Definition of "salesmanship"

[…] 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.”

1880, R. D. Blackmore, chapter 9, in Mary Anerley‎, volume 2, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, page 162

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.

1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 1, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company

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 - [...].

1961 February, Cecil J. Allen, “Locomotive Running Past and Present”, in Trains Illustrated, page 85

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.

1963, Hannah Arendt, On Revolution‎, New York: Viking, published 1965, Chapter 6, section 4, p. 282

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.

2012, Nathan Rabin, “The Simpsons (Classic): ‘Treehouse of Horror III’” , The A.V. Club, TV Reviews, 29 April, 2012