Congratulations. ?Your ticket to career long excellence in sales has just come up. You'll always be top of the achievers list. ?Every target will be exceeded. Every overrider hit. Every day your phone will ring with a new job offer.
"The sales tool kit has advanced dramatically: It now includes sophisticated analytics to identify opportunities, software to discipline processes and produce forecasts, and negotiation expertise to broker complex deals."
"professional sales has entered a new era, requiring skills that aren scarce but teachable?and best taught in a collegiate setting"
We all know?that a well-staffed sales function is vital to business success. Consider, for example, the findings of a series of studies conducted since 1988 by the sales force consultancy Chally Group. Analyzing data from more than 100,000 business decision makers, Chally discovered that 39% of B2B buyers select a vendor according to the skills of the salesperson rather than price, quality, or service features. So business schools must spend a lot of time teaching sales skills, right?
Wrong. Take a look at the curricula of the world?s top-ranked business schools, and you might come away with the impression that sales is unimportant. Most MBA programs offer no sales-related courses at all, and those that do offer only a single course in sales management. Even at the undergraduate level of business instruction, sales courses are sparse.
To put a finer point on it, of the 479 U.S. business programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, only 101 have a sales curriculum, and a mere 15 offer either an MBA in sales or some sort of sales-oriented graduate curriculum. Sales may be vital to businesses, but of the 350,000 students a year who earn bachelor?s degrees in business from American universities, and the 170,000 who earn MBAs, only a tiny fraction have been taught anything about it. The news isn?t all bad, however. As we will show, signs point to an increasing awareness among universities that they should invest in sales education. There is a growing consensus that professional sales has entered a new era, requiring skills that are scarce but teachable?and best taught in a collegiate setting. We will share what we?ve learned from building the Center for Sales Leadership at DePaul University and suggest how it might guide the establishment of other such programs in the future. But first let?s explore why sales hasn?t been central to business education in the past. Old-School SalesUntil quite recently, business education might have been perfectly justified in skipping over sales. Time was, the model salesperson was two parts personality and one part product knowledge. The job was to carry a bag, get a foot in the door, and talk up your offering?s features and benefits. Perhaps a formal sales education couldn?t add much to that. Product knowledge was unique to a company and therefore handled by internal training. People skills weren?t considered teachable in any conventional sense. Selling was something to be learned by doing. As with riding a bicycle, you could read about it, but real knowledge came from trying, failing, and trying again.
Meanwhile, it was also true that many people enrolling in MBA programs had already proved they could sell. Graduate schools of business, back when they were fewer, favored applicants with work experience, and much of that experience had been won on the front lines of revenue generation. In seeking a master?s degree, these go-getters wanted to acquire the general management skills their day-to-day jobs didn?t teach. The boom in MBA programs coincided with the rise of marketing as a discipline, and mass producers relied on heavy advertising and strong brands to control the sale and distribution of goods. Sales, in contrast, got little respect.
To the extent that instruction on how to sell was needed, the demand was met by a sales-training industry that included companies such as Axiom, FranklinCovey, and Miller Heiman. Within universities sales was at best a stepchild of marketing. Old-school sales was no-school sales. A Profession TransformedSelling and sales management have come a long way since the days when most business school curricula were designed?so far that the term Sales 2.0 is now commonly used by people (such as the editors of?Selling Power?magazine) who have spent their careers watching the world of revenue generation. That term borrows from Web 2.0, or the idea that the real power of the internet is not to enable traditional content producers to publish more cheaply but to give users a hand in creating content. In the realm of selling, it?s the buyer who is newly empowered. Customers no longer need a salesperson to learn about a company?s offering, much less to place an order. As a result, sales has become more about helping customers define the problem they are trying to solve and assemble a complete solution. The sales tool kit has advanced dramatically: It now includes sophisticated analytics to identify opportunities, software to discipline processes and produce forecasts, and negotiation expertise to broker complex deals.
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