friend was in a sales career. Salespeople came to the home to sell encyclopedia, fire alarms, vacuum cleaners. In fact, direct selling was the #1 side hustle. Kids were even “employed” in direct selling, recruited by ads in comic books, to sell holiday greeting cards, magazine subscriptions, other goods door to door to win a new bicycle or for the commissions.
Fast-forward. Much of this is gone. Much of the direct selling has been absorbed into or erased by the internet, social media, Amazon. A great many companies no longer have big field salesforces, driving company cars, going to businesses. The meeting is by Zoom, the product demo done online, the proposal sent by email. Humans are still behind most of this, but it strikes me as ripe for A.I. takeover. There are a few universities, like my client High Point University, with courses in professional selling. But a huge frustration and complaint that I hear a lot from small business owners to Fortune 500 executives is that they can’t find anybody who knows how to sell, can sell, and will sell. Big companies are even hiring “phone Moms” to sit with a company’s sales rep and make him make phone calls, set phone appointments, talk with prospects instead of texting. People are afraid of other people. Have been raised so emotionally fragile that they can’t shrug off even a single “NO” en-route to a “YES”.
Problem is, very little happens until somebody is sold something by somebody – an idea, a product, a service, a charity in need of donor support. A shrinking population of people who can and will sell isn’t good for anybody. A growing population with a bad attitude toward selling and sales professionals isn’t good for anybody either.
One of the reasons I up-dated and wrote a new, 2026 edition of my book, NO B.S. SALES SUCCESS, was this crying need and important need for a lot more people to understand selling. To understand it as a very organized, step by step, scientific process and to appreciate it as an art. To experience and use the self-confidence that comes from being an influential, persuasive person able to put your ideas across or able to earn a good 6-figure income for your family.
My old friend and speaking colleague of 9 years, the great Zig Ziglar, often told audiences to “go out and sell something – America needs the business”. And we do. Contrary to the TV ads, America doesn’t run on Dunkin. It runs on knowledgeable, smart, ambitious, high performing sales professionals making sales. Just as we have discovered we made a big societal mistake by diminishing interest in careers in the trades and forcing everybody into college and college debt, and we are racing to remedy the mess that made —- a shortage of skill workers; plumbers, electricians, etc. and a trillion dollars in bad debt, we made another huge societal mistake in giving salespeople 2nd class citizen markings and in discouraging entry into the sales profession.
BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/No-B-S-Sales-Success-Prisoners/dp/1932156895
About The Author: DAN S. KENNEDY is the provocative, truth-telling author of the popular “NO B.S.” book series and regular contributor to a number of newsletters, including The No B.S. Magnetic Marketing Letter. He is a multi-millionaire, serial entrepreneur and a trusted advisor, strategy consultant and ad copywriter for hundreds of small to mid-sized businesses, although some have grown to valuations and/or been sold for $50-Million to $1-Billion. His methods have made successes in over 200 different industries and professions. As a speaker, he has repeatedly appeared on programs with celebrity entrepreneurs like Kathy Ireland, Debbi Fields, George Foreman and Gene Simmons; with top business speakers like Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins and Jim Rohn; four former Presidents, Gen. Schwarzkopf, Secretary Colin Powell and Lady Margaret Thatcher….addressing audiences from 500 to 35,000 including 9 years on the largest public seminar tour of all time.
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