Journal of Marketing Education

In this article, we review the recent expansion within the sales education literature from five primary journals and the business literature at large. The five primary journals are the Journal of Marketing Education, Marketing Education Review, Journal for the Advancement of Marketing Education, Journal of Education for Business, and the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Of the 119 identified articles published in the past 15 years, experiential learning, career development, and assessment were the three most prominent topics. Of these, 69% were published after the Cummins et al. review article “A Critical Review of the Literature for Sales Educator,” which was published in Journal of Marketing Education as a means of expanding sales education research. Future research opportunities in sales education are offered with suggested hypotheses for investigation. A reference table of classroom innovations is provided as an easy guide to instructors seeking vetted pedagogical enhancements.

Based on the industry need to hire qualified salespeople, a call to expand sales education at universities has been continuously echoed. This article provides an updated overview of the sales education landscape in the United States and offers insight into both the curriculum offerings and the practices of marketing educators who teach sales courses at colleges and universities with sales programs. This research assesses the current state of sales education by critically evaluating recently published sales education literature, reviewing university websites of the University Sales Center Alliance members located in the United States, surveying professors who are members of the Sales Educators Foundation and/or the University Sales Center Alliance, and examining sales course syllabi of sales faculty. This article describes the findings of these research investigations. Understanding the pedagogical choices, teaching practices and perspectives on curriculum of the educators of leading sales programs is valuable to those educators contemplating launching a sales program at their respective universities.

More universities are teaching sales to meet growing employer demand, thereby increasing the prominence of university sales centers. Sales center directors tend to be a PhD or a non-PhD faculty member. While there are advantages to both backgrounds, we know little about how sales center directors view their roles and what behaviors they enact to satisfy demands. The purpose of this research is to investigate the activities of sales center directors and gain deeper insights into their thought worlds. Leveraging job demands–resources theory and a work-based identity perspective, we posit that sales center directors with versus without a PhD will emphasize different job demands. Using a web survey to examine sales center director behaviors and in-depth interviews to explore their thought worlds, we find twice as many sales center directors with a PhD spend time on research activities than their non-PhD counterparts. Sales center directors with a PhD spend twice as much time on research activities than their non-PhD counterparts. Sales center directors without a PhD spend a quarter of their time coaching individual students while those with a PhD express strong desire to impact the sales profession, suggesting that their attention is broader than coaching students.

Job opportunities in the field of professional sales are fast growing, with sales organizations striving to hire sales students who are prepared to embark on a sales career. Unfortunately, university business programs and faculty often lack the resources necessary to thoroughly prepare students for a sales career, or to expose them to career opportunities within their local market. This research posits an intracollegiate sales competition as a tool to benefit students, corporate partners, business schools, and faculty, and in doing so, provides considerations and best practices for initiating a competition. The findings of two additional studies provide empirical evidence suggesting that after competing in a sales competition, students have an increased perception of sales careers, an enhanced knowledge of the sales process, and an increased intent to pursue a sales career after graduation. Furthermore, student competitors’ perceived preparedness for a sales career fully mediates their intent to pursue one. Additionally, competitors had better learning outcomes than students completing a traditional in-class role-play activity.

Since their inception, university sales competitions have been key learning and educational components of university sales education. Over the past two decades, the oldest and one of the largest sales competitions in the United States has been held in a face-to-face format. However, due to the educational environment created from the COVID-19 pandemic, this competition was forced to convert to a virtual format over a 16-day period. This research outlines the steps taken to convert this event to virtual format and presents insights for other universities endeavoring to produce virtual sales competition events. Finally, research implications and direction for future research are presented.

Technology usage is widespread across most fields of business. In sales, “back-end” technologies, such as customer relationship management or salesforce automation, offer a foundation for effective and efficient “front-line” interactions in the personal selling process (PSP). In many instances, “front-line” technology applications have replaced traditional, hard-copy sales support materials. However, do these technology-based sales support materials (TSSM) offer meaningful utility in the PSP? Using a randomized field experiment, the current study answers the question through examining the use of TSSM within the PSP and across genders. Results indicate that the use of TSSM offers utility during the presentation and objection-handling stages of the PSP. There are no gender effects associated with technology use. The study offers educators pedagogical recommendations regarding the use of TSSM within the PSP. The study also validates the PSP scale.

This article examines whether educators’ use of selling activities (selling-to-teach) based on the seminal sales process can improve perceived and actual learning. By viewing the teaching interaction as a sales situation, the authors suggest professors can help students realize their need for learning just as a salesperson helps a prospect realize a need for a product or service. Leveraging the theoretical communication commonalities in teaching and selling, we posit that selling-to-teach will positively affect perceived and actual learning. Using a mixed-methods approach through two studies, we find qualitative and quantitative (n=616) support for selling-to-teach. Instead of examining pedagogy in sales, we suggest that sales is a pedagogy to be used across disciplines. This fuller examination unveils the sales process as a pedagogical tool to empower instructors and to maximize the student learning experience through different selling steps used as teaching method.

It is widely known that students have preconceptions regarding salespeople and that these preconceptions are modified by participation in sales classes. It is also known that experiential sales class activities are more effective at increasing student interest in pursuing a sales career than traditional lecture style lessons. Less explored is the source of student preconceptions regarding sales and an associated model to explain the observed classroom pedagogy phenomena. Moreover, despite the focus on measuring student attitudes toward sales, there is limited research that presents practical methods for sales educators to introduce sales concepts to students. To address this knowledge gap, this article presents the findings from a quantitative analysis of student experiences regarding sales, a model for interpreting these experiences as it relates to sales career interest, and a novel process for developing the introductory and advanced sales classes at a large metropolitan university.

Universities increasingly make their sales curriculum available for groups other than dedicated sales students. This study investigates engineering students’ drivers that predict interest in sales certification, as well as drivers that predict actual choice for a sales curriculum. We focus on engineering students (n = 204) and contrast our findings with business students (n = 179). Based on social cognitive theory, we investigate how personality (Big Five personality factors and Trait Competitiveness), ability (ACT, GPA, and Academic Self-Efficacy), and social factors (role models, and perception of salespersons) affect interest and choice. Our results indicate that although the regression models explain a reasonable amount of variance, models that work for business students do not work equally well for engineering students. Also, our analysis reveals that factors that explain interest do not explain actual choice, and vice versa. In addition, we uncover subtle gender difference when it comes to actual choice for a sales curriculum. Finally, the benefits that engineering students perceive of sales certification differ primarily based on whether students are taking sales classes, and not on degree sought.