In the 1980s, we had quotas just as salespeople have today.   There have always been rankings that would give reps incentives to sell more.  One company had a bulletin board near the employee entrance showing the rankings, including a happy or sad face next to each name! 

The sales managers were usually experienced, successful former salespeople who were more of a coach.  He would type out a script for when I made cold calls.  These tools didn’t work very well but it at least got appointments.  There were no telephony systems back then to track “talk time” or busy signals.  There were no CRM systems—we were left to our devices to forecast.  Despite the lack of technology, it was a great time to break into sales.

Sales training was very elaborate in the 1980s.  My first sales training experience in 1983 involved going to the corporate office, getting general sales training, followed by product training.  My first year involved three separate trips for training and each trip was typically at least a week.

We were somewhat of product specialist.  When I was with Unisys, I was a “Group 5” specialist, selling payment processing applications to the government.  There were two products we sold, and we were expected to know everything about those two products.   We had to be able to do a full demo, as there weren’t always technical resources available.