Training the Next Generation of Sales Reps
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.”
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