You can’t make living selling big trombones. Mandolin picks perhaps, and here and there a Jew’s Harp.

Recently, a friend, Tom Scearce, who attends an entrepreneurial roundtable to which I also belong, posted a blog titled 4 Tips for Selling in the Moment.

As a person who has more friends and acquaintances in the field of sales and sales management than any other, I was interested. Sales and how to increase them are subjects we never get tired of discussing. Which is weird, because the things about which we complain and comment never seem to change much.

Every effective salesperson knows they have to 1. qualify the customer, 2. overcome objections and 3. ask for the sale.

Every sales manager knows that twenty percent of their sales staff are going to bring in about eighty percent of the revenue, and that the sales manager will spend eighty percent of his or her time working – not with the top salespeople – but in trying to encourage, teach, incentivize or threaten the mid- to low-level performers to do better.

...what are particularly striking are the references to new technology and product obsolescence that are threatening and bewildering them.

Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man hit Broadway in 1957. It’s a dazzlingly clever musical about a small Midwest town (River City) near the turn of the century. It affectionately teases the morals (and moral outrage) of this community. What made it work so well in 1957 (and today) is showing so clearly that, while context may change, moral compasses remain.

For example, the matrons of River City are incensed by an independent woman(!) librarian who allows on the shelves the work of "ribald" authors such as Balzac. The protagonist, con man and salesperson extraordinaire “Professor” Harold Hill rallies the rubes against the evils of a newly opened pool hall in their midst.

Substitute the late-Fifties clamor to censure Allen Ginsberg’s Howl for Balzac and the video game Grand Theft Auto for pool, and you see the enduring magic of the play.

Continuing the comparison, in the opening number of the musical, (I urge you to see it here) we listen in while a group of salesmen, traveling aboard the Rock Island railroad line, complain and explain the concerns of their profession. They squawk about cash versus credit and the absolutely vital importance of “knowing the territory.” But what are particularly striking are the references to new technology, product obsolescence and general stores that are threatening and bewildering them.

Substitute Internet for Model T, CD player for demijohn and specialist retailer for little bitty store and…well, you get it.

One salesman frets: “Why it’s the Model T Ford made the trouble, made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get up and go…”

“Who’s gonna patronize a little bitty two by four store anymore?”

“Gone. Gone with the hogshead cask and the demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub and the pail and the fence.”

Substitute Internet for Model T, CD player for demijohn and specialist retailer for little bitty store and…well, you get it.

We're still talking and bickering about the same things, a hundred years past the Model T.

One last thing: The salesmen on the train are intrigued and threatened by stories of a master persuader – a character named Hill. They agree that his product can’t be sold. Yet, this bull’s eye salesman “…lives like a king and he dallies and he gathers and he plucks and shines and when the man dances, certainly boys, what else? The piper pays him!”