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Today’s show featured an interview with Dawn Deeter, Director of the National Strategic Selling Institute at Kansas State University.
Find Dawn on LinkedIn.
DAWN’S TIP: “Always be honing your skills, because things are always changing. My dad taught math, and sometimes I think, “Boy, wouldn’t that be nice?” Because things don’t change. I’m always every semester updating my notes, because nothing is ever the same. You’ve just constantly got to be honing those skills and staying up to date on what’s happening.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. We’re talking to the Director of the National Strategic Selling Institute at Kansas State University. Dawn, I’m excited to talk to you. You came via introduction from our good friend, Lee Salz. That’s something that we’ve always been treated with. A lot of people have asked me, “Are there sales major programs at universities?” There’s over 5,000 marketing majors that people can get at colleges across the country, and not quite as many in the sales world. Actually, very, very few in comparison. We’ve gotten to know some people at the Sales Education Foundation and it’s something that we’re very intrigued with because you do a lot of great things.
We’re going to get deep today into what goes on for students to get a degree in professional selling at a major university. What are some of the things that you think about from a curriculum perspective? What are some of the things that employers would like to know as they’re hiring? I was going through your site and researching for today’s show. There are some really blue-chip companies that are doing some great recruiting at the Kansas State University. Let’s get deep into that. First off, it’s great to see you. Thanks for being on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself and give us your brief journey into how you got to KSU.
Dawn Deeter: I started my career actually as a buyer in the shoe industry. I did that for the first 10 years after college. As I was buying, I became a little bored and realizing that I didn’t think it was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I started working on my master’s degree and then ended up pursuing my PhD. I quit my job and went back to school full time. Then after my PhD I started on this journey, and when you’re doing your PhD, you pick a specialty. Since I had worked with so many salespeople over the years on the other side of the table, it made a lot of sense to me to teach sales. That was my area of specialty.
I started at Monmouth University in New Jersey. I was there about three years. Then I moved to Ohio University. Ohio had a big sales program, still do. While I was at Ohio, K-State had the idea to start a sales program, and they sent out letters, and I was the recipient of one of those letters. I applied and ended up out here to start this program from scratch. It’s been a very fun ride to do that.
Fred Diamond: Congratulations on your journey and for the success at the National Strategic Selling Institute. Give our listeners a perspective about what degrees you offer and what will students get if they go through the program?
Dawn Deeter: Students can earn either a certificate in professional strategic selling or a major in professional strategic selling. The certificate is exactly like a minor, and it’s a five-course sequence and it can be earned by any undergraduate major in the university. We see that as some of the real growth potential in our program. We’ve grown from 15 students in 2013 to 584 students today. We’ve had substantial growth and we’re seeing more and more interest outside the college of business, so students earning that certificate. Then the major is they major in business with the degree in professional strategic selling. They get a lot of additional coursework that the certificate students wouldn’t do.
The other thing that I think makes our program a little different, and this is probably true of some of the bigger sales programs across the country, is that we do a lot of extra professional development and extracurricular activities for our students that they don’t always get in other majors.
Fred Diamond: Give us some insights into the curriculum. What are some of the things you teach? I’m curious, are these professors that teach, or bringing people from industry? Give us a perspective on the classroom and what that looks like.
Dawn Deeter: We’re fortunate in that all our professors are from industry. They started in industry and then got the PhD and so forth. But we also have instructors that came from industry to also teach. We have eight faculty and staff right now working in our program. But we start with a fundamentals of professional selling course that teaches them the basic sales process. A lot of focus on asking questions, because they all come in thinking sales is about talking, and we have to break them of that habit early. Lots of questioning. Even though SPIN has been around for a long time, it’s easy for them to understand. We do a lot with SPIN and we introduce some other models, but a lot of time on questioning and then doing role plays in that class.
We take them then to a sales technology class where we teach them how to use different technologies to prospect. We use a CRM, we use some different tools that you can use to get data on prospects. That class I think has been really helpful because so many of them end up prospecting in a BDR role when they go out of college. We don’t tell them it’s prospecting because that tends to scare them a little bit. We call it sales technology, but it’s really a prospecting class in disguise.
Then from there they take a Salesforce leadership class, which we teach them how to coach and be coached. Typically, a lot of universities will have a sales management class, but I don’t think any of our students will graduate and become a sales manager. This coaching class, it teaches them how to coach by asking questions, but then also teaches them how to be the beneficiary of coaching, which then helps them as they graduate. We do a lot of personality assessments in that class too, so they can understand how to adapt their style.
From there, they might take my advanced selling class where we put on a benefit auction designed to give them a live sales experience. If they haven’t had an internship yet, they have to get on the phones or go in person and sell tickets, find items for the auction, sell sponsorships, and maintain quota. They have to manage their pipeline and they can come out of that class saying, “Hey, I had a quota of this. I exceeded it by this percent. I brought in this much cash that then went to scholarships.” Then I would say 95% of the students who take that class love it. There’s always 5% that don’t, but those are the ones that shouldn’t go into sales.
Fred Diamond: Do high school seniors apply to get into the institute? Do they go to KSU specifically to get into your institute, or they apply to KSU and then maybe halfway through their first year they decide, “Sales looks like a good major?” I’m just curious on the difference between that.
Dawn Deeter: They have to be a student to apply. They have to be physically here. But we are getting more people that come here to major in sales. We are seeing that more frequently. Students can apply the first semester of their freshman year and then go in that way. Sometimes they don’t find it till their junior year, or they don’t think it’s for them until their junior year. We accept freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. It’s hard to accept a senior because it’s too late to get the coursework. But we do accept a lot of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. We had more freshmen apply this year than we’ve ever had, because they have to apply to get in. I think we had 61 freshmen apply this fall, which was by far the largest group we’ve ever had.
Fred Diamond: I noticed in your curriculum, a big part of it is sales competitions. Explain what they are and what’s the value to the student?
Dawn Deeter: A sales competition is a role play where they compete against other students, basically. We’ll have a case from one of our partners where they learn about the product, they learn a little bit. We’re cutting back more and more on how much they find out about the person they’re meeting with to make them adapt during the role play.
They’ll come in and they’ll do a 15 or 20-minute role play. Sometimes there’s multiple rounds, sometimes it’s just one round, but they will be recorded. We’ll have industry people here judging them, and then those industry people will choose the winners and they can earn scholarship money. That’s an obvious benefit, but it also is just a chance for them to hone their skills. The more role plays they do, the more time they spend practicing, the better off they are. That’s the real benefit.
Then we also have a sales team that travels and competes against other universities. Those students, they are just so good. There are career fairs at all those competitions, and they get opportunities with other companies that maybe don’t travel to Kansas State. It’s just a really beneficial situation for the companies and the students.
Fred Diamond: When you say they’re really good, what would make a student really good? It’s interesting, in the very beginning you said a lot of them, they think about it’s their ability to speak. But as we talk about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast all the time, when I interview leaders from companies like Salesforce, Oracle, Hilton, et cetera, it’s all about the ability to listen. What makes someone good at a sales competition?
Dawn Deeter: That they realize that, and that they ask really good questions. The worst thing to me is if they follow a script and they sound really robotic and that they’re actually listening to the person and they’re asking questions based on what they hear. That’s what makes them really, really good.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, you’ve been there for what, 14 years now? 15 years?
Dawn Deeter: This is my 13th year.
Fred Diamond: Congratulations. What are some of the commonalities that you see of the students that excel? Students that just knock it out of the park, that get the highest grades, that are teeing themselves up for hopefully a great career in professional sales.
Dawn Deeter: I’m going to say something slightly controversial here, maybe, but I would say, because I teach that advanced selling class, and so they’re actually selling in my class. I would say the kids that excel are hungry. Just like any good salesperson, they are hungry. They like to win. They’re competitive and sometimes they have the best grades, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’ll come in and I’ll just be so surprised at how great they are, because I haven’t seen it previously, but they just knock it out of the park. That’s when I know. That’s when I really know that they’re just dedicated to developing that skill and doing what it takes to be successful. They’re all driven, they’re all competitive, and they’re fearless.
Fred Diamond: Those are good descriptions. Of course, the people we work with at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, they’re professionals. If you’re a professional, you need to be curious, you need to have the energy, you need to be interested in what the customer is up to.
You mentioned partners. You have a lot of companies that come to career fairs that you hold a couple times throughout the year. You just mentioned at the various competitions, there are career fairs and companies that are hiring people, they don’t want to make mistakes. There’s a lot of investment that goes into recruiting and then bringing someone in. Talk about from an employer perspective, you’ve spoken to hundreds, what are they looking for when they’re hiring a kid with a college degree in sales?
Dawn Deeter: They’re looking for those qualities of someone who’s not afraid to go out there and hustle and make calls and get uncomfortable asking things that make them uncomfortable, in the sense that picking up the phone makes them uncomfortable. It’s interesting that a lot of the recruiters now that are coming to recruit here are former students of ours who have been through the program and they know what they’re getting. But they have told us that they really appreciate the fact that the skills our students are coming out with, their work ethic- I just was told this the other day by one of our employers who hires here quite frequently that our bench is deep. We don’t just have one or two. We’ve got lots of them. I thought that was one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time.
Fred Diamond: I just spoke to someone the other day. I’m in Northern Virginia and I went to a University of Virginia event and they had a lot of kids there who worked for Pricewaterhouse, PwC. I asked one of the kids, “Why do you work for PwC?” They said, “Well, a lot of PwC graduates hire from UVA.” That makes a lot of sense.
What are some of the benefits of getting a degree in sales? Is it mainly you’re going to get a job right afterwards? There’s a lot of people looking for this great talent? We talk about it all the time. Every company needs great sales talent right now.
Dawn Deeter: That’s a lot of it. I think they’re attracted to some extent by the money, the freedom, and the fact that they can always get a job, that there’s so much demand for it. We have kids going out with four or five offers that it’s just amazing. It’s gratifying to see. It’s also very much a transformational degree. You watch them come in as freshmen, a little squirrelly, and you watch them leave a sales professional, it’s very gratifying.
Fred Diamond: We talked before about partners and companies coming to hire. If you were to approach a company that isn’t really involved with the KSU program, the National Strategic Selling Institute, and you wanted them to come to your career fair, what would be your pitch to them?
Dawn Deeter: I usually ask questions first to find out how much they’re offering, and that kind of stuff, and what they’re looking for. I want to know more because I want to place my students in really good companies too. I want to make sure I have a full understanding of what they do. But my pitch is these kids come out of these programs and we work with the Sales Education Foundation as well. They’ve done some research that these kids pay off faster. They pay off in 18 months instead of 30 months, and they hit the ground running. That’s what we hear consistently from our employers, that they get on the job and they know what to do from day one. That’s the real added value, that they’re going to start bringing in revenue faster than their peers.
Fred Diamond: You’ve been doing this for over a decade. Do you track career growth of the kids who’ve gone through this program and maybe how quickly they move into management and maybe even up the chain to the senior level?
Dawn Deeter: We have more anecdotal evidence than we do consistent evidence. But yes, even when I was at Ohio, teaching there, some of my students, the positions they’re in, I’m just blown away, because I knew them when they were squirrelly. Now they’re Global Vice Presidents and things of that nature. I think they do move through some of their training programs faster. We’ve had a few that actually skip the entry level and they move them right out into the field. That’s not the norm, but we see that happen from time to time. I think that skillset really sets them up for whatever they want to do.
Fred Diamond: I know you also, in the spring and the fall, I believe, you devote a whole week to sales week. Can you talk about that? When you do it and what some of the things are that you do throughout that week?
Dawn Deeter: Sales week, when I first got here, and it was literally just me trying to drum up business for this thing we were creating, it was my idea to introduce students to careers in sales. The idea was we would do something every day sales related to get students exposed to what sales was about. Today it’s grown into quite the week. We do it every fall in September and every spring in February. We will have a keynote speaker come in on one day. We’ll have a reception or dinner on the next day to do corporate partner networking. Then we have a two-day career fair in the fall and a single-day career fair in the spring. Then we’ll do different things.
This year in the spring, on a Thursday, we’re going to do a scientific sales small career fair and panel discussion. Sometimes we’ll do alumni panel discussions, recruiter discussions. Then Friday we do a sales competition with one of our corporate partners. Students have all kind of activities, and that’s really where all the action happens, starting that job search and internship search.
Fred Diamond: Generically, what types of companies would be recruiting from Kansas State University? Are they large multinational companies that have thousands of salespeople? Or are they like startups or maybe a hundred-person engineering firm that needs two people? Just give us a perspective on who does the recruiting.
Dawn Deeter: Most of our corporate partners are mid-size to larger companies. Just because making the investment in our program makes more sense, given the number that they’re hiring. I field calls from companies every week that are interested in hiring our students. The demand is out there, and industries for us cover the gamut in terms of from tech to servicing industrial or servicing meat processing plants, servicing financial services. There’s lots of different industries that we cover.
Fred Diamond: It makes so much sense for companies to do the recruiting at a university. One of the things that we talk about all the time on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is the shift in professional selling with the shift in customer engagement rising from the digital transformation, digital information now being accessible to them. SPIN selling, when it came out, it was very clear. There’s marketing, then there’s sales. Now, because customers have access, and with AI, again, we’re posting today’s interview in early 2025, AI has taken over a lot of the customer research. Talk about how your teaching has shifted due to the transformation in the sales industry.
Dawn Deeter: We’re constantly adjusting what we’re doing. We have to keep up on the technologies to make sure we know more than the students know. We are currently exploring AI. We’ve used some AI different coaching solutions and things for a while now, but trying to figure out how to include AI in the curriculum and have them use it in a way that’s productive and yet not have them use it in a way that cheats themselves out of the learning, if you know what I mean. It’s an interesting dynamic that we’re figuring out. Our curriculum is always shifting. We’re actually going to sit down and do another curriculum review this spring because we’ve got to stay on top of what needs to be taught in each class and where we need to reinforce which skill to make sure they’re getting what they need to achieve the most success once they graduate.
Fred Diamond: Looking at all your materials and seeing all the stuff that’s come out of it, it’s fascinating. We get that all the time. People say, “Well, how come colleges don’t teach sales?” Well, there are. I’m just curious, you probably know the answer without having to think about it, why do so few universities have a program like KSU as compared to other marketing or business related disciplines?
Dawn Deeter: I find this from time to time as I’m talking to people at different universities and finding out what’s going on, is that there was this notion that you didn’t need to have a college degree to go into sales. Even in our own college, I once heard someone say, “I don’t even know why we’re doing that,” because we don’t need to do that. They can just go out and do it. I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. You do not understand.” Today’s salesperson has to be a consultant. They have to understand the entire business and they’ve got to offer a value driven solution. That’s not just something you go wing. I think that is part of it, and the ivory tower notion that that’s not what we do. You will find that at most sales programs, almost all the professors have had industry experience in sales, or like me, being a buyer and working with salespeople, so that we tend to be a pragmatic bunch.
Fred Diamond: It’s fascinating what you’re doing. Before I ask you for your final action step, is there anything else you want to bring up that we haven’t discussed?
Dawn Deeter: I don’t think so. I just really appreciate the opportunity. We really feel like we’re doing something special in sales and we’re excited to share that information.
Fred Diamond: No, that’s great. The people who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, our whole mantra is that sales is a profession. If you’re a professional, what do you do? Well, you get educated. More than ever, even in the beginning of the career, I talk to young people about this all the time, or junior people into sales, you need to provide value for anybody that you’re talking to. It may change as you go up and down the scale per se, but customers, they’re not waiting for your call. You have to approach them with value. I like what you said before, the very first thing, a lot of times people think sales is about, “What do I got to do to sell you this pen?” type of a thing. Well, it’s not.
A customer isn’t interested in listening to you until you bring them value. If you can bring them stuff that’s going to help them improve their state in their industry, improve their customer service, improve their ability to solve problems that their customers may have, and it’s even gotten harder over the last couple years. One of the results of the pandemic is people are more aware of what their customer’s challenges and what their customers customer’s challenges are. The top sales professionals that we see are the ones that think of it from a professional perspective. I’m excited to talk to you. I’m excited to see all the success and congratulations on what you’ve built to this point at the National Strategic Selling Institute.
You’ve given us so many great ideas. Give us a final action step. If you were talking to a sales professional right now and you had to tell them one thing to go do, what would you tell them to do? What’s an action step they should do after listening to the show or reading today’s transcript?
Dawn Deeter: The main thing, and it builds on what we’ve been saying, is just always be honing your skills, because things are always changing. My dad taught math, and sometimes I think, “Boy, wouldn’t that be nice?” Because things don’t change. I’m always every semester updating my notes, because nothing is ever the same. You’ve just constantly got to be honing those skills and staying up to date on what’s happening.
Fred Diamond: That is a great point. It’s nice to hear that some of the people who graduate from your program do go into some leadership and management roles right away. That’s a nice testament to the curriculum and the way that your program prepares them for that. The only way you go up the chain is by being fresh on your skills as a sales professional and also as someone who is an advocate in your customer’s industry. You could provide the value for them.
I want to thank Dawn Deeter with Kansas State University. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
The money quote, IN MY HUMBLE OPINION: “The worst thing to me is if they follow a script and they sound really robotic, [but if instead of that] they’re actually listening to the person and they’re asking questions based on what they hear. That’s what makes them really, really good.”