these scripts grew more detailed—morphing from a short primer called “How I Sell National Cash Registers” into a sales manual that ran nearly two hundred pages.1 The ever more detailed instructions, Friedman says, focused “not only on what salesmen should say, but also on what they were to do while saying it,” complete with NCR’s version of stage directions. Sprinkled into the company-crafted monologues were asterisks “that indicated that the salesman was supposed to point to the item he was referring to”—as in Now, sir, this register* makes the entries. The indication* of the transaction
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