Can College Teach You to Sell? – by Christina Salerno

Tags: Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales, Sales Education, BNET Briefing…, Sales Training, Recession, Economy, Customers, Christina Salerno

In sales, experience trumps textbooks. The best education comes strictly from the school of hard knocks. Or does it?

In this economy, maybe not. Fewer sales organizations have the resources to take on inexperienced associates who require months to get up to speed. And the recession has made the job much harder — even for the grizzled sales veterans of the world. Newly thrifty customers are also savvier than ever, with the ability to do their own in-depth research online. In short, the average salesperson can no longer afford to be merely average. So where will the most successful reps get their know-how? As a number of universities add sales programs to their curricula, more people in the field are saying, “Bring on the textbooks.”
Key Stats
Top job offers for college graduates: Sales is No. 2 — in between teaching (No. 1) and nursing (No. 3)
Starting salary for sales jobs: $41,179
Universities or colleges that offer sales programs: 40
Total number of U.S. universities and colleges: 4,000
[Sources: National Association of Colleges and Employers, University Sales Education Foundation]
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Advocates for college sales programs say that sales departments face a problem much larger than one recession: The very fundamentals of the profession are changing. “You can’t just be a universal salesperson” anymore, says Howard Stevens, CEO of the HR Chally Group, a firm that offers sales development services. More knowledgeable buyers eliminate the need for salespeople who merely provide facts about their offerings. Buyers today want a salesperson with expertise, in-depth industry knowledge, and problem-solving abilities, says Stevens. “We’ve come to recognize sales as half art and half science,” he says. “Science is the part that is taught and learned. In high-end sales, the customer is expecting you to take responsibility for your product or service.” In other words, to succeed in this new environment, sales professionals need a stronger foundation in the fundamentals of their business — and it’s not clear they can get that on the job anymore.

At the same time, scores of college graduates will go on to have careers in sales, which ranks second among the jobs most commonly offered to recent college graduates, just behind teaching. Yet only 40 of the more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States have formal sales programs, according to the nonprofit University Sales Education Foundation. At Ohio University’s Schey Sales Centre — one of the first academic sales programs established in the nation about a decade ago — students learn to do more than sell a product or service, says Executive Director Ken Hartung. “If a company buys a product, what they are really doing is outsourcing,” Hartung says. “They are hiring [a sales professional] to manage that product’s benefit,” which means sales reps need to inspire trust. On top of learning the nuts and bolts of selling and negotiating techniques, the center’s 225 students study a specific industry, such as finance, retail, or technical sales, to boost their knowledge of that sector. A student specializing in technical sales, for example, is required to take two additional courses in chemical engineering or machine design.

What’s in It for Employers
It’s no secret that the sales profession suffers from a high turnover rate — as much as 30 percent in some industries. But students who invest time and money into a sales education in college are much more likely to stick it out than their peers without academic sales training, Hartung says. “They’ve experienced it, [unlike] someone who doesn’t know what they are getting into,” he says.

That translates into real savings for companies hiring sales associates. In a sophisticated business-to-business sales job, Stevens says it takes a new salesperson an average of 18 to 24 months to “break even” — that is, to sell enough product to match what the company pays in compensation and sales training. “The cost of [hiring and] training salespeople is huge,” he says, adding up to about $180,000 a year. Sales programs move some of that burden away from the companies and into the universities, Stevens says.

A student with a formal sales education ramps up faster, selling at the equivalent of someone with two or three years of experience right from the start, says Jeanne Frawley, director of the University Sales Education Foundation. She notes that companies such as Hess Corporation and AT&T regularly report that sales graduates become fully acclimated to their companies in about a year, rather than the three years that other new sales associates require. “They already know their specialty and recognize what questions need to be asked,” she says. “They can walk in and really talk about concepts and how to create a solution.”

Can Sales Be Taught?
Not everyone believes that sales can be taught in a classroom. Many sales professionals argue that you either have the talent or you don’t; any additional know-how is best learned by doing. Brad Finn, a 32-year sales veteran and president of shoe company SRO, says he doubts that sales education will ever become a viable option in colleges. “I’ve been in sales all my life with no formal training,” he says. “So much of sales is life experience.”

Finn says the skills a salesperson really needs to master are more about insight — such as when to back off from a customer or when to persevere. A sales professional must become the person a customer looks forward to spending time with, which Finn argues has more to do with understanding interpersonal relationships than formal education. While he agrees that business-to-business sales are becoming more complex, he says that a salesperson would be better served by a degree in business or finance than in sales.

Still, advocates for sales education say the college programs are about more than just the training. They give the profession a better reputation. “We’ve got to get more companies, more students, and more families to understand that sales is a legitimate profession,” Stevens says. The key is to carve out a legitimate place for the profession within academia. Colleges may cobble together a few marketing classes with an e-commerce course and call it “sales training,” Frawley says. “But three marketing classes do not equal a sales program,” she says. “We need programs that address the complexity of business-to-business sales, so that students can handle it upon graduation.”

Coasting toward apathy – Harvey Mackay’s Column This Week

When you’re very comfortable in your job, and things seem to be going pretty well, you may be tempted to ease up—coast a little. Resist that temptation!

Jane Goodall, the famous naturalist, relayed a fable that her mother used to read to her and her sister when they were little, about a competition of birds to see which could fly the highest.

“The mighty eagle is sure he will win, and majestically with those great, strong wings he flies higher and higher, and gradually the other birds get tired and start drifting back to the ground. Finally, even the eagle can go no higher, but that’s all right, because he looks down and sees all the other birds below him.

“That’s what he thinks, but hiding in the feathers on his back is a little wren, and she takes off and flies highest of all.”

That’s the danger of coasting, not giving it your all. We get in a comfort zone and don’t challenge ourselves. Always doing your best should be your goal.

I’m sure almost everyone remembers the fable about the tortoise and the hare. They bet on who was the fastest to run a certain distance. The rabbit was way ahead and stopped to take a nap, while the turtle kept chugging away and crossed the finish line first. Everyone knew that the rabbit was faster, but he coasted—took things for granted—and lost.

Even in winning, people can coast. For example, I remember being at last summer’s Olympic Games in China at the men’s 100-yard dash final. Usain Bolt from Jamaica blew away the field and won in a world-record time. However, I couldn’t help but think how fast he actually could have run, had he not coasted at the end and looked around at his competitors. His record will be broken one day, but we’ll never know how fast he could have run that race.

Several years ago at one of Lockheed Martin’s electronics facilities in Orlando, Fla., complacency from past successes started to infect one of its manufacturing processes. Occasionally, parts were omitted from component kits prepared for assembly and inspection at another factory. Each missing part disrupted the assembly process and frustrated the workers assembling the products.

Norman Augustine, chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp., said: “I borrowed an idea from an automobile dealer in Dallas I had heard about. The dealer received few complaints from customers because he gave them the home telephone numbers of the mechanics who worked on their cars. I arranged for workers to include their names, work phone numbers and self-addressed postcards in the kits they prepared. Complaints dropped precipitously.”

I can tell you from personal experience that Mr. Augustine is 100 percent correct. When you put your name on a business, as I did, you have nothing to hide behind. The buck stops here. Maybe I’ll squeeze in a round of golf, or a short vacation, but that’s as far as I let myself go. It’s easier to stay motivated than to get motivated again.

An elderly carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house-building business and live a more leisurely life so he and his wife could enjoy their extended family. He would miss the paycheck, but he needed to retire. They could get by.

The contractor was sorry to see his good worker go and asked if he would build just one more house as a personal favor. The carpenter said yes, but in time it was easy to see that his heart was not in his work. He resorted to shoddy workmanship and used inferior materials. It was an unfortunate way to end a dedicated career.

When the carpenter finished his work his employer came to inspect the house. He asked, “Are you satisfied with the house?” When the carpenter said that he was, his employer said, “Good, because the house is yours. “My gift to you!”

The carpenter was shocked! What a shame! If he had only known he was building his own house, he would have made sure it was all first class.

So it is with us. We build our lives, a day at a time, often putting less than our best into the construction. Are you cutting corners and squandering time, commitment and effort?

Mackay’s Moral: Coasting can lead to a big downhill slide.