What would a Sales 101 course look like?
By brendan at 18 January, 2010, 6:14 pm
Something that drives me mad is that in my humble opinion, our Universities are undermining the success of Australian business. I say this because from my observation the number one skill required for success in business, regardless of profession, is the ability to sell. To sell your product, yourself as the right candidate for the job, your idea, your project, your venture to an investor. Every single person I have met at the top of their profession has been a great sales person. This includes University Vice Chancellors, Politicians, Judges, and CEO’s of billion dollar operations.
But according to my research (I’d love to be proven wrong) no universities in Australia teaches sales. The rationale behind this is that Sales is a “skill” and therefore should be taught at lower level than university (read short course). Our Business schools are instead trying to train consultants that are good at strategy, but not getting your hands dirty.
I disagree that sales is just a skill, but think that argument is ridiculous anyway if its the most important ability you need to succeed in business. Everybody is selling something. Even if it isn’t necessarily a product, it might be a service or image. You might be an online financial advice and comparison website (http://www.lovemoney.com/), a bookstore or an entertainment manager. Without a grasp of basic sales abilities, you won’t go far. Selling is an art, and a difficult one to master. If I was designing a commerce degree in Australia, I’d have a 10 week course that looks like the below as a core unit. Each of the topics can also be applied to non traditional “sales” activities such as getting your project up with a winning business case. I’d also suggest that if you are a business owner and don’t understand what I am talking about – you better fix it or you will be doomed to obscurity.
Week 1 Sales in Context
Sales is the engine that pulls a business along not production or accounting and sales should fit hand in glove with the rest of the marketing efforts. Sales is where customer contact happens, and this is what steers the business and uncovers tomorrow’s opportunities.
Week 2 The Sales Cycle
There is a standard sales cycle for capturing and harvesting customers which I’ve talked about before. Its critical to the design of the business to optimise the activities within each step so that money isn’t wasted, nor opportunities left on the table.
Week 3 Customer Psychology
Every time I meet someone new to selling, they seem to be surprised that its all about the customer. Customers are interested in the benefits to them, not the features of your product and they like to be able to quantify them (the value proposition). They also like to be listened to, which as a bonus, allows you to find out what they want.
Week 4 Product & Service Design
Most technology businesses seem to start off selling projects, then wonder why they can’t forecast how much they will sell next month. It seems to come as a surprise that you should design your product to have features customers are willing to pay for, or have a range of prices for different customer segments. Great models abound
Week 5 Sales Infrastructure
Good support can dramatically increase the effectiveness of a sales team, whether it be quotation templates, configurators, point of sale materials, CRM systems or POS Equipment.
Week 6 Proposals, Presentations & Pitching
I got a quote the other day from an Australian software engineer that said “I will charge $450”. No time frame, no warranty, not even a mention whether it was ex or inc GST. Writing a proposal isn’t that hard, and it pretty much follows the same sequence whether its selling a peanut or a power station. Understanding which decision maker gets which information in which format isn’t that complex either. However it does need to be thought through.
Week 7 Sales Law
There is more to sales law than just the Trade Practices Act and a smidgeon of contract law. Terms and Conditions of Sale normally run to at least a couple of pages about intellectual property, transfer of title, reasonable behaviours and warrantees. Do you really want your layer to decide what should be included?
Week 8 Sales Activities
Sales activities generally fall into one of two camps, finding new customers or minding existing customers. Highly effective sales people do more than turn up to just more than industry events. They develop relationships with loads of potential customers through creative means.
Week 9 Agents, Distributors & Channels to Market
Businesses such as Accounting firms generally interface directly with their customers, but others such as insurance or IT have distribution channels that can be complex and overlapping. Designing a channel to market locally and overseas is not something that should be left to chance.
Week 10 Sales Management
I’ve never met a salesman that didn’t have sales manager on their resume. However only 1% of them have actually been any good at managing a team. Sales Management is very much about deciding which KPI’s are the drivers of sales, how to design the team and set goals, and how to reward the team for success.
So this is how I see the core components of a Sales 101 course. Is there anything you would drop or add?
Comments
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Hey Brendan,
This is one of my major complaints about the Bachelor of Business (Entrepreneurship) that I’m doing at RMIT at the moment. They’re really into teaching you the theory and research behind entrepreneurship but as we all know you need to be able to sell your product or service to have a business at all.
They could do with decent teaching staff too.
Cheers,
Ned
Hi Ned,
Thanks for this, I have fixed up the comments thing that was broken.
My position is that I don’t think university is the right model for training entrepreneurs. I much prefer the Master/Apprentice model as I think entrepreneurship is much more aligned to be a trade, than a profession. Unfortunately in Australia we hold university education to be much more valuable than other types of training (because of their marketing).
If you think about the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs in Australia, they generally learnt their craft at someone else’s knee, not at University. There they gained credibility to access capital, learnt how to spot a deal, negotiate and sell an idea, developed a network that mattered. Their orientation to action is innate, not learned. You can’t acquire these attributes at University as they are not “knowledge” which is what Universities mainly offer.
I don’t think that Universities are the natural owners of Entrepreneurship courses, in fact quite the reverse. They can never offer cutting edge content and are only doing it to make a buck.
Brendan
Wow. I have been searching for an article like this for a long time. This is AWESOME. I’m a junior at Clarkson University in northern NY, USA and we have an entrepreneurship program but we do not have a sales major or even a sales course. I have researched other schools and also asked several friends around the country and to my knowledge there are not any sales majors offered, anywhere here in the USA (please correct me if I am wrong!).
Being an aspiring entrepreneur myself, I have heard time and time again that sales is arguably the single most important skill to hone if you are going to be successful. I also think sales can be taught (there are hundreds of sales seminars and books on sales and the concepts involved in the process of selling, am I wrong?) and I believe that it applies to a wide audience of students, not simply aspiring entrepreneurs.
The one thing I’d like to add to your Sales 101 course is a book for required reading: “The Little Red Book of Selling” by Jeffrey Gitomer. While I have not started a company and I do not have a wealth of sales experience, this book has had the most profound impact on me from the standpoint of learning how to sell.
Excellent read, thanks a lot for posting this.
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Thank you for your time, I hope you have an awesome rest of the week!
Cordially,
John Exley
Co-Founder – Business Analysis Team
Co-Founder – Sustainable Synergy
Clarkson University 2011
Interdisciplinary Engineering & Management
(585) 472-0272
National University of Singapore
+65 9858 1161
Follow me on http://www.twitter.com/JohnExley
Hi Brendan,
Thanks for your article. You’ve encapsulated my sentiment on the importance of sales. Key sales aspects we’ve faced within our business include:
1. Understanding what can be a great divide between sales and marketing – we employed an external agency for marketing and a different agency for sales – there was significant mismatch within the handover process.
2. Sales psychology – understanding the subtleties and making sales intrinsic. I’ll be devoting more time to sales psychology this year and plan to finish reading SPIN Selling and The Little Red Book of Selling.
3. Our sales cycle length was longer than we’d anticipated.
4. Understanding the importance of thorough interview preparation when engaging a sales person and agreeing on achievable targets and performance benchmarks. Understanding: How important is the number of years of experience within the market / field / segment? How important is a strong existing network of contacts? What are the best methods for assessing their previous performance history? What is the appropriate base / commission split for the product life cycle and the ramifications of too high base or too low commission? Are you properly prepared to start your sales cycle?
Regards,
Leah.
Hi Brendan
Great post right on the money.
The point I would add is that the most successful sales people add vast amounts of value to both their company and their customers. When I started my sales career with IBM I was in awe of the great sales people in the team. Guys like John Jepson and Bruce Maplestone hated to work hard so they made sure that everything they did was valuable. No point working hard on a prospect that wasn’t going to buy from you so they qualified very cleverly. They also knew that it would take far greater effort to convince a prospect to buy a solution that wasn’t going to work that well so better to find a customer with the right sort of problems that you can soilve very well. So they taught me to make sure that what you were selling would work well and be easy to install. Focussing on finding those areas where you can easily create massive value for your customers meant less time down the track solving problems created by solutions that were not quite right for the customer. Being a great sales person sidekick is by far the best way to learn sales. You’re so right Brendan!
Cheers
Russell Yardley
You can follow me on http://www.twitter.com/rmyardley
Blog: http://www.RussellYardley.com/opinions
Hi Brendan.
I’m well educated – Bachelor of Commerce, Masters of Science, yadda yadda, but the most important business skills that I have were learned on the job. In fact, the most useful experience for me was selling waterbeds (of all things) for about 4 years while studying the first couple of degrees.
People say that sales can’t be taught – what I think they mean is that sales can’t be learned in a classroom and I would agree.
I think that people should learn to drive cars by riding a bicycle for a year. Start with something light, safe, where the only life at risk is your own. Then graduate to 2 tonnes of steel.
I think the same of sales. Start with something – anything – while you’re studying. The more ‘consultative’ the sales approach required, the better. Electronics, beds, farm equipment; this will be a real grounding in ‘people’. Then move on to the big stuff.
Employers, you should be hiring smart uni students. Yes, you’ll only have them for a few years and they’ll be a pain in the arse sometimes, but they’ll be smart, motivated and willing to learn. Plus they’ll replace themselves when the time comes from the ranks of their younger uni colleagues.
Reading the right books about sales might give you a framework to approach sales but there’s no substitute for experience talking to (and most important listening to) people.
I’m sold on that idea.
Alex
Sounds like a great idea and something I’ve been thinking about myself recently too.
Selling is obviously one of the most important skills an Entrepreneur can have and your comments about Entrepreneurship being better suited to apprenticeship than University is insightful.
I’d pay money for a course like this without any doubt. The problem is – I suspect this is a skill that might be best learned as an actual sales person or Entrepreneur out in the field, rather than merely learning the theory of sales.
James Spittal
Hi James,
Yes the practice of selling is best taught in the field as its a skill, however the theory that supports sales, simply isn’t taught and should be.
For example :
When writing a proposal, do you think about at exactly what moment title is transferred? This can matter if you want to get paid.
What framework would you use to redesign a sales model that wasn’t working (despite customers loving your product). Would you go down the “suck it and see” route, or would oyou try applying some intellengent thought?
Brendan
Hello Brendan.
Greatly appreciate your Sales 101 Course thoughts + resultant responses.
Well worth the time spent reading and considering this information.
Found this thread while browsing Peter R. Lewis’ LinkedIn Profile (met Peter while he was in San Francisco).
What are your views on the selling technique espoused by Timothy Ferriss in his book, “The 4-Hour Work Week” , in which he explains selling “proven” product by automating the sales channel to “proven” customers, online: effectively eliminating face to face contact with customers for higher sales revenue, and to keep sales costs to a minimum, by retaining no employees, no bricks and mortar shop front, no ownership of and warehousing of, product.
Kind Regards
Wendy Nye