Stone Tablets, Trade Shows, and Telephones: 4,000 Years of Sales History
Episode
43 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Startups, Fundraising & VC, Sales & Revenue
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Ancient B2B Complaints: The oldest recorded customer complaint dates to 1750 BCE in Mesopotamia, where merchant Nani carved his dissatisfaction with subpar copper ingots into a stone tablet. This demonstrates that difficult clients and service failures have existed for 4,000 years, predating modern customer service by millennia. The effort required to chisel complaints into stone suggests only truly significant issues warranted documentation in ancient commerce.
- ✓Sales Standardization Origins: John H. Patterson founded NCR (National Cash Register Company) in the 1880s and created the first mandatory sales script, sales quotas, and sales conventions. He forced every representative to memorize the NCR Primer word-for-word, transforming sales from an unregulated Wild West into a standardized profession. This standardization became the foundation for modern sales training, accountability systems, and corporate sales kickoff events still used today.
- ✓Snake Oil Reality: Chinese railroad laborers in the 1800s used genuine water snake oil containing omega-3 acids for muscle relief. American entrepreneur Clark Stanley corrupted this at the 1893 World's Fair by selling fake snake oil made of mineral oil and beef fat with no actual snake content. Government testing in 1917 exposed the fraud, creating the lasting term for dishonest salespeople that persists today.
- ✓Territory Optimization Math: The traveling salesman problem from the 1800s asks: what is the shortest route visiting multiple cities once and returning to origin? This NP-hard mathematical challenge has no easy formula as variables increase. Modern companies like Amazon and UPS use this foundational problem to optimize global logistics networks worth billions. Field sales representatives can apply this by dividing territories into quadrants and working one section per day.
- ✓Inside Sales Emergence: Dial America formed the first inside sales team in 1957, shifting sales from door-to-door to telephone-based selling 106 years after the first major trade show. This marked the beginning of virtual selling environments where face-to-face meetings became optional rather than mandatory. The telephone became the fastest connection between two points, dramatically reducing travel time and increasing daily prospect contact volume for sales professionals.
What It Covers
This episode explores 4,000 years of sales history, from the oldest customer complaint carved on a clay tablet in 1750 BCE Mesopotamia to modern $380 billion acquisitions. Jeb Blount and Ashley trace the evolution of professional selling through snake oil salesmen, the first sales quotas, and the traveling salesman problem.
Key Questions Answered
- •Ancient B2B Complaints: The oldest recorded customer complaint dates to 1750 BCE in Mesopotamia, where merchant Nani carved his dissatisfaction with subpar copper ingots into a stone tablet. This demonstrates that difficult clients and service failures have existed for 4,000 years, predating modern customer service by millennia. The effort required to chisel complaints into stone suggests only truly significant issues warranted documentation in ancient commerce.
- •Sales Standardization Origins: John H. Patterson founded NCR (National Cash Register Company) in the 1880s and created the first mandatory sales script, sales quotas, and sales conventions. He forced every representative to memorize the NCR Primer word-for-word, transforming sales from an unregulated Wild West into a standardized profession. This standardization became the foundation for modern sales training, accountability systems, and corporate sales kickoff events still used today.
- •Snake Oil Reality: Chinese railroad laborers in the 1800s used genuine water snake oil containing omega-3 acids for muscle relief. American entrepreneur Clark Stanley corrupted this at the 1893 World's Fair by selling fake snake oil made of mineral oil and beef fat with no actual snake content. Government testing in 1917 exposed the fraud, creating the lasting term for dishonest salespeople that persists today.
- •Territory Optimization Math: The traveling salesman problem from the 1800s asks: what is the shortest route visiting multiple cities once and returning to origin? This NP-hard mathematical challenge has no easy formula as variables increase. Modern companies like Amazon and UPS use this foundational problem to optimize global logistics networks worth billions. Field sales representatives can apply this by dividing territories into quadrants and working one section per day.
- •Inside Sales Emergence: Dial America formed the first inside sales team in 1957, shifting sales from door-to-door to telephone-based selling 106 years after the first major trade show. This marked the beginning of virtual selling environments where face-to-face meetings became optional rather than mandatory. The telephone became the fastest connection between two points, dramatically reducing travel time and increasing daily prospect contact volume for sales professionals.
Notable Moment
The episode reveals that the massive Vodafone-Mannesmann acquisition in 1999 cost $202 billion (equivalent to $380 billion today), representing the largest B2B acquisition in history. The hostile takeover negotiations lasted months and permanently changed European corporate law, demonstrating how high-stakes sales negotiations at the corporate level can reshape entire legal frameworks and business landscapes.
Episode Transcript
Join us for the fanatical prospecting boot camp that will help your team five x their pipeline in ninety days or less. We'll be hosting it on March in Atlanta, Georgia. Go to salesgravy.com/live. That's salesgravy.com/live and use the code podcast to save a $100. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. We have a special episode today. If you have not listened to this podcast on YouTube, you can see all of the sets that our wonderful team makes. This is a really, really cool one for Valentine's Day because today is the celebration of love at sales gravy, and, we've got a cool set here. So go to youtube.com/salesgravy. That's youtube.com/salesgravy, and check us out. And, again, welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. Ashley, I've got you here. Mhmm. And, I thought we would go through some fun b to b sales factoids, some different stories. I really like history podcast. So I wouldn't like I guess, the thing you all are gonna find out about me on this on this podcast is I love history, like a huge history fan. And so I listen to a lot of, like, Dan Carlin. I listen to a lot of, podcasts that go through several multi hour episodes. Museums take us about two days to get completely through. I read every single sign. I have a fun fact for almost anywhere that we go. And, yeah, I was just actually talking to the team in this room right here about the nineteen nineteen Boston molasses incident. I wanna say Boston molassacre. No. It's just not the right term for it. But the Boston molasses incident of nineteen nineteen, go read up on that. It's super, super interesting. And inspired by those stories, inspired by the intrigue of the world around us, I thought, why don't we bring some fun facts to the table and and break up the highly valuable content that we typically produce and produce some different highly valuable content that you can repeat at your Thanksgiving table. And maybe just at dinner to your kids, and they will roll their eyes, but you'll have a good time doing it. That's that's what I'm striving to do today. Yes. And I am most excited for this first story. So I, myself, am also a history buff, not quite to the level as JBJ, but I absolutely love history and just learning, you know, why and where things came from, how did they begin, that sort of thing. So we cover a couple of different aspects in sales and customer service in in these stories. And before we get into this, if you are watching us on YouTube and if you're listening to us on Spotify, actually, you can leave …
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by National Cash Register Company
“He forced every representative to memorize the NCR Primer word-for-word, transforming sales from an unregulated Wild West into a standardized profession.”
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by Sales Gravy
“Sales Gravy Fanatical Prospecting Boot Camp - https://salesgravy.com/live”
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