Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

The previous installment in this series drew a long, thoughtful comment from James J. Brown, a long-time veteran in corporate selling. It’s worth quoting at some length:

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 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.

First, thanks to Brown for sharing so generously from his own experience. Second, kudos for William Paterson for having such foresight with its program. Third, my recent reading in the area of “deliberate practice” makes Brown’s comments about instant feedback jump out at me. Expert performers, in whatever field, rely on high-quality feedback to help them attune their performances. If you’re Tiger Woods, that feedback is embedded in the flight of the ball and in the comments of your swing coach. If you’re Will Smith, the feedback is embedded in figures on box office receipts and in the comments of your trusted inner circle on the scripts you are considering.

But here’s the key in the sales-education connection: If you’re a seller out in the field, you may only get feedback from your failure rate in closing sales. Trouble is, virtually all sellers face very high failure rates as a matter of course. The difference between a job-threatening miss of quota and a record-setting sales year may be the difference between closing one sale out of ten and one sale out of eight. For gifted or highly experienced sellers, their own observations and intuition may be enough of a guide; for beginners, it certainly seems clear that a process like William Paterson’s makes much more sense: immediate, empirical feedback combined with expert commentary from industry veterans who have been in the trenches.

More on this to come soon, since I got a lot more feedback from my initial queries in this area. Meanwhile, feel free to add your comments as well — especially if you’re a sales pro.

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Previous installments in this series:

• Sales education: Can sales be taught in the classroom?
• Sales education: More on how sales can be taught.
• Sales education: More thoughts from the Cloud.

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