What Can A 100-Year Old Sales Book Teach Us About Sales?

You should be forewarned that this book is a product of its time, and you will encounter casual racism, as well as good old-fashioned “women don’t belong in the workplace” sexism.

Anyway, more than a century before companies could track clicks, analyze customer behavior, and personalize advertising with algorithms just for you, William Walker Atkinson recognized a fundamental truth of commerce: successful selling begins with understanding the person doing the buying. The Psychology of Salesmanship captures an important moment when sales was being transformed from an intuitive art into something its practitioners believed could be studied systematically through psychology. It’s a fascinating early example of something that is now a pretty big industry: using psychology to understand why people buy stuff.

This was published in 1912, and it belongs in the same world of early 20th-century New Thought and self-development literature as James Allen’s As A Man Thinketh and Wallace D. Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich. But instead of manifestation, Atkinson applies this to sales, something a tad more practical.

And it’s surprisingly modern. A good salesperson shouldn’t just memorize a pitch and charm some mark into buying what they’re selling, but be mindful of the prospective customer’s attention and interest and desire and motivation and the process that goes into their decision-making.

Basically, selling is psychological, and that’s something that pretty much all modern sales and marketing books will tell you. They’re always discussing emotional triggers and buyer motivation and the customer journey. All this stuff didn’t have names a century ago, but Atkinson understood it well, even without the benefit of today’s business-speak vocabulary.

This early ancestor of modern sales psychology talks about understanding what the customer needs instead of just hyping up the product. Atkinson understood how important it is to capture and maintain attention while appealing to the imagination and creating desire. He understood the concept of building confidence and trust among different personalities, and how to handle objections and why some people hesitate. Wrap all of these in contemporary terminology and you’ve got a LinkedIn sales course.

Keep in mind, though, that William Walker Atkinson was a pretty weird dude who was very involved with New Thought, a philosophy that emphasizes the power of thinking to shape our lives. He was also into mentalism and yoga and the occult, and wrote books about these subjects under various Hindu pseudonyms, and even once wrote a book called Clairvoyance and Occult Powers. You’ll find that The Psychology of Salesmanship will wander into ideas about mental influence and personal magnetism. Being over a hundred years old, this book is not without its cringe.

But being over a hundred years old is what makes The Psychology of Salesmanship interesting and curious as a historical document. Psychology was still developing as a scientific discipline, and this book was being written at the same time the professional salesperson was becoming a thing. Industrialization created goods and products and brands and department stores, and suddenly selling was something that folks like Atkinson believed could be studied and taught. This book is that attempt.

Click on the book cover to buy your own copy of The Psychology of Salesmanship!

Cover Image Credit: Background image of conference room by websubs from Pixabay. Handshake image by Ralph from Pixabay.

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