More universities need to teach sales

29th November 2016 |   Journal Of Sales Transformation

More universities need to teach sales – that’s according to Frank Cespedes and Daniel Weinfurter writing in the Harvard Business Review.

“For decades, Sales and Academia remained worlds apart and the business world did fine. But Sales is changing, Academia is out of touch, and this is bad for business and the academy,” the authors write.

The argue that more than 50% of US college graduates, regardless of their majors, are likely to work in sales at some point; yet, while there are over 4,000 colleges in the country, fewer than 100 have sales programmes or courses. “Of the more than 170,000 students who earn MBAs annually, only a tiny fraction learn anything about sales.”

Yet almost 60% of job postings for wholesale and technical salespeople now require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree, according to analysts Burning Glass, while employers are spending an average of 41 days trying to fill sales jobs compared with 33 days for all other jobs.