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Today’s show is a special “Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged” episode featuring Chris Wilkey, Director of the Ball State University Center For Professional Selling.
Find Chris on LinkedIn.
CHRIS’ TIP: “Great salespeople don’t force the sale. They earn trust by showing they’re listening and willing to serve—even if it means saying, ‘You don’t need this.'”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: My name is Fred Diamond. I run the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. We kicked off this new show, the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged, for a couple of reasons. There’s what, Chris, about 75 universities would you say that offer a sales major? I know there’s about 200 per the Sales Education Foundation that have a class maybe. Maybe one class in the marketing department. I believe there’s maybe as many as a hundred, I’m not sure, that actually offer a sales degree. At the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we work with B2B and B2G, business to government, sales organizations to help them engage teams, elevate leaders, and empower success.
Chris, what you’re doing at Ball State, the Center for Professional Selling, and a number of the other universities that we’re also interviewing as part of the Sales Professors Unplugged show, you’re right in line with the customers that we work with, the companies that are hiring people at your universities, that want to hire these kids who are coming out of school with training, with an understanding of the enterprise sales process, that’s why we’re doing this show, that’s where we’re all there.
Today, I got Chris Wilkey. He’s with Ball State’s Center for Professional Selling. Chris, you’re all in. You actually did your undergrad. You now are running the show at Ball State. Tell us a little bit about yourself and give us your journey to Ball State’s Center for Professional Selling.
Chris Wilkey: If you look back, if you would’ve asked when I started school in 2009 that I would be back here as a professor running the Center for Professional Selling, I would’ve looked at you like a crazy person. That was never the game plan. I actually started school with a scholarship through the business college as part of their honors program. I really didn’t specifically know what I wanted to do. I went down the marketing path and I realized that I took a few sales classes and really liked them. The professors we had were very good, had some great skills, so I decided to shift over to the sales major at that point. At that time with Ball State, it was a two-class difference. There really wasn’t much difference between marketing and sales, so I just went ahead and got the degree in sales and then a degree in economics too. Economics for a challenge sale, because I thought that may be what I want to do.
At the time, I really wasn’t super involved with the Center for Professional Selling. I knew the professors, didn’t really do much else outside of that. I actually ended up, right after graduation, going to a company called Right On Interactive, selling a customer scoring system that would be put onto a CRM software. I worked there for about three months. Their sales cycle was about two years. I made a lot of cold calls, talked to a lot of people, and at the time, the company was just doing okay. They gave us the option, the entire sales staff, to either go completely to inside sales or to find another job.
I decided to leave the company at that point and then started my own digital marketing agency with a college roommate of mine. Through that, I did a lot of small business sales, talking to a lot of different companies and individuals, helping them with their websites, social media presence, anything that was in a digital environment. We thought we were going to be doing mostly social. It ended up being mostly websites and graphic design. Did that for about a year and a half.
Through my connections with the American Marketing Association, I got a call from somebody saying, “Hey, we may need some people to come in to help with something. Do you want to come in?” “Sure. We’ll have a chat.” About a week later, we had sold the business and joined a digital marketing agency and I was doing the digital sales side of it. We were working in the manufacturing industry selling digital ad services and social media and websites at that point.
Then I went over, liked the job, I hated the drive, shifted over to Ball State in the foundation land. I got to work with donors and see that sales process and was doing their digital marketing, shifted to Housing and Residence Life after that. Within that did everything under the marketing umbrella and started teaching on the side.
I started teaching a finance class and an econ class as an adjunct. Then finally COVID came around and I was in housing. That was not a great place to be at the time. Considering we were an auxiliary and self-funded, we were issuing refunds to everybody. The opportunity came up for me to join the marketing department as a faculty member and I said, “Sure, that sounds like a wonderful idea.” After all of that stuff happened, about a year and a half later, the sales center, the guy retired that was running it. It was being ran by an admin coordinator, and the admin coordinator put her two weeks in. They needed somebody and I was one of the only people available that had the background and understood what the classes were, had sales experience, and was willing to step in and take over that position.
Fred Diamond: Wow. It’s an interesting journey, but you got there. One thing that you said before in that description was the first place that you went to work had a two-year sales cycle. A lot of people don’t understand that when they’re in college. They think that sales is a phone call type of a thing. A lot of the companies that are members of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, and I’m pretty sure that a lot of the companies that are recruiting your kids, they are similar. It’s a long sales cycle, enterprise B2B, it’s not a phone call usually, it’s you got to talk to six, seven people. You got to think strategically, you got to understand budgets, you got to understand timing. That’s probably part of the curriculum. Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about your curriculum and the various classes that you offer as part of this program.
Chris Wilkey: We offer a major and a minor. Both of them have the similar classes, the major just has a few additional classes that get structured under that. We offer a series of five. The first one’s going to be an introduction to professional selling. That’s going to be what’s the profession, what the different types of sales are, how do you build relationships, what does a sales process look like? We use SPIN Selling in a lot of our classes as the initial basis to teach. Then we get them ramped up for a role play to actually sell a real product to a fake customer within the class. We’re really teaching them questioning, listening, and being able to problem solve and how do you read the room and read what the person is saying instead of just trying to say, “Hey, do you want this? You need this. You need this.” We’re teaching them more be a problem solver, more of that relational sales within that class.
After they do that, they move up to an advanced level selling course, which is the second course in the sequence. Within that we teach multiple role plays. They actually go out into the field with a professional and they go to an office visit. If they’re at an outside sales rep, they go and do a ride along with them for the day. Then their final role play they do in that class is at a competition that we host on campus, and they do it with the employers that are actually trying to hire them. They do a lot of other networking and other types of events throughout the semester with that class.
Then we teach a sales technology course. Within that course, they’re learning the basics of a CRM system, but we’ve switched it over the last few years and we’re pulling in more of lead gen on a digital side and then how you nurture that lead throughout. Then once you’re done, how do you convert that into an actual sale? It’s teaching them the steps along the way. We instituted a new competition at the end of it where they actually have to demo the product to a potential business. They have to understand the product well enough to be able to sell it. That’s a new thing we’ve been shifting through.
We also do a sales management course. They’re going to learn about leadership styles. They’re going to learn more about how to incentivize and manage people, and also how you divvy up territories and how do you do compensation and how do you do recruiting. All the stuff that we hope that once they graduate work for a few years, if they want to go the managerial route, they can step off and go that direction. If not, they at least understand what their boss is doing and why they’re doing it.
Then the last one is an experiential sales course. Within that they actually have to sell something. That’s the whole point of the course. This year we’re tailoring it with actually nonprofits to help the nonprofits in community raise some money. We’re going to pair up teams with nonprofits and have a little in-class competition with it. Then the team that does the best actually gets to give money that a donor has given to that nonprofit, plus the money that they raised. They used to sell Pacers tickets, they used to sell ads for events. They sell something, mostly on a cold call basis, so they get that experience under their belt.
Within that too, we also start prepping them for the job search. We bring a lot of industry professionals in, alums, partners that are trying to hire, and they come in and talk about their opportunities and help them get ready to launch off. If you are in the sales major, you’re also going to take a digital marketing class to learn about all the digital tools that are out there. You’re going to take a consumer behavior course, a market research course to get you a little bit into the numbers and how to use that research side of things. Then your traditional marketing principles course.
Fred Diamond: That is a great roster of classes that you offer. I like the fact that you offer the intro to sales management. I tell people all the time, when people ask me what is my advice, if I could give them one bit of advice on how to grow their sales or even other professional careers, I always say, “Get your boss promoted.” That’s one of the first things I say. If you can get your boss promoted, you’re doing the right things. You have someone who you could follow potentially. If you work for someone who is promotable, then you could learn some of those skills.
You mentioned sales competitions. You mentioned you have a couple of them actually, the demo competition, the role play competition. I’ve attended a couple of these and they’re quite fascinating to see an entire sales process brought down into 20 minutes, if you will. Tell our audience a little more about them. Why do you do them? What is the value for students in participating in these competitions?
Chris Wilkey: I’m laughing because yesterday, I’m in the middle of my doctoral degree in higher education, and my dissertation topic is sales competitions. I am all around in the space. We do internal and external competitions. The general idea behind it, if you do an internal one, I guess across everything, it’s a recruiting event, number one. That is what this is. The students are actively going into a situation that is learning based, but they also get the recruiting side of it. Basically, if we run an internal competition, our partners pay us and donate to the university to help us run the competition.
We give the students a role, say, “Hey, here’s who you are. Here’s who you’re selling to.” We work on it in class, do practices. Then they go and knock on a door and get 15 minutes to try to ask questions, build rapport, and then see if they can actually make the sale on the product. Every competition is a little bit different. Our internal ones, we have one where it’s just a roleplay that we’re using. The other one is that demo competition I was talking about.
The external ones, they have all different styles and different locations for it. We compete in the International Collegiate Sales Competition in Orlando. We compete in Selling with the Bulls in Tampa, the Invitational that’s at Toledo. We went out to Lawrence, Kansas to do one that we’re selling King’s Hawaiian rolls. We’ve sold chicken nuggets. We’ve sold Duquesne University an insurance with their Steel City Challenge. We do a bunch of them. The idea is, instead of having to go to each individual school to recruit, you can host one large event and the students get to compete. It’s really, if you look at the rubrics, we’re teaching them how to listen and to question.
We all understand that you’re not going to go and make a sale in 20 minutes. That’s very unlikely. But it’s, can you go into a room, make a connection with somebody, and then ask the right questions and actually listen to what they’re saying to be able to provide them a solution that could actually benefit their business? If they go along the way, they usually run into an objection or two, something crazy happens in the finals always, and they’re trying to just be put on their toes a little bit. The idea, really what we do is giving the students a high impact learning experience where all of a sudden they prepped, they go into the room, and then everything is ad lib past that, and it’s improv-ish, and they have to figure out how to do it and handle the unknown.
Fred Diamond: It’s fascinating. I’ve attended a couple of the role plays and I was a judge at a couple of them as well. It’s interesting, as you watch more and more of them, you see where they’re going. You see how trained you guys, and that’s one of the reasons why at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we’re doing a lot of these podcasts now, and we’re getting to know professors and directors like you who are running these programs because it fits in with exactly what the companies that are members of the IEPS are interested in.
I’ll be honest with you, I attended a role play where the kids were doing a 20-minute role play designed to sell a particular technology. I actually had been a customer, legitimately, not as a fake thing, but as a human being, I was a customer of this particular technology from the salespeople at this company a couple of times in my career. These kids were better. They were rehearsed for the thing, but like you just said, a couple curve balls are thrown in halfway and these kids are trained to know where they’re going, which led us to say, “If you’re companies that are hiring, you want to go to these university programs,” because the kids who make it through to get to on the stage, if you will, they’re so well-trained, they’re smart, they’re committed to being successful. It’s such an impressive process.
Just curious, do high school seniors apply to get into your major or do a lot of them, kids who are seniors or juniors, they know that they want to go into professional selling. Maybe they have a father or a mother or an uncle or something and they’ve discovered Ball State. Or is it like, “Hey, I want to go to Ball State and I have to determine my major. Sales sounds interesting.” Where’s the mix there usually?
Chris Wilkey: Usually, we have a few that a family member was in it, or a relative, or they had a buddy and they come in, and I can think of two on my sales team right now that are in the program that were like that. I also realized that most of it happens once they take that initial sales class. Within Ball State, if you’re a marketing major, you have to take a sales class. Everybody’s required to take at least that introduction to professional selling. We usually get a lot of converts out of that. That’s usually where we convert them out. Sales in the education space tends to have a little bit of a bad name. It’s not an issue, but it doesn’t sound what everybody wants to go do. It’s not like, “I’m going to go business analytics or entrepreneurship and innovation,” and they’re great programs, but the stats are 75% of students after college go into sales.
They end up seeing the job opportunity is there, the money’s there if they’re good at it, and once they’re exposed to the industry, they go, “I don’t have to be a used car salesman.” That’s the initial thing that all the students think sales is. There’s actually research articles out there that are all about that, how do you shift the perception of sales to those high school and those college level students, and Ball State’s doing something unique. It’s not official yet. It’ll be official in another year or two, but we’re probably going to make every student in the business college take a sales course. It’s going to be part of the business core curriculum, because at any point in your life, regardless of if you go into sales, you’re going to sell either an idea yourself or a product at some point in your life.
You talk to our alums that may have gone in the finance or accounting space and they go, “If you want to be a partner, you got to bring in business.” It’s all in that sales aspect. We’re really trying to get that integrated throughout most of it within the business college.
Fred Diamond: As we always say, if nothing gets sold, then there’s no reason to have people in logistics, operations, accounting, or finance, as we like to say, nothing happens until something gets sold. I’m just curious, you mentioned that a lot of companies will sponsor or partner with you for these competitions. What do employers look for when they’re hiring a college student with a sales degree?
Chris Wilkey: That’s a hard question to answer because everybody is different. Every single one of my recruiters recruits differently for what they’re looking for. We have a lot of students that are Midwest nice. They want someone you can go grab a beer with. They want somebody you can go and have a chat with, and you have a relationship with them. Some want the person that is going to go out and is the most competitive person out there. Some of my recruiters look for those who want to make a lot of money and they want to find a great incentive structure for it.
The most common things I hear are they need grit. They need to be able to be self-directed in some capacity. They need to be a great listener and ask amazing questions. Then they also need to be able to connect all the dots. I think that’s where we try to teach them along the way. When they hire a student with a sales degree, they want them to be a year to two years ahead of what that person they hire with a non-sales degree is so they hit the ground running that much quicker.
What we find is, if you have these training programs, there’s one in particular down in Jasper, Indiana, they do engines and motors, Jasper Engines & Transmissions. What they do is they have a year and a half long training program. Our students get through it in six to nine months. Because they already have what they’re trying to teach them, it speeds their ability to hit the ground running and start making those sales quicker than anybody else.
Fred Diamond: How has the business community responded to this? Is your phone ringing off the hook with companies that have understood this? It’s interesting. We like to say that there are 5,000 marketing degree programs at universities. Like we mentioned at the forefront of today’s show, at the most, there’s a hundred, if you will, so not every company is aware. A lot of people, when I talk to them about this, or when I post a Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged show, people will, even today, we’re doing today’s interview in May of 2025, will say to me, “Gee, I didn’t even realize that there are well-known great universities that are doing this program that are sending kids to great companies.” Where are we with the business and academic marriage?
Chris Wilkey: What tends to happen in our space, Ball State’s had their sales center, I think we’re 27 years old. We’ve been around for a while. I just talked with an alum two weeks ago, and they’re like, “I didn’t know we had a program.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m the same age as you. I was in the program. We had it at that time.” It’s weird because the way we usually get our partners that sponsor us, because we had somebody get hired by them, they did so well, and they went, “Where’d you learn to do that?” They go, “Well, I got taught that at Ball State in the sales course.” Then they come in and they’re like, “We want more people like that.” We have an international fashion house. That’s the exact story. Their best salesperson they had over the last 15 years was a Ball State grad through professional selling.
Of course, we’re going to go regionally. There are students that go to Ball State tend to stay in Indiana or nearby neighboring states. We get a lot of those companies that are looking for students, but there are national companies all across the nation that have great entry level programs, and they start partnering up with the universities to try to recruit from them. We have 21 partners, and we’re at the point now where we have to cap that soon, because if we get any more, we’re not going to have the capacity or the number of students to be able to turn over to them to say, “Here’s your pick,” and we want to be able to provide the students with a really good opportunity to connect with the companies.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great way you just described that. If a company’s hiring, again, we’re doing today’s interview in 2025, they don’t have a year, two, three years for the new hire, especially out of college, to really grow. I tell people, they’ve heard this on the podcast before, I started my career at Apple Computer. We had a year’s worth of training before we were allowed to do anything. You never see that anymore. Maybe there’s a couple programs out there for a kid, they make them sign an agreement type of a thing. But for the most part, they want the kid to be up and running. They want all their new employees to be up and running. By the way, I didn’t mention this, Ball State, tell us where you’re located for people who don’t know.
Chris Wilkey: We’re in Indiana. If you listen to David Letterman, we’re the Harvard of Muncie. We’re about an hour and 15 minutes northeast of Indianapolis, so about an hour south of Fort Wayne.
Fred Diamond: What expectations do the kids have for their sales career? Where do they expect this degree to take them?
Chris Wilkey: Well, it’s going to vary on each student. A lot of them want it to get them an entry level job at a company they really want to work for. The crazy part is most students don’t know what they want to do. That’s straight up. I had one student last year, she swore to me, “I never want to do sales. I never want to do sales.” She was in a sales class. She did not want to be in there. She hated it. I ran into her about a month ago, and she was so excited because she got a job in sales. I’m like, “Told you you’ll most likely end up going through that.”
The students, some of them that are really motivated, they’re going and eyeing specific companies and they’re trying to figure out how I get to this one. When they get out there, all we really have the expectation of is that they are above what you’d get from any place else. We want them to hit the ground running and be skilled enough to go, “Wow.” They get it. I think the best thing is we try to teach them the little things that make a difference, of how you build relationships, you follow up, you do what you say, you under promise and overperform on everything. You make yourself look as good as you possibly can so that when you come back, you can either donate money to us, you can make a bunch of money yourself, or your company wants to hire more from us down the road.
Fred Diamond: I run the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. The reason I mention it is professional. You’re teaching kids to be professionals. You’re not teaching them how to manipulate people with sales at the B2B and B2G level, and it’s not about being salesy. At the end of the day, it’s about servicing your customer. As a professional, what are the things that you do? I like the way you just described that, you need to present, you need to be presentable. One thing, I’ve gone to a bunch of these competitions and I’m just blown away at how presentable these kids are. They have the energy, they have to be smart. If you’re selling a technology solution to a CIO or a director of IT, or a CTO, there’s a lot of things you need to know. It’s not just about the bits and the bites. It’s about usage. It’s about where the customer is going, where the customers customer’s industry is going. The people who are successful in selling for companies like these, it’s not about getting the customer to do something they don’t want to do. It’s about helping them understand, helping them see where their market’s going.
In line with that, I’m just curious, from a curriculum perspective, what are some of the trends shaping the curriculum? We talk a lot about the trends of professional selling with the shift in customer engagement because of the rise of digital information being accessible to them. Even now more so with the GPTs out there where a customer can type in and get within 30 seconds everything that they need to know about a product or a solution that they may be going after. Talk about how your teaching has shifted because of that.
Chris Wilkey: You mentioned something of not doing anything manipulative. We actually do an assignment in one of the classes where I don’t need to buy the product, and we see if the students can figure that out. Instead of pushing to sell something, we basically give them that, “I don’t actually need this.” The students only pass that assignment when they say, “Hey, you know what? You don’t need this. It’s not for you,” and they move along and then we do a discussion after that in class. There’s no magical techniques of how to close the sale. It’s, can you help them? By the end, you aren’t selling it. They’re selling it to themselves because they need the problem fixed.
But then to address your question on the AI and technology integrated in, we’ve actually started using some AI tools to help prep the students. What we’re doing is we’re not shying away from it, because let’s face it, I’m doing my dissertation right now, if I can get something transcribed in one minute that would take me three days, I’m going to do it in one minute. That’s just a smarter play. HubSpot is one of the softwares we use in the classroom on the CRM side of things. AI is intertwined through all of that. You can put a business card and it’s going to fill in the spaces, it’s going to summarize your notes from your meeting, it’s going to do it. What we teach them to do is how to use it ethically and how to use it to maximize their time. It’s not just a, “Here you go, I need you to write me an email.” It’s how do you engineer a prompt correctly to get an email that is tailored to what you’re doing.
You can use it for editing, you can use it for recording, scheduling reminders. How do you make your job and your life a little bit easier and make it so that you seem like you’re way more on top of it than anybody else. We also do the role playing. What we do with it is students always struggle with how to ask questions. We have chats back and forth, and we have them start putting questions in, getting answers and going, “How could I phrase that question better?” Or we use Copient.ai to do practice role plays. Through that, the students are getting to practice five to seven times on a role play before they go into a room, so they get and understand the type of questions that we’re looking for. The AI tools fed the information, and if you ask the right questions, you get it. It’s all about figuring out how to tailor that to the student.
Then when we bring the industry professionals in, they talk about how they’re using the technology. We’ve shied away from, there’s no more tests in my classes. We don’t do long written projects. It’s, how can I get you to experience something and understand it a little bit better? It’s more of that experiential learning and that immersion that we try to do.
Fred Diamond: I like the first answer about the project where you have the salespeople getting to the point where they see that this really isn’t a prospect. One of the interesting things with B2B sales is the customer’s going to be in it for the long term. It’s very rare for customers, especially in IT or finance, to go jump from place to place. A lot of times when they have those jobs, they want to hold onto those jobs, and they might be at a place for 20, 30 years. If you’re a sales professional selling the technology, maybe a complimentary technology, you may encounter that customer over the course of your career for 20, 30 years. We talk to sales leaders all the time who have been selling the same thing or maybe something different or something new, and they’ve been in relationships. I think that’s a great process.
I want to thank Chris Wilkey with Ball State University. This was great. Best of luck on your dissertation. If people are listening to this sometime in the future, hopefully you’ll have achieved that goal. Good luck to you on that.
Usually, our final question is, give us an action step, something specific listeners can do to take their sales career to the next level. I’m going to just open it up to you, if there’s anything else that you want to share that you haven’t shared that you would like our listeners to understand, please give us that right now.
Chris Wilkey: What we’re doing right now in my online class over the summer, this week’s listening week. Go have a conversation with somebody and try not to respond. Try to listen. Just listen to what they’re actually saying. We challenge the students to do that and then they reflect over it. Record yourself and talk about what they actually said, and notice if you’re trying to put something out there before they ever say it, and then stop that. Because if you are able to actually just start listening to people and figuring out what they need, that’s what sales really is. I love to do it.
Great story. I went down to Tampa for a conference and I was at a bar. It was a Columbia restaurant down there, sat at the bar, and all these people were in tuxes. I’m sitting there, “What the heck is going on?” I’m in flip flops and shorts. I asked the bartender, I said, “Hey, am I allowed in here? What’s going on?” I could hear these three ladies come up and they were talking and they were having a great time. I said, “Hey, miss, would you like to take my seat?” They were trying to find seats together and they had two next to me, they needed a third. I said, “I’ll be happy to move.” They’re like, “No, no, no, you have food.” I said, “No, I’m good. I’ll move.”
Come to find out, that was a person who had worked there for 45 years, and the president of the company was sitting over there. They comped my entire meal, we talked about bourbon for about an hour. We came back and did a private event there all because I was just listening to what they were saying and said, “Hey, you need this more than I do. Let’s do this.” It was never about making a sale. I had no idea anybody was watching. I guess it was their big holiday party that they were celebrating and they were honoring their employees. The guy just said, “I’ve never seen anybody just stand up before.” I said, “Well, all they did was ask,” and they didn’t even realize they were asking. Listening is really important for people and most people don’t take the time to do it.
Fred Diamond: In the early days of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, we’re well over 750 shows, a question I would ask is, and I would interview typically VPs of B2B sales or B2G, business to government, sales organizations. I would say, “Tell us something you’re great at. VP of sales, feel free to boast.” People would always say, “I’m a great listener.” They would say things like you have two ears, one mouth. Use them in that order. Or the 66% solution, two ears, one mouth.
Then I started saying, “Well, give us some advice. How do you become a better listener?” Then there were things like prepare better questions. Come to the table with the right questions. That’s not, tell me your pain. Now you got to get deeper into that. It’s understanding where their industry is going and genuinely having the curiosity to listen to what they say. But I think that’s a great thing.
A lot of times, especially new salespeople, and I see this all the time, because we get invited to watch not just the role plays, but a lot of our member companies will invite us to watch, a lot of times they’ll videotape or audio tape their SDR or early sales professionals’ conversations. You could see that the sales professional is chomping at the bit to get everything in in the 20 minutes that the customer has allocated. They spend so much time on that that the customer doesn’t have any time to say anything. We like to say if the customer’s doing 95% of the speaking, then it’s a successful call. Of course, demos, it should be a different angle there. But that’s a great bit of advice. I hope the kids take something away from that this summer.
Chris Wilkey, I want to thank you for being on the show. Congratulations for the success at Ball State University. My name is Fred Diamond and this is Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo