Is too much transparency a bad thing?

Published: Wed, 02/18/26

Updated: Mon, 02/23/26

February 18, 2026

Good morning Quota readers, we hope you’re making it through the winter slog with all of your faculties intact. In this week’s sunlight-deprived issue, we’ll tell you about Cyrus McCormick, the man who likely built the first sales-territory business. Then, the usual goodies. Enjoy!

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

57% of sales professionals now say the sales cycle is getting longer

Source: Salesforce

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

Dell is shaking up how it pays its sales team to more sharply penalize underperformers, according to a recent report by Business Insider. Dell will begin offering its highest-performing salespeople larger incentives if they reach their most ambitious goals—while simultaneously cutting sharply back on payouts for staff who don’t hit their full quotas. The compensation plan is “designed to reward [employees] for driving profitable growth, expanding our footprint, and winning market share for Dell,” the presentation reviewed by BI said. You can read more about it here.
What does the ideal modern sales team actually look like? According to Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, it still has humans, but has seven times that number in AI agents on staff. Lemkin recently posted an article on the SaaStr blog detailing his head count, including what can be replaced (with AI) now, what can’t be replaced, and what will be replaceable in the future. It’s eye-opening, depressing, and subject to debate. You can check out the article here.

FEATURE

Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-1884)

The First Scalable Sales Machine—How Cyrus McCormick Built a Territory-Based Sales Force Long Before Modern Sales Existed

The farmers gathered around the muddy Virginia field in July 1831, arms crossed, skepticism written across their faces. Twenty-two-year-old Cyrus McCormick wheeled his ungainly horse-drawn machine toward six acres of ripe oats. One observer later described it as "a cross between a wheelbarrow, a chariot, and a flying machine." What he had created was a mechanical reaper.

The stakes were high. His family's iron foundry had failed in the wake of the 1837 financial panic. This reaper was their last shot at solvency. The horses pulled. The blades whirred. In one afternoon, the contraption cut through what would have taken a dozen men with scythes an entire day to harvest.

McCormick had solved an engineering problem. What he hadn't solved was the sales problem. For the next decade, he sold less than 100 reapers.

Then McCormick did something that would reshape American commerce. He built a sales machine. In 1847, McCormick relocated to Chicago, then a swampy town of 17,000. The railroad wouldn't arrive for three years. The telegraph hadn't reached the city. He was betting on infrastructure that didn't yet exist.

What he built there would define field sales for the next century.

Building the Machine

McCormick's innovation wasn't the reaper itself. Dozens of inventors had created working models by the 1830s. Scottish farmer Patrick Bell had built a successful harvester years before McCormick's first demonstration.

McCormick's breakthrough was understanding that revolutionary products don't sell themselves. Farmers needed to see the reaper work in their fields. They needed someone local who could repair it mid-harvest. They needed credit terms matching their cash flow.

So McCormick built a distributed sales organization unlike anything that existed in 1840s America.

He recruited local merchants as exclusive territorial agents. McCormick's agents set up shop in designated territories, received sample machines, and took commissions on sales. They demonstrated the reaper in actual field conditions, arranged financing, delivered machines, and provided repair service during harvest season.

At its peak, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company had around 5,000 third-party sales agents in the field. Each agent was trained on machine mechanics, business practices, and customer service. Each had an exclusive territory, and each was motivated by commission.

The Playbook Emerges

The organizational structure McCormick built reads like a modern sales ops manual. He established regional performance expectations and used "traveling agents" to monitor distributor activity. He created feedback loops through correspondence and a company-published trade magazine.

He trained agents on economics. The reaper cost $125 in the early 1850s (roughly $3,800 today). His agents learned to articulate ROI, demonstrating how the machine would replace eight to ten field workers within a season.

He pioneered customer financing, offering installment plans with payments stretched between harvests. "It is better that I should wait for the money than that you should wait for the machine," he said. He standardized pricing.

His motto: "One Price to All." While competitors haggled, McCormick eliminated the friction of negotiation.

McCormick offered performance warranties and fast after-sale service. A satisfied customer became a testimonial, which he liberally used in advertising.

The System Scales

By 1850, McCormick was selling 5,000 reapers annually. By 1868, production exceeded 9,500 machines. The Chicago facility had become the largest factory in the city.

In the 1880s, McCormick replaced commission-based regional agents with salaried managers who oversaw franchised dealers. The move from independent contractors to a controlled distribution model anticipated shifts many modern companies make as they mature.

When Cyrus McCormick died in 1884, his son continued expanding. By the early 1900s, McCormick had 65 regional offices across the United States, six in Canada, and international offices. In 1902, the company merged with competitors to form International Harvester.

The Legacy Lives in Every Sales Org

McCormick understood something fundamental: distribution is as important as invention. A revolutionary product without systematic distribution dies in obscurity. A competent product backed by excellent distribution builds empires.

He proved that sales could be engineered, systematized, and scaled. If you trained people properly, gave them the right incentives, supported them with the right tools, and held them accountable to defined territories and performance expectations, they'd build customer relationships that compound over time.

The reaper transformed agriculture. McCormick's sales machine transformed commerce. 170 years before CRMs, before formal sales methodologies, before revenue operations, he built a distributed, commission-based, demo-driven sales organization that sold complex capital equipment to skeptical buyers across a continental market.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

How many homes were sold in the United States in 2025?

A. 9.22 million

B. 4.06 million

C. 11.1 million

D. 7.08 million

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

I worked at a small office early in my career where the thermostat sat right between two veteran reps. These guys were both absolutely nuts.

One of them swore he performed best at 68 degrees. He said cold air kept him sharp on calls. The other claimed anything under 72 made his fingers numb because he had "bad circulation."

It started as a joke. One of them would change it in the morning. The other would change it back after lunch. They treated it like a game. Then they stopped talking directly and started adjusting it without saying anything. The crazy thing is, these guys could literally tell when it was too hot or too cold (I didn't really care and didn't notice much of a difference between 68 or 72).

It finally bubbled up during a Friday pipeline meeting. We’re all sitting there while our manager is asking about the forecast, and one of them gets up mid-sentence and bumps it down two degrees and sits back down. The other guy had no reaction. But everyone was watching him. He just stood, walked over, and turned it back up. The tension in the room was crazy. What followed was a full argument about "respect.” At one point one of them said, completely seriously, “You’re sabotaging my quarter.”

HR ended up locking the thermostat behind a plastic cover the next week, at 69 degrees. They both complained

Anonymous Location Withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- February 2026

WORTH A PEEK

Alright. The conversation is worth having (again): is AI really going to replace sales soon? A Redditor posted this question, and sparked an interesting discussion, with over 300 responses. Check out the conversation here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’m a mid-market AE at a healthcare SaaS company selling patient engagement software to regional hospital systems. My manager says he wants “radical transparency” in pipeline reviews. No sandbagging, no hiding risk, full honesty.

But every time I flag a deal as shaky or push a close date out, the tone shifts. I get grilled on what I did wrong, told I’m not controlling the deal, or reminded that “top reps find a way.” I’ve started noticing teammates quietly keep risk to themselves until it’s unavoidable. I want to be honest. I also don’t want to get labeled negative. Is this just how the game works?

Transparent in Location Withheld

Dear Transparent,

This is one of the main reasons why pipelines are not accurate in sales orgs.

The fix is to shift from emotion to evidence. When you flag risk, anchor it in specifics: stakeholder gaps, budget timing, procurement steps.

Make it about deal mechanics, not confidence. Also separate risk from responsibility. A hospital pushing the budget to next quarter isn’t something you can fix with "urgency" or "finding a way." If transparency keeps getting penalized, you can either adapt to the incentives or decide whether you want to build a career somewhere else.

Quiz Answer: B. There were approximately 4.06 million homes sold in the U.S. in 2025 (You can read the source article here).

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik and Steve Rado.

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