How The Dale Carnegie Sales Course Started
During the Wall Street crash in 1929, many companies went to the wall and many careers were shattered. Gradually, businesses recovered and could move from survival mode back to a more normal business environment. We all know that nothing happens in business, until a sale is made, but what happens if the system is not working? The profession of sales seems like an oxymoron, because so few salespeople are actually professional. This has been the way of the world since the earliest beginnings of commerce and it still continues into today’s world of business.
Gaining buyer trust is always an issue in business and during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, many people lost their trust in institutions, as their savings were lost when the banks collapsed and their shareholdings were wiped out as the stock market imploded. In this milieu of destroyed trust, many salespeople struggled to differentiate themselves and convince buyers they were reliable and honest.
Desperation had led some salespeople to exaggerate or lie about what their product or service could do. They would habitually hide the negatives about their solution and just focus on the one sale and not focus on the re-order. Guilt by association meant that honest salespeople were being tarred with the same brush as those brigands, ne’er-do-wells and outlaws of the sales profession.
In those torrid times, there was a clear class stratification between salespeople. There were those who belonged to substantial firms, which had the wherewithal to organise systems for training their salespeople and there were the great unwashed, who had to work it out for themselves.
This latter group spawned the infamous pitch method of sales where blarney, bluster and cajolery reigned supreme. There was no attempt to establish credibility and trust, apart from employing fake charm and honeyed words - lots of honeyed words. No questions were being asked to ascertain what the buyer actually needed. Instead, these salespeople rushed headlong into the description of the nitty gritty of the solution and then quickly pivoted into a boring monologue on how great it was.
They were also not explaining the benefits of the solution, based on the details of the features of the solution. They just told the facts, facts, facts of the product and then belaboured the buyer about how “really great” it was. Because they didn’t connect the features of the product with the benefits of the solution, they also failed to link how the benefits could be applied inside the buyer’s firm to improve their results. They also failed to offer any evidence from firms similar to the buyer, as a means of proof that this solution has worked before for other clients and would work for this buyer too. None of this was convincing to the buyers.
Whenever they encountered any hesitation or hint of any pushback from the buyer, they moved straight into high intensity argument mode, to overcome the buyer and convince them they were wrong and the salesperson was right. They didn’t for a minute consider to ask the buyer why they had a problem with the solution. Rather, they amped up their response with more volume, energy and urgency. Being told you are wrong by salespeople is never attractive to clients.
If the buyer said they had to “think about it”, these untrained salespeople would start pushing back demanding to know “well how long do you need to think about it” and using other high-pressure tactics to win the business. They were majoring in the “hard sell”.
Unsurprisingly, these undertrained, undereducated salespeople were failing. If you were on 100% commission or a very low base and commission arrangement, not selling meant you were not able to put food on the table for your family. Sales was brutal in that regard. Sale Managers would set high targets and those unable to make the numbers, were ruthlessly and unceremoniously shown the door. The firms simply didn’t care about investing in developing salespeople. They used a constant churn mechanism to fire those who couldn’t make it and hire in the next group of hopefuls. The pressure that this blunt instrument created on salespeople was enormous.
We cannot really blame these untrained salespeople for their plight. There was no well-established self-education infrastructure for how to succeed in sales, like we have today. There are so many books, YouTube videos, blogs, social media posts, podcasts, sales rallies, etc., available to salespeople today. Up until the late 1930s, you had to use trial and error to find a way forward. This was very time consuming, difficult and translated into a low rate of success. You either sank or you swam and the inefficiencies in the system were enormous and tremendously wasteful. Salespeople were trapped in a bottomless pit of failure with no obvious way out.
Observing this class divide between the have training and the have none groups, Dale Carnegie decided to do something about it. He had started his training business in 1912 and over many years had been successful in running public leadership classes. Various individuals from a broad range of firms and industries gathered to create a class cohort. His book “How To Win Friends And Influence People” had become an international best seller in 1936 and even today, it is always in the top ten for business books. His leadership classes were drawing huge numbers of people and sometimes salespeople would attend his classes. They had mentioned to Dale Carnegie how helpful it would be if they could have attended a public course just devoted to sales.
Dale Carnegie picked up on the feedback and called his friend Percy Whiting to help him get the Sales Course underway. In 1939 he said to Percy Whiting, "we have so many salespeople taking the course, we should write a program just for salespeople." Whiting had a rich sales background. He had his own brokerage firm, but ultimately it failed due to the stock market crash of 1929. This brokerage business is where he got his sales experience. He subsequently became a reporter and later the Sports editor, for the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, before he quit to join Dale Carnegie to launch a completely new business teaching sales techniques to salespeople. WWII interrupted that project, so the Sales Course resumed after the war. A great deal of research and rewriting of the teaching materials took place during the war years. The content was expanded by at least 30 to 40 percent to become the first Dale Carnegie sales training class manual. Percy Whiting subsequently published The Five Great Rules of Selling in 1947, which became the textbook for the course.
The course was also influenced by a salesman of insurance, Frank Bettger. He had been a former Major League Baseball player for the St. Louis Cardinals. After leaving baseball, Bettger had little success selling insurance, until he took the Dale Carnegie Course in Philadelphia in 1917. Dale Carnegie helped him to recognize what helped him be a success in baseball was enthusiasm. When he applied that to selling, he had great success. Later Frank Bettger, Percy Whiting and Dale Carnegie did a tour providing lectures each covering their area of expertise. In the three-day lecture series, Bettger spoke on Enthusiasm, Carnegie on Human Relations and Whiting on Sales and Organization. With Dale Carnegie’s strong encouragement, in 1947, Frank Bettger wrote the best-selling book, "How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success". Bettger’s success also helped Dale Carnegie to promote his own Sales Course, which was highly successful and trained millions of salespeople.
This original Sales Course continued until 1995, when the Sales Advantage Course was released and replaced it. This new programme was very popular and Dale Carnegie Training was well known for its excellent sales training programme. In 2017 research started on revising the Sales Advantage Course. After much research, development and testing, in 2018 the Winning with Relationship Selling Course was launched and continues to this day.
The sales programme created by Dale Carnegie and Percy Whiting followed a process which we would call “consultative sales” today. They were way ahead of the times. Salespeople were taught how to establish credibility with potential clients. The missing link for non-trained salespeople was how to ask questions and more importantly how to ask the right questions, to understand the client’s needs. This course took care of that problem and once salespeople understood what the client needed, they were much more successful in concentrating on the alignment between what they had to offer and what the buyers needed.
When they came to explaining how their solution would help the buyer, they were able to use a structure which made sure they linked the benefits to the features of the product or service. They were taught to then show the alignment between the benefit and the client firm’s situation, explaining how to apply it internally. This small element made a tremendous difference to the buyer’s understanding of how they could adopt the solution to their situation. When they provided evidence of where this had worked for another buyer, in a very similar position to the client, it really resonated with the buyers and they bought!
At the point of closing the sale, if there were any objections, the class participants were taught to never argue with the buyer. Instead, they were to ask the buyer the context and background behind their objection. This provided valuable insight into the problem as seen from the buyer’s point of view and this made it much easier to address their issues. Once the salespeople knew what the issue was, they could focus on resolving that barrier for the buyer and allow them to purchase. The way of asking for the business was also very low key and quite different from the pushy, high-pressure techniques of their untrained competitors. Consequently, the sales success rates went up dramatically and the graduates became the top salespeople in their firms.
Gaining buyer trust is always an issue in business and during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, many people lost their trust in institutions, as their savings were lost when the banks collapsed and their shareholdings were wiped out as the stock market imploded. In this milieu of destroyed trust, many salespeople struggled to differentiate themselves and convince buyers they were reliable and honest.
Desperation had led some salespeople to exaggerate or lie about what their product or service could do. They would habitually hide the negatives about their solution and just focus on the one sale and not focus on the re-order. Guilt by association meant that honest salespeople were being tarred with the same brush as those brigands, ne’er-do-wells and outlaws of the sales profession.
In those torrid times, there was a clear class stratification between salespeople. There were those who belonged to substantial firms, which had the wherewithal to organise systems for training their salespeople and there were the great unwashed, who had to work it out for themselves.
This latter group spawned the infamous pitch method of sales where blarney, bluster and cajolery reigned supreme. There was no attempt to establish credibility and trust, apart from employing fake charm and honeyed words - lots of honeyed words. No questions were being asked to ascertain what the buyer actually needed. Instead, these salespeople rushed headlong into the description of the nitty gritty of the solution and then quickly pivoted into a boring monologue on how great it was.
They were also not explaining the benefits of the solution, based on the details of the features of the solution. They just told the facts, facts, facts of the product and then belaboured the buyer about how “really great” it was. Because they didn’t connect the features of the product with the benefits of the solution, they also failed to link how the benefits could be applied inside the buyer’s firm to improve their results. They also failed to offer any evidence from firms similar to the buyer, as a means of proof that this solution has worked before for other clients and would work for this buyer too. None of this was convincing to the buyers.
Whenever they encountered any hesitation or hint of any pushback from the buyer, they moved straight into high intensity argument mode, to overcome the buyer and convince them they were wrong and the salesperson was right. They didn’t for a minute consider to ask the buyer why they had a problem with the solution. Rather, they amped up their response with more volume, energy and urgency. Being told you are wrong by salespeople is never attractive to clients.
If the buyer said they had to “think about it”, these untrained salespeople would start pushing back demanding to know “well how long do you need to think about it” and using other high-pressure tactics to win the business. They were majoring in the “hard sell”.
Unsurprisingly, these undertrained, undereducated salespeople were failing. If you were on 100% commission or a very low base and commission arrangement, not selling meant you were not able to put food on the table for your family. Sales was brutal in that regard. Sale Managers would set high targets and those unable to make the numbers, were ruthlessly and unceremoniously shown the door. The firms simply didn’t care about investing in developing salespeople. They used a constant churn mechanism to fire those who couldn’t make it and hire in the next group of hopefuls. The pressure that this blunt instrument created on salespeople was enormous.
We cannot really blame these untrained salespeople for their plight. There was no well-established self-education infrastructure for how to succeed in sales, like we have today. There are so many books, YouTube videos, blogs, social media posts, podcasts, sales rallies, etc., available to salespeople today. Up until the late 1930s, you had to use trial and error to find a way forward. This was very time consuming, difficult and translated into a low rate of success. You either sank or you swam and the inefficiencies in the system were enormous and tremendously wasteful. Salespeople were trapped in a bottomless pit of failure with no obvious way out.
Observing this class divide between the have training and the have none groups, Dale Carnegie decided to do something about it. He had started his training business in 1912 and over many years had been successful in running public leadership classes. Various individuals from a broad range of firms and industries gathered to create a class cohort. His book “How To Win Friends And Influence People” had become an international best seller in 1936 and even today, it is always in the top ten for business books. His leadership classes were drawing huge numbers of people and sometimes salespeople would attend his classes. They had mentioned to Dale Carnegie how helpful it would be if they could have attended a public course just devoted to sales.
Dale Carnegie picked up on the feedback and called his friend Percy Whiting to help him get the Sales Course underway. In 1939 he said to Percy Whiting, "we have so many salespeople taking the course, we should write a program just for salespeople." Whiting had a rich sales background. He had his own brokerage firm, but ultimately it failed due to the stock market crash of 1929. This brokerage business is where he got his sales experience. He subsequently became a reporter and later the Sports editor, for the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, before he quit to join Dale Carnegie to launch a completely new business teaching sales techniques to salespeople. WWII interrupted that project, so the Sales Course resumed after the war. A great deal of research and rewriting of the teaching materials took place during the war years. The content was expanded by at least 30 to 40 percent to become the first Dale Carnegie sales training class manual. Percy Whiting subsequently published The Five Great Rules of Selling in 1947, which became the textbook for the course.
The course was also influenced by a salesman of insurance, Frank Bettger. He had been a former Major League Baseball player for the St. Louis Cardinals. After leaving baseball, Bettger had little success selling insurance, until he took the Dale Carnegie Course in Philadelphia in 1917. Dale Carnegie helped him to recognize what helped him be a success in baseball was enthusiasm. When he applied that to selling, he had great success. Later Frank Bettger, Percy Whiting and Dale Carnegie did a tour providing lectures each covering their area of expertise. In the three-day lecture series, Bettger spoke on Enthusiasm, Carnegie on Human Relations and Whiting on Sales and Organization. With Dale Carnegie’s strong encouragement, in 1947, Frank Bettger wrote the best-selling book, "How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success". Bettger’s success also helped Dale Carnegie to promote his own Sales Course, which was highly successful and trained millions of salespeople.
This original Sales Course continued until 1995, when the Sales Advantage Course was released and replaced it. This new programme was very popular and Dale Carnegie Training was well known for its excellent sales training programme. In 2017 research started on revising the Sales Advantage Course. After much research, development and testing, in 2018 the Winning with Relationship Selling Course was launched and continues to this day.
The sales programme created by Dale Carnegie and Percy Whiting followed a process which we would call “consultative sales” today. They were way ahead of the times. Salespeople were taught how to establish credibility with potential clients. The missing link for non-trained salespeople was how to ask questions and more importantly how to ask the right questions, to understand the client’s needs. This course took care of that problem and once salespeople understood what the client needed, they were much more successful in concentrating on the alignment between what they had to offer and what the buyers needed.
When they came to explaining how their solution would help the buyer, they were able to use a structure which made sure they linked the benefits to the features of the product or service. They were taught to then show the alignment between the benefit and the client firm’s situation, explaining how to apply it internally. This small element made a tremendous difference to the buyer’s understanding of how they could adopt the solution to their situation. When they provided evidence of where this had worked for another buyer, in a very similar position to the client, it really resonated with the buyers and they bought!
At the point of closing the sale, if there were any objections, the class participants were taught to never argue with the buyer. Instead, they were to ask the buyer the context and background behind their objection. This provided valuable insight into the problem as seen from the buyer’s point of view and this made it much easier to address their issues. Once the salespeople knew what the issue was, they could focus on resolving that barrier for the buyer and allow them to purchase. The way of asking for the business was also very low key and quite different from the pushy, high-pressure techniques of their untrained competitors. Consequently, the sales success rates went up dramatically and the graduates became the top salespeople in their firms.
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