10 bizarre and daring feats of salesmanship

From Fortune's "The Art of Selling" special report continues with a look at how legends mastered the sales pitch - and raked in the revenues.

Mary Kay Ash
The beauty queen motivated her commissioned sales force with a woman's touch, offering diamonds, trips, and pink Cadillacs to top performers. A year after Mary Kay's launch in 1963, sales were $198,000; in 2007 they were $2.4 billion.

Brownie Wise
Formerly a rep for Stanley Home Products, Wise convinced stubborn inventor Earl Tupper that salespeople needed to demonstrate his plastic containers' patented "burp," ushering in an era of suburban Tupperware parties.

Gerard Lambert
The "Father of Halitosis" called bad breath a medical condition in Lambert Pharmacal Co.'s 1920s ads. In the process he made Listerine a bestseller.

John H. Patterson
National Cash Register's founder had strange and stringent rules for his hires. He built fields on NCR's campus and required salespeople to do exercises. He dictated how much they could pay for neckties.
He once fired an employee who nearly slipped from a horse during a character-building equestrian event he organized. Seen as the father of the modern sales force, Patterson mentored (then fired), IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr.

Herman T. Smith
The first black salesman hired by PepsiCo, the 28-year-old Smith was charged in 1940 with cornering the black consumer market, getting a jump on rival Coke. He and his team couldn't stay in white-only hotels, so they made train reservations on Pullman sleeping cars.

Joe Girard
Guinness World Records' top salesman sold 13,001 individual cars (six cars a day) in 15 years at a Chevy dealership near Detroit. Every month he mailed cards to his customers that read simply, "I Like You."

Tom Siebel
Oracle sales veteran Siebel started his own software firm in 1993. Though the Valley had gone dot-com casual, his strict code required salespeople to wear suits; he also named every conference room at headquarters after a customer.

Alfred Fuller
Fuller Brush legitimized door-to-door selling, with its salesmen visiting nearly nine out of ten American homes in the first half of the last century. In Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933), the wolf dresses up as a Fuller Brush man to get inside the house.

Big Pharma
In the '90s Big Pharma discovered that attractive, peppy cheerleaders made perfect pitchwomen. An outfit called Spirited Sales Leaders has placed more than 60 cheerleaders and dancers in pharma sales forces in the past four years.