Business Insight Zone

That’s the question I put to my LinkedIn network, and the range of answers I got was illuminating. When I’ve talked about this in the past with sales pros, including some of our veteran account managers here at Hoover’s and sales consultants who have been in the business a long time, they all talk about how the whole world of sales can get better.

Many of these folks, even ones who have thrived under the typical find- more- rainmakers method of building sales teams, want sales management to become more rigorous, more analytical, and more systematic. One sales consultant I talked to pointed out the great disparity between manufacturing — where TQM, Six Sigma, and all the other descendants of Taylorism have squeezed defect and re-work rates down to almost nil — and sales, where there are huge leakages and failure rates everywhere you look.

I got so many good answers to my LinkedIn question that there’s no way to fit them all in one blog post, so I’ll start with some excerpts here and then add to them in subsequent posts.

Mary Hammerschmidt of Billtrust lauds a college class she had called “Personal Selling,” which featured sales-oriented roleplays, but then adds:

That being said, nothing beats the real thing. Techniques and tips can help, but you’d be better off working at a furniture store or car dealer to hone your skills than paying for school.

Lee Unger of ChoicePoint Precision Marketing says that some corporate sales workshops have been helpful to him, but expresses doubts about how much sales can be systematized:

Many of the more successful sales people I have worked with have degrees in completely unrelated fields, surprisingly few business degrees, and several with no degree at all. I believe sales is more of an art form, and like artists, each sales person is different and approach their craft in different ways. [...]

Until sales becomes more of a science and less an art form, I suspect it will be very hard to focus core college discipline towards it. Nothing replaces experience in sales.

Kevin Jackson of CSC Consulting writes:

I think that many people believe that sales is either easy, or there are those who are “natural” salespeople. I agree that there are certain personality types that gravitate towards sales, i.e. the proverbial type-A. However I can tell you that I have seen the methodical plodder outsell the vibrant type-A on many occasions.

The fact is that sales has an analytical component and an emotional component. The salespeople who have the best success have a methodology, whether overt or otherwise. [...] An understanding of the sales process, a good methodology, would improve 95% of the salespeople I know.

I think a school that could train successful salespeople would give the Ivy League a run for their money, and would likely gain fast notoriety, though I doubt a major university will pick up such a curriculum, except perhaps as part of an MBA.

He also adds this interesting perspective about college coursework: “Sales is comprised of psychology, logic, planning and research, statistics, listening, change management, and ‘artistic thinking’, so you get a lot of the curricula in other classes that one might take in college, but little that is directly applicable to a sales curriculum.”

My friend Rich Blakeman, a VP at the Miller Heiman sales consultancy, offers this:

There are actually a number of degree programs in sales today at the undergraduate level.

The number of schools offering a degree began with a number of historically minority institutions: College of St. Catherine’s, Southern University, North Carolina A&T and others. Many of these were originally in a program begun by 3M to build “sales-ready” talent coming out of minority colleges and universities into their field force.

Beyond those initial programs, other schools like University of Indiana, Dayton, and more have joined the bandwagon. There are a couple of professional societies for sales on college campuses and the movement is growing with support of many businesses as partners.

Rich also points specifically to the program at St. Kate’s — I hope to follow up with the folks there directly.

My Hoover’s colleague Russ Somers puts my initial question into a thoughtful business framework:

There’s a sentiment that ’sales is an art, not a science; therefore it cannot be taught.’ Any learned behavior can be taught (and there is a long tradition of teaching art). Anyone who’s done sales successfully knows that they’ve learned a lot through their career. The most successful sales pros I know are continually learning and are excited about sharing their knowledge.

There are two deeper questions to be answered:

1) Is there ROI in learning sales? Does the impact of the learning I’d accumulate in X years in the classroom outweigh the impact of the learning I’d gain in the same number of years on the job? If not, it can still be taught; but it’s not worth going to those classes. You’re better off going out into the field and learning it old-school.

2) Who has the right skill set to teach it? I’ve seen sales programs at the graduate & undergraduate level taught by marketing professionals. All due respect to us Marketing folks, but we don’t do sales and may not have the right skills to teach it.

(The magic of the Internet: Russ and I sit in neighboring cubicles at Hoover’s Galactic HQ in Austin . . . but as far as I know he and I had never discussed this topic before I saw his answer on LinkedIn.)

Russ also mentions that the Acton MBA program here in Austin includes sales as part of its curriculum. If there are any Acton students, teachers, or alums in the audience, please tell us more about how Acton does it.

I’ll be exploring this topic much more in further installments, especially as I follow up with some of the business academics who are bringing rigorous sales training into the B-schools. Meanwhile, chime in with your own opinions: how well can sales be taught in the classroom?