Sales education: More thoughts from the Cloud.*
Continuing on the earlier installments in this series (see below for links), here are more thoughts from sales pros in my network about how well sales can be taught in the classroom — especially in college or graduate school.
John Grace, a financial analyst at Capital One, points to the Sales Excellence Institute (SEI) at his alma mater, the University of Houston. According to John, the SEI has a very hands-on program designed to give students direct experience — not just abstract instruction — in selling, and the teaching is done by experts with sales experience.
But John also raises an important issue: maybe B-schools shouldn’t teach sales because of lack of demand.
I will agree that most B schools don’t have good sales training programs. However, I will also say that learning sales isn’t why those programs exist[:] they are for management training. The average MBA grad isn’t looking to become a salesperson so why would programs provide a product (sales training) that the majority of their customers don’t want to buy? If MBA programs thought the demand was there they would teach it quickly.
A couple of thoughts about this:
1. John may be right that there simply is not enough demand. Maybe sellers get undergrad degrees (or no degrees, for that matter), head out into the business world, and use their intuition and communications chops, combined with hard-earned experience, to make it in the selling game. Maybe they’ll never sign up in great numbers for sales education programs because they’re too busy making money selling.
2. Counterpoint: It may also be a lack of supply, because sales is the last great unexplored frontier from the standpoint of academic analysis of business. At least, this is what I keep hearing from sales consultants who tell me how poor the state of sales operations is for many companies. Even many big businesses accept levels of ineffectiveness and inefficiency in their sales operations that they would never accept from their finance or IT or marketing departments. This may come, at least in part, from a lack of rigorous research into the sales process — not no research, but a relative lack in comparision to the other major functions of corporations, which have been studied to death in the decades since Frederick Taylor and Peter Drucker were starting their careers.
If #2 is as important as I think it is, we’re likely to see more rather than less academic research into sales in coming years. If this is so, we’re likely to see more rather than less sales training in business schools. And it makes sense: you don’t need an MBA to join a marketing department, but a lot of marketers get one to sharpen their skills, improve their professional networks, and increase their chances for climbing the ladder of corporate management. Ditto IT, operations, finance, and so on. Why wouldn’t the same thing apply for ambitious sales managers, if sales-oriented training were more available for them.
Back to John, who extolled the virtues of an introductory undergraduate sales course he had, then added this:
I know that I’m not a sales person, but being aware of the basics has been very helpful to me in my career. Just asking for the sale, probing for hidden objections, the baby stuff can be very useful. I suspect anyone who tries hard and know the basic techniques can be an average sales person. If you have the right personality, people skills, and drive lined with training you should be a GREAT sales person.
This seems to match what I was saying last time about the importance of “selling” even in corporate roles where no literal selling-to-customers is involved.
More on these themes coming soon. Feel free to weigh in with your own insights in the comments.
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Previous installments:
- Sales education: Can sales be taught in the classroom?
- Sales education: More on how sales can be taught.
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* The Cloud = the group expertise of the Internet, in this case via the Q&A function of LinkedIn.
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I read with great interest your blog on sales education at the University level. I guess I can agree with all our fellow sales professionals on their comments. I have been in sales my entire career. I sold information technology for the Burroughs Corp and eventually founded and became the VP National Account Sales at ADP. I also was CEO of the Ardmore Group, an international sales consulting firm for many years.
Four years ago I was given the opportunity to create the first degree program in sales in the US. Russ Berrie asked me to start the Russ Berrie Institute at William Paterson University in NJ USA. The University now offers a BS in Professional Sales. Russ Berrie and WPU were not the first to recognize the need for professional sales education. As mentioned in previous comments Ball State and the University of Houston have outstanding programs and with WPU should be benchmarked for excellence. A group of universities that are the leaders are members of the University Sales Center Alliance http://www.salescenteralliance.com
The above is some background. I would like to share with you what I learned as a sales executive going to work in an academic environment for the first time. First of all no parent or student expects to go to a College to become a salesperson. A doctor, engineer, lawyer, scientist, accountant, business executive perhaps but not a salesperson. One of the reasons is the image of our profession. No one realizes that over half of the CEO’s in the US come from sales.
The key to our success was our curriculum and the fact the we only hired professors that had over three years of outside sales experience. They were interviewed by sales executives as well as the academics. The curriculum was recommended by sales executives and developed by the faculty with their approval. We researched and installed five behavioral monitoring labs each with cameras and telephones so that the presentations could be captured on a computer system that produced DVD’s for the students use as well as being used as interactive video system that can broadcast internationally. The video self modelling feature enabled the student to take the DVD home with them gave the student the opportunity for instant feedback on how they handled the situation at hand. This improved learning many fold. It also became obvious that repetition and instant feedback by the instructor and their classmates sunk in. Having sales executives co-facilitating and participating in the classroom has put this program in the forefront of business education at WPU. The students also create their own video resume so that they can show the prospective recruiter how they look in action handling a variety of sales situations. The seniors are also trained to coach the younger students to develop their skills. The graduating students are now among the highest paid and are sought after by some of the largest corporations in the US.
My belief is that sales can be taught at the College level if the University is willing to invest in the right systems, involve the sales community in the curriculum and be willing to hire educators with sales experience.
[...] previous installment in this series drew a long, thoughtful comment from James J. Brown, a long-time veteran in corporate selling. [...]
I have always though that sales training at college was very basic and focused on the planning and marketing instead of the “real world” skills needed to survive. I am an LSU grad and learned more my first 6 months OJT than id did in the 6 years in college. I do beleive in the value of education to have some understanding of general knowlege and form a framwork that you can build on. However, the real skills are best taught in the real worl, with experienced and successful salespeople. Been there, done that, and made a million+. Thanks for the fourm and see you in Sales-Cass!