Every morning, just as the sun comes up and the city comes to life, I walk my dogs through the Flatiron, Chelsea and NoMad.
I’ve made a habit of learning the history of the blocks we wander, reading everything I can about the places we pass. Some of it, it turns out, is sales history.
One of my favorite discoveries comes from Christiane Bird’s A Block in Time, a history of the single block bounded by 23rd and 24th Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In the years before the Depression, the Fuller Brush Company leased space in the Masonic Building at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue, an office tower the Masons built to rent to companies and fund their charitable work.
The timing matters. Roughly 100 years ago, Fuller Brush was in the middle of one of the great sales runs in American history. Sales grew from $87,000 in 1916 to $15 million in 1923 (nearly $300 million in today’s dollars), and in 1922 The Saturday Evening Post coined the phrase “Fuller Brush Man.” By the mid-1920s, the company had a national identity, selling to households from ordinary city apartments to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park and John D. Rockefeller’s estate.
And they did it the hard way. Fuller’s dealers earned no base salary, walked about six miles a day, and sold only one in five homes. Seven in ten recruits washed out in their first three months.
Those who stayed figured something out, and a century of behavioral science now explains why it worked. Here are seven lessons today’s B2B value sellers can take from the Fuller Brush Man, one of the best sellers ever.
1. Give Before You Get
What Fuller did: The Fuller Brush Man opened with a gift, the “Handy Brush,” which the company developed specifically to open doors. It came with no strings and no obligation to buy.
Why it worked: Reciprocity is wired into the brain’s reward system. In a 2010 PNAS fMRI study, positive reciprocity robustly engaged the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex, the same reward circuitry that responds to money and food, and the signal was strongest for partners with a reputation for giving back.
But how a gift is perceived matters as much as the gift itself. A 2024 Nature Communications study by Gao, Chang and colleagues found that favors seen as altruistic produce gratitude and communal concern, while favors seen as strategic produce a sense of obligation. Each lights up different brain networks. Gratitude builds relationships, while obligation breeds resentment. The Handy Brush worked because it felt like a genuine gift, not bait.
For today’s value seller: Lead with something genuinely useful, such as a benchmark, a diagnostic or an insight, and don’t make it a toll gate. Gated content signals strategic intent. Ungated value signals care, and care is what earns the conversation.
2. Prove It in the Buyer’s World
What Fuller did: Alfred Fuller didn’t describe his brushes. He used them in the customer’s own home. He washed babies with a back brush, swept stairs, cleaned radiators and milk bottles, anything that would prove the worth of what he had to sell. The sale was made when the housewife saw what the brush could do for her.
Why it worked: Experience creates ownership before purchase. In a Journal of Consumer Research study, Peck and Shu found that merely touching an object increases a buyer’s sense of ownership, and that perceived ownership raises how much they value it. Even imagining ownership has a measurable effect. This is the endowment effect at work: once something feels like ours, we value it more and feel its absence as a loss.
For today’s value seller: Stop presenting features and start showing outcomes in the customer’s environment, with their data, their workflows and their numbers. A business case built on the buyer’s own metrics, or a pilot in their environment, does what Fuller’s demonstration did. It lets the buyer experience the outcome before they own it.
3. Sell the Use Cases, Not the Brush
What Fuller did: The company’s slogan was “45 Brushes, 69 Uses, Head to Foot, Cellar to Attic.” Fuller didn’t sell bristles and handles. He sold a cleaner, easier household, mapped to every room and every task.
Why it worked: It invited the buyer to picture herself using the product. Consumer psychologist Jennifer Edson Escalas found that ads encouraging mental simulation persuade through narrative transportation, immersion in a story that brings strong emotional response and lower levels of critical thought. In later work, she showed that when people are transported by their own story-like thoughts, persuasion isn’t weakened by weaker arguments. A buyer imagining a clean cellar is no longer evaluating a brush, she’s living the outcome.
For today’s value seller: Don’t lead with your platform. Lead with the buyer’s use cases, room by room: the specific jobs, roles and workflows your solution improves. Paint a picture concrete enough that the buyer can see their own team working differently. Use cases make the outcome imaginable, and imaginable outcomes get bought.
4. Never Argue with the Customer
What Fuller did: The Fuller Brush Man was trained to stay calm and courteous. He might look troubled when a customer pushed back, but he was never argumentative.
Why it worked: Arguing triggers psychological reactance. Jack Brehm’s theory, first proposed in 1966 and tested for nearly six decades since, holds that when people feel their freedom of choice is threatened, they enter a motivational state focused on restoring it. In persuasion, the threat is usually the influence attempt itself. Researchers have documented the resulting “boomerang effect,” where pressure produces anger, negative thoughts and resistance, the opposite of the intended result. The stronger the pressure and the more important the decision, the stronger the pushback.
For today’s value seller: When a buyer objects, get curious, not combative. Ask questions, acknowledge the concern and let the buyer reach the conclusion themselves. Every time you win an argument with a customer, you risk losing the deal. Preserve their sense of control, and they’ll lean in instead of digging in.
5. Keep Coming Back with Something New
What Fuller did: The Fuller Brush Man wasn’t a one-time visitor. He was a trusted regular who returned every three to six months with new items to demonstrate, reinforcing the company’s promise each time.
Why it worked: Two forces compound with every visit. The first is familiarity. Robert Zajonc’s landmark 1968 research showed that mere repeated exposure is enough to make people like something more, with the first few exposures mattering most. Repeated exposure also increases trust, but returning empty-handed doesn’t work: boredom and saturation can reverse the effect.
The second is reputation. In the 2010 PNAS study cited earlier, the brain’s reward signal for reciprocity appeared only for partners who had consistently returned the investment, and was absent for those without that track record. Trust, in other words, is learned one interaction at a time.
For today’s value seller: The sale is the start of the relationship, not the end. Show up regularly, and always bring something new: a fresh benchmark, a progress report, a new idea for getting more value. Each visit should add value, not just check in. That rhythm is how customer success becomes your growth engine.
6. Take the Risk Off the Table
What Fuller did: From its earliest days, the company built itself on three principles: “Make it work, make it last, and guarantee it no matter what.” The buyer had nothing to lose.
Why it worked: Buyers feel losses far more than gains. A 2024 Journal of Economic Literature meta-analysis by Brown, Imai, Vieider and Camerer, covering 607 estimates from 150 studies across economics, psychology and neuroscience, put the average loss aversion coefficient at 1.955. In plain terms, a potential loss weighs about twice as heavily as an equivalent gain. That’s why “what if this doesn’t work?” so often beats “look what this could do.” A guarantee removes the loss from the equation, leaving only the upside.
For today’s value seller: Your buyer isn’t just weighing your ROI. They’re weighing the risk of being wrong, and the personal cost of a failed decision. De-risk it explicitly with phased rollouts, success criteria agreed up front, shared value plans and, where you can, outcome-based commitments. The less the buyer can lose, the easier it is to say yes.
7. Win the Small Yes First
What Fuller did: Alfred Fuller titled his memoir A Foot in the Door, and for good reason. The hardest part of the job was earning the right to a full conversation. Across all the homes they visited, Fuller dealers sold to only about one in five. But once a Fuller Brush Man was allowed to make his full pitch, two out of three homes placed an order. Accepting the gift, letting him in, watching the demonstration: each small yes made the next one easier.
Why it worked: Psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser named the effect after door-to-door selling in their famous 1966 study, “Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique.” Homemakers who first agreed to a small request, answering a few questions about the household products they used, were far more likely to later agree to a much larger one: about 53% versus 22% for those asked cold. Once we take a small step, we want our later actions to stay consistent with it. Later meta-analyses find the effect is real but more modest than the original, which is a useful reminder that the small yes has to be genuine, not a trick.
For today’s value seller: Don’t ask for the big commitment first. Design a path of small, valuable yeses: take the assessment, review the benchmark, join a working session, agree on the success criteria, run a pilot. Each step should deliver value on its own, so every yes builds momentum toward the decision.
The Door Has Changed. The Rules Haven’t.
The Masonic Building still stands at the corner of 23rd and Sixth. Most mornings, the dogs and I walk past it as the delivery trucks unload and the first commuters stream out of the subway.
Today’s buyers don’t answer the door to strangers, and the door itself is now an inbox, a website or an AI assistant. But the human brain making the decision hasn’t changed in a century. It still rewards genuine generosity, values what it can experience, imagines before it commits, resists pressure, trusts what’s familiar, fears loss and moves forward one small yes at a time.
The Fuller Brush Man didn’t have neuroscience to explain why his approach worked. He just knew it did. Today’s value sellers have both the science and the lesson.
Give first. Prove it. Sell the outcome. Stay curious. Keep coming back. Take the risk away. Earn the small yes.
Let’s discuss the best ways to get these practices implemented with you and your team (schedule a meeting): https://calendly.com/tpisello-gd/one-on-one
Sources
- Christiane Bird, A Block in Time: A New York City History at the Corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, Bloomsbury, 2022
- Connecticut History (CT Humanities), “Hartford’s Fuller Brush Company Goes Door-to-Door Across US”: https://connecticuthistory.org/hartfords-fuller-brush-company-goes-door-to-door-across-us/
- American Heritage, “The Fuller Brush Man”: https://americanheritage.com/node/55474
- Gao, Jolly, Yu, Liu, Zhou and Chang, “The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness,” Nature Communications, January 2024: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44286-9
- Phan et al., “Reputation for reciprocity engages the brain reward center,” PNAS, 2010: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2919895
- Peck and Shu, “The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership,” Journal of Consumer Research, 2009: https://doi.org/10.1086/598614
- Escalas, “Imagine Yourself in the Product: Mental Simulation, Narrative Transportation, and Persuasion,” Journal of Advertising, 2004, and “Self-Referencing and Persuasion,” Journal of Consumer Research, 2007: https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jconrs/v33y2007i4p421-429.html
- Reynolds-Tylus, “Psychological Reactance and Persuasive Health Communication: A Review of the Literature,” Frontiers in Communication, 2019: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00056/full
- Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968
- Brown, Imai, Vieider and Camerer, “Meta-analysis of Empirical Estimates of Loss Aversion,” Journal of Economic Literature, 2024: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jel.20221698
- Freedman and Fraser, “Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5969145/