By Jake FitzGerald
Publication Date: 2026-11-04 09:04:00
IBM capped his commissions, so Ross Perot quit with a borrowed $1,000 and a pitch his former employer had already rejected. What he built from that rejection forced one of America’s largest corporations to come to him decades later.
In January 1962, a Dallas salesman at International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM | IBM Price Prediction) met his whole annual quota in 19 days. That left him most of the year with nothing to sell. IBM had already talked about shrinking his territory. When he offered to accept a lower commission rate to keep it, the company capped commissions instead.
Ross Perot used the idle months to listen to his customers. “What I gleaned from my customers was that they were desperate for more than the hardware. They wanted a finished product,” he said later. He pitched IBM on selling that finished product: hardware, software, programming and operations, all for a set price. IBM turned him down because it was content with its near-monopoly on hardware.
