Professional selling is beginning to get some respect and attention from several top business schools. At Harvard Business School, Associate Professor David Godes now teaches a second-year MBA course on business-to-business marketing. North Carolina has begun an introductory sales class for its MBAs. Stanford University began its MBA sales course in 2004.

In two short years, Stanford’s course, Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations, has grown to a full four-unit course with 19 sessions attended by more than a hundred students. The Stanford students study under a teaching pair, Professor James Lattin and Lecturer Mark Leslie, who founded and led several companies, including Veritas Software.

Andris Zoltners, who has been teaching sales at Northwestern’s Kellogg School for a quarter of a century, thinks the attention is both proper and overdue. Almost four million Americans are involved in business-to-business selling, Zoltners estimates. “Yet at most graduate business schools, professional selling is usually a footnote in the channels lecture in Principles of Marketing.” Graduate students gravitated toward subjects like venture capital, strategic planning, and entrepreneurship.

There are other reasons for tardy attention to sales. Research is important to universities, and solid sales research has been difficult. The sales force is hard to observe, unlike brand development, advertising, and other marketing tools. Companies do not let researchers experiment with salespeople, who are action-oriented. “Sales reps are usually preoccupied with making their numbers,” Zoltners notes.

Zoltners says only his consulting practice and executive teaching give him access to much real-world sales performance data. He chairs ZS Associates, whose 750 consultants specialize in fields such as territory alignment, sales forecasting, and sales force architecture.

And conventional academic research approaches may be naïve about the complexity of sales force issues. Zoltners sketches out the “investment to outcome” flow in sales as: 1. Sales force decisions, 2. People, 3. Activity, and 4. Outcome. This process is a bit lengthier than the direct linkage between marketing and consumers. “The people and activity steps are very unpredictable and hard to model. I suspect more research into sales is going on outside academic institutions,” Zoltners says.

Perhaps major companies could encourage more academic interest in sales by making more data available. Zoltners thinks the subject is important and interesting enough to merit thorough treatment. He teaches Kellogg MBA candidates about the sales process, as well as how to size, structure, and compensate the sales force.

For two decades, visiting teachers have taught three-to-five-day executive seminars at Kellogg. The seminars cover subjects such as accelerating sales force performance, business marketing, customer-insight tools, managing customer relationships, and sales force incentive planning. Executive seminars are designed for midcareer professionals, from regional sales managers up to sales VPs and division presidents. The seminars are open enrollment, and many companies send groups of managers. This type of career sales education is fairly common. Prestigious business schools at Pennsylvania, Chicago, Michigan, Virginia, and Columbia also have short executive classes.

Preparation for professional sales at the undergraduate level has also been thin, with most colleges offering only a couple of sales courses and very few offering full sales programs. But here too, there has been some recent progress.

Kennesaw State University graduated its first 22 sales majors in 1989. The major requires courses in professional selling, market analysis, sales management, international marketing, business-to-business marketing, and advanced selling topics, in addition to business and other undergraduate courses. Students learn the process in the first half of each semester, and then spend the next half in role-plays.

Kennesaw concentrates on business-to-business sales, where uncovering customer needs and building long-term relationships are critical. All students must learn to use customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and an advanced class covers account and territory management.

Some Kennesaw students start out thinking that sales courses will be easy or that they have a natural gift for it, according to Kennesaw Associate Professor Terry Loe. They soon learn that sales can be complicated and difficult. “The first class weeds them out,” Loe says. The program now has 100 students, and Loe expects there will be 300 to 400 four years from now.

Loe argues that a sales major makes sense because most marketing graduates and almost half of business-school graduates go directly into sales. “Lots of people get into sales as a good path to management, and many CEOs and presidents have a sales background,” Loe says. “Companies such as HP, Xerox, and IBM call me every week asking about our students. We have a 100 percent placement rate.” He estimates that about 45 schools teach sales in some fashion, and interest is growing.

Recruiting companies are beginning to see the value of realistic undergraduate sales training. Students who graduate from a solid program not only know sales, but know how hard it can be. “Our students self-select out of the program, so the ones who make it through are not surprised if their first sales job is difficult.” says Loe.

Kennesaw’s sales program now has 25 board members, and 12 firms sponsor its annual sales competition, which drew contestants from 40 different schools in 2006.

Baylor University’s Center for Professional Selling in the Hankamer School of Business offers a bachelor’s degree in business-to-business selling. The coursework includes marketing, two classes in professional selling and communications, sales force management, sales executive skills, negotiation and conflict resolution, market analysis, and decision making.

Baylor also offers a separate six-course degree in sports sponsorships and sales, with guaranteed internships with leading sports teams. The Center’s director, Bill Weeks, says he has been discussing adding sales as an elective in Baylor’s MBA program.

About a dozen Baylor students now receive the undergraduate sales degree each year. The program is aimed at students who will initially take entry-level selling jobs in major corporations. Students do extensive role-playing and videotaping of their performances. Weeks is assisted by 10 sales VPs in teaching sales-executive skills, and students “shadow” sales reps, managers, and executives as a regular part of their education. CRM, financial analysis, and national account and cross-functional management are also taught in the program. All recent graduates have moved into sales positions with major companies.

“We try to manage students’ expectations,” Weeks emphasizes. “We tell them about the challenges as well as potential benefits of sales, we give them adversity and rejection, and they must make a b2b presentation to a person they have not met.” The Center will join IBM in setting up a 24-desk call center where students will learn selling over the phone while working with a CRM system, suitable practice for sales recruits who start out as inside telesales reps, before moving to the field.

Weeks says undergraduate sales programs have been received enthusiastically by the business community. But universities, especially those outside the United States, are still skeptical of sales as an academic discipline. Doing academically respectable sales research requires that researchers learn to offer solid value to cooperating firms to get useful data.

A different approach is taken by The Sales Center at Ohio University, which offers sales certificates in five different areas: professional, media, financial services, retail, and sports. The certificates augment the university’s regular undergraduate degrees and generally require seven courses of four credit hours each.

“Students get about half the value in class, and the other half outside the classroom,” explains the Center’s Executive Director Kenneth Hartung. There are learning events, symposiums, internships, and work with professional salespeople. Sales students run these external events themselves. Students are required to have 300 hours of internship in a selling environment before receiving their certificates.

The Center now has about 150 students. It accepts about 55 percent of applicants from Ohio’s other schools. “We want to see if they have experience and passion, know what they want, and are committed,” Hartung says. He also wants students to take ownership of the Center’s activities, helping to run it, especially the extensive outside activities.

Hartung estimates that up to half of all college graduates will take their first job in sales or a sales-related position. Students who have taken sales in college should perform better and more quickly. “The feedback we get is that our students do very well in sales training,” Hartung says.

Hartung partners with other schools at Ohio to offer the specialized sales certificates. He hopes to partner with the engineering school soon. Hartung asks three questions about a certificate program: Is there a market need for the specialty? Is the need unique enough? Will companies come to Ohio to recruit if a special program is established?

Other colleges are also getting on board the undergraduate sales bandwagon. And they have come up with a wide variety of approaches.

For example, Westwood Colleges offer a bachelor of science in business administration with a concentration in marketing and sales at a dozen locations throughout the United States and over the Internet. The school emphasizes hands-on experience in courses taught by sales professionals.

The Russ Berrie Institute for Professional Sales at William Paterson University offers a bachelor’s degree in professional sales. The degree requires six courses in sales, plus business courses and general courses, including communications and mathematics. The sales courses are professional selling, negotiation, global perspectives, sales management, key accounts, customer relationships, and advanced sales. Students in other Paterson programs can earn a minor in sales by taking five of these courses.

The Edward H. Schmidt School of Professional Sales at the University of Toledo offers a bachelor of business administration degree in professional sales, minors in professional sales for other students, and certificate programs for working salespeople and sales managers. The School is now developing an MBA in sales leadership.

The Schmidt major requires courses in purchasing, sales, territory management, sales force leadership, and advanced sales. Sales majors can also specialize in particular industries by taking courses in engineering, manufacturing, metals, pharmaceuticals, insurance, financial services, or information technology. All sales students are required to take courses in writing, communication, and standard business-degree subjects.

The Fisher Institute for Professional Selling at the University of Akron offers sales major, minor, and certificate programs, plus graduate programs in sales management. Undergraduate courses include professional selling, purchasing, negotiation, sales management, and e-marketing. The certificate program requires 15 credit hours. Graduate courses include negotiation, sales management, and intercultural communications.

Illinois State University now has eight PhDs teaching nine sales and sales management courses, including personal selling, sales management, advanced personal selling, forecasting, and purchasing. These courses are integrated with courses from other Illinois schools to offer specialized sales tracks in insurance, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and manufacturing.

Aurora University’s Dunham School of Business offers a major in professional sales and sales management as well as a certificate program. The certificate requires four courses: professional sales process, prospecting, sales management, and sales motivation. The major in sales management is offered to adults who have five years of work experience and complete 38 semester hours of sales and general business courses. •