The Sales Communication Timeline

1850s: Spread of railroads puts thousands of salespeople on the road frequently, widely and profitably.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.

1890s: First local telephone services established in major cities. The first literal “Sales Call.”

1915: Vacuum tube makes long-distance sales call by telephone practical. New York is linked to San Francisco.

1930s: The file folder becomes the common means of organizing business and much sales information.

1940s: First mobile phones introduced, but they are not practical or economic for selling.

1957: Jay Pritzker buys a hotel from a man named Hyatt next to LA Airport. He starts to build a lot more hotels around the world and calls it a “hotel chain.” So do many other people.

1960s: Commercial jet service makes long-distance sales trips much more affordable in time and money.

1963: The touch-tone phone makes dialing for sales dollars a little gentler on the index finger.

1969: The Defense Department links up with UCLA computers in a system that will expand into ARPANet, MILNet and ultimately something called “the Internet.”

1970s: The Rolodex makes business calling a faster, flip-through exercise for millions of salespeople.

1973: Federal Express delivers 16 packages its first night. FedEx will bring next-day delivery of both sales materials and products to anywhere in the U.S.

1976: Fax technology improves, allowing salespeople to send hardcopy information to buyers, one page every three minutes.

1977: The Apple II brings true computing to the desktop, beginning a revolution in calculation, communication and presentation.

1978: Deregulation of U.S. passenger airlines begins. It will make air travel much more affordable, frequent, and able to penetrate any market in the world.

1982: Faxing speeds up to three pages per minute. There are now 350,000 fax machines installed in the U.S., many for sales purposes.

1982: Antitrust settlement begins to loosen up communications. MCI and others will offer cheaper long-distance calling, plus many new communication services.

1983: Chicago tests first practical cell phone service. Early cell phones spread throughout major cities in the mid-1980s.

Early 1980s: IBM’s mainframe-based email system gets the word out to sales, support and management at major corporations.

Mid-1980s: Pharmaceutical reps get early laptops at $5,000–$7,000, plus up to $1,500 of software per rep.

Late 1980s: Harvard Graphics, Freelance and other programs bring graphics and presentation capability to sales force. Microsoft’s “Making It Easier” approach to many PC tasks begins to catch on at the desktop.

1990: The 20-year-old Defense Department computer network goes private as the Internet, to be managed by a private company named America Online.

Early 1990s: Truly mobile cell phones spread in U.S. Europe gets digital phones, easing data transmission. Lotus Notes makes messaging a lot easier for linked PCs.

1991: The World Wide Web is invented. Sales Automation Association founded to sort out the new selling technologies.

1991–93: Better, cheaper laptops begin to spread through sales force.

1993: “Interactive Selling” computer tools that configure and price complex products in front of the customer begin to develop.

1994: The old sales car, with product samples or account files in the trunk, is turning into a mobile office for many salespeople.

1995–96: The Internet begins to hook up potential buyers, sellers, reps, support staff and (maybe?) everyone else, too. First selling through the Internet is by small, specialized companies. But Netscape, which goes public in 1995, and other companies have a much broader vision.

1997–99: Lighter laptops for $2,000, plus $99 software, become standard sales equipment.

1997–98: Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) systems give mobile salespeople much better directions in unfamiliar territories.

1998: The vision works: Internet selling begins to explode. So do ‘Net stocks.

1998: Retail sales on the Internet explode to $7.8 billion, up 225 percent from 1997. Forrester Research predicts retailers will gross $103 billion online by 2003.

1996–99: Pocket-size voice and data recorders organize email and messages for transmission through Internet, intranets and PCs.