Salesmanship

Propagandists, don't worry about the marketing and salesmanship of languages and religions. Most people are simply not intelligent enough to make sense of them. They're not journalists, novelists, or poets. In any case, if you knew astronomy, you would know that this world is a mere speck of dust in a big sandy beach.

Successful salesmanship of the highest order requires not only a fine special training, but also a good education and a keen insight into human nature; it also requires resourcefulness, inventiveness and originality.

The professional dealer's salesmanship was incredible, I was just looking but he managed to convince me to buy three times what I was considering buying over the next six months.

[…] this man worked at his business all the harder, with the brightness of the home-joys fading. But it went very hard with him, more than once, when he made a good stroke of salesmanship, to have to put the money in the bottom of his pocket, without even rubbing a bright half-crown, and saying to himself, “I have a’most a mind to give this to Mary.”

Babbitt’s spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship.

High-pressure salesmanship on the part of the Electro-Motive subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation, which has built by far the largest proportion of the American diesels to date, there certainly has been - to such an extent, indeed, as to compel the old-established builders of steam locomotives, such as Baldwins, the American Locomotive Company and the Lima Locomotive Company, either to follow suit or go out of the locomotive building business altogether - [...].

It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political talents can assert themselves only in rare cases, and it is even rarer that the specifically political qualifications survive the petty maneuvers of party politics with its demands for plain salesmanship.

2012, Nathan Rabin, “The Simpsons (Classic): ‘Treehouse of Horror III’” [season 4, episode 5; originally aired 10/29/1992], The A.V. Club, TV Reviews, 29 April, 2012, The idea of a merchant selling both totems of pure evil and frozen yogurt (he calls it frogurt!) is amusing in itself, as is the idea that frogurt could be cursed, but it’s really the Shopkeeper’s quicksilver shift from ominous doomsaying to chipper salesmanship that sells the sequence.