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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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.

~

* The Cloud = the group expertise of the Internet, in this case via the Q&A function of LinkedIn.

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.

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?