Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Following up from Wednesday’s post, here are more thoughts on how well sales skills can be taught in the classroom.

Chris Clemens, who works in sales for FoodTools Inc., talks about his own sales education at Ball State University.

Sales skills can be sharpened and improved in school, but the basic sales skills typically come from your ability to communicate with people.

I attended Ball State University and participated in the H.H. Gregg Center for Professional Selling. My sales courses in college helped me polish my communication skills. Students think that sales is a “push” thing, but through learning “SPIN”* and other techniques we gain an understanding that you need to be service focused in you want to be successful at helping people solve their problems.

This new idea about selling helps us think about our listening, speaking, critical thinking, and general people skills. We start to understand how the sales process works and although most of us do not continue to use the techniques taught to us in school we at least gained an understanding of a general process. Successful salespeople will then create a process that will work for them.

I am sure I could have learned this in the real world too, but it could have cost me lots of mistakes, a few jobs, and my self esteem. Instead I was given the opportunity to learn and screw up in a classroom where my paycheck didn’t depend on making the sale.

Sales degree programs may not create the sales elite, but they do prepare them and allow them to learn important lessons before entering the professional world.

(* SPIN = Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff. See this page for more.)

This leads me to two thoughts:

1. To some degree, Chris’s comments echo those of Kevin Jackson in the previous post. Kevin said that many college courses approached sales-relevant skills tangentially, e.g. by exposing students to “psychology, logic, planning and research, statistics,” and so on. Good sales education, it seems to me, would organize treatment of these skills in direct terms.

2. When I lectured at UT the other day, I talked to the undergrads in the class about striking a balance between their courses, in which experts (in accounting, marketing, etc.) can offer you massive shortcuts to understanding, and hands-on experience in the workplace, where this understanding gets internalized as you’re forced to test it and put it to use. Chris’s comments here seem to work in the same vein.

By the way, Chris has also put me in touch with the folks at the H. H. Gregg Center; I hope to publish a follow-up with them soon.

Veteran seller Robert Charles offers this:

[...] I have to agree that MBA programs definitely do not put any focus on sales. I am currently in an MBA program myself and interviewed with three programs…none of them had any focus on sales nor are they impressed by a good salesman.

I’d have to say that there is not a problem with someone learning sales through a class because it can be done and can be a benefit. The problem is that not enough quality MBA programs are recognizing the value of molding solid salesman.

This matches what I’ve learned from my own friends who have gone through prestigious MBA programs. The curriculum may be useful in many topics and on many levels, but for the most part sales is ignored. Contrast this to the practice of the Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship, which we’ve discussed at some length in the comments to the earlier post.

My Hoover’s colleague Macon Schoonmaker writes this about a notional super-curriculum in sales:

[...] So while there’s topics like professional decorum, lead generation, prospecting, cold calling, hunting, farming, elevator pitch, value propositions, positioning-leverage, ROI, customer centric expectations, corporate sales objectives, sales administrivia like pipeline-forecasting, contracts, and compliance: The real art and science of a sales curriculum would have to focus on the attributes of a sales cycle (Discovery of Opportunity to sell, Appointments with people influencing the sale, Qualifying the buying criteria, Qualifying the budget, Qualifying the competition, Qualifying the people influencing the sale, Product Demonstration, Proposing, Negotiating and Closing). Not to mention the subsets of theory and activity involving the checks and balances while advancing the sale at each cyclical turn.

Glynn Pearson, who is Director of Sales for Powervision Software, talks about his the mid-career MBA he’s pursuing now, and how it uses the networked knowledge of the students to improve the program:

I’m taking an executive MBA at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. The group is older and are all advanced in their careers. One of the things that I’ve really liked about this program is that any skill or experience the program is lacking is usually made up for through people bringing their own backgrounds to the group.

I do think that MBA students should be learning sales skills. I think if you look at the successful people that MBA’ers commonly want to emulate you’ll see that a lot of them have at least a spirt of salesmanship if not actual training. You can have the best ideas in the world but if you can’t get people to listen to them, they are worthless.

That last point is key: to some degree, everyone who succeeds in business must exert some degree of selling ability — even if that means the work of a financial controller “selling” top executives on a certain budgetary approach. If I’m right about that, why hasn’t sales taken its rightful place alongside management, marketing, accounting, and the other “scientific” business disciplines taught in business school? This would seem especially useful given the recognition in today’s workplace of the importance of emotional intelligence, which for many good salespeople is Competitive Skill #1.

Stay tuned for more in this series, and please feel free to share your own views on sales education in the comments.