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Today’s show is a special “Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged” episode featuring Dr. Darin White, Founding Director, Sports Industry Program at Samford University, and Dr. Clif Eason, Director, Professional Sales Program at Samford.
Find Dr. White on LinkedIn. Find Dr. Eason on LinkedIn.
DR. WHITE’S TIP: “Relationships are never going to go out of style. No matter how much AI or technology we get, having the ability to build authentic, caring, servant-oriented relationships is everything.”
DR. EASON’S TIP: “We’ve built our curriculum not to teach students how to sell a product, but to teach students how to communicate effectively and persuasively, and hopefully build those skills of resilience and work ethic along the way.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I got Clif Eason and I got Darin White with Samford University. We’re going to be talking about your professional sales program, but we’re also going to get deep into your sports industry program and some of the things that you’re doing to prepare the young adults who go through that program for a career in sports sales, ticket sales with professional sports teams, with universities, whatever it might be. For people who listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcasts, whenever I get somebody on the show who knows anything about sports, and I’ve had professional baseball pitchers and elite basketball coaches, we could probably talk for hours, but we’re going to restrict this to about 25 some odd minutes. I’m excited.
Darin, why don’t you get us started here? Tell us a little bit about yourself and the sports industry program at Samford, and just get us going here. What percentage of students that go to Samford will pursue sports sales? Then we’ll bring Clif into the equation and he’ll talk about the overall sales program and the curriculum that you offer.
Darin White: Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama, we were the very first business school in the southeast to have a program in sports marketing and sports sales. We actually started the program way back in 2011. We call it our sports industry program. We have students that come from all over the country. We have 24 different states, for example, represented in this year’s freshman class that’s coming in. We love what we do. We have an extremely high placement rate. Over 90% of our students that graduate from the program end up working in sports, so that’s pretty remarkable.
Within the sports industry program, a segment of those students want to work in sales. A lot of them will end up working mostly in professional sales actually. We have a few that go college, but most of them go to work for NFL teams, NBA teams, MLB, wherever it may be. Those students partner with me in the sports program, and Clif, because he runs our sales program. We work together with those specific students that want to work in sports sales.
Fred Diamond: You’ll bring some clarity to that as we go through the call here. Clif, tell us about the sales program and what you offer students at Samford University.
Clif Eason: As Darin mentioned, we’ve had sales classes for a long time in the Brock School of Business, but we formalized that into a sales concentration, a specific sequence of four courses about seven or eight years ago. Since that time, we’ve grown the number of students who are taking that full course load. We have a lot of students who might just take one or two of the courses, and students who take the full complement of four courses. A lot of those are part of our sports marketing or sports business program as well.
The program has evolved over time. In fact, this is one of those evolution years for us where we’re making a pretty big tweak to the curriculum. But it’s been a fantastic way to connect with the business community and to bring more attention to Samford’s Brock School of Business and the high quality of students that we have here.
Fred Diamond: Darin, we talked about sports. Tell us about a career in sports marketing and sales. What are some of the opportunities? What are some of the high spots and what might be some of the challenges?
Darin White: Let’s say that you grow up playing sports and your dream is to work in sports. There’s no better way to break into sports than sales. Everyone says the hardest job to get in sports is the first job. What we’ve learned over the years is that about 75% of entry-level jobs in professional sports is actually in sales. Again, if you want to work in sports, if you want to work for the Atlanta Braves or the Philadelphia Eagles, or whatever it may be, your best route by far is to get a job in sales.
As a result, we have a lot of our students that come in, that’s what they do. They specialize in sales, they get a lot of experiential learning while they’re with us, and ultimately, they end up working in the world of sports, starting in sales. A lot of them stay in sales their entire career. Some of them move around, but a lot of people, if you look at the GMs of your pro sports franchises right now, you’d be shocked at how many of them started in sports in a sales function.
Fred Diamond: I know you have a pretty in-depth curriculum and things that happen from freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. If you don’t mind, take us through the general curriculum where a student would go as a freshman all the way through a senior.
Darin White: If you come in to Samford and you want to work in the world of sports, i.e., you want to be in our sports industry program, you have to apply during your senior year in high school. We have about a 30% to 35% acceptance rate to come into the program. You come in your freshman year and we’re going to have different courses for you to take right from the very beginning. As a freshman, we’re going to put you over in our Division I athletic department, and you’re going to work every single department over there, including ticket sales and sponsorship sales. You get exposed to both of those. Sophomore year, we’re going to have you in a business communications class where you’re going to learn all about that, you’re going to build your LinkedIn page, you’re going to do all of those things to get yourself set up.
Then your junior year, you’re actually taking the intro to sports marketing class. In that class, about a fourth of that class is dealing with sales. We read How to Win Friends and Influence People, for example. We will have speakers that’ll come in and talk that are professional sales executives with pro teams and different organizations. They’ll come in and speak and open up the world to the students in terms of all that’s there. Then if you’re still gung-ho and you want to do sales, then I actually turn them over to Clif. I’ll let Clif talk about the courses that he then takes them through after they get through that intro part with me.
Fred Diamond: Just a little clarity for people who are listening who may not know, what are things that you sell in professional collegiate sports?
Darin White: Basically, if you’re a sports organization, you’re selling everything. Professional sports organizations, of course, they sell tickets. Gate revenue used to be the number one revenue stream for sports organizations forever, up till about five years ago. Now, actually, the largest revenue stream is actually media rights. Someone’s got to sell those media rights. The number two largest revenue stream now is actually sponsorships. That’s your Coca-Colas, your Deltas, all that. Someone’s got to sell that. Someone has to sell all that inventory. A lot of people think about the advertising sign on the outfield in a baseball game, for example, but there’s so much more you can sell. Very innovative teams are always coming up with new inventory that they can sell. You’re selling tickets, you’re selling sponsorships, you’re selling the media rights, you’re selling licensed merchandise, that’s the fourth revenue stream. Bottom line is, if you’re going to work in sports, you better know how to sell, because that’s what those organizations are doing every single day.
Fred Diamond: I was listening to a baseball game recently and there was a double play, and the announcer said, “And today’s first double play was brought to you by-” Someone had to sell that, I guess, and some company.
Darin White: I was at a minor league baseball game recently, and there was an injury law firm that had been sold on the idea of having a partnership. What they sponsored was, is when the opposing team got hit by a pitch, say that ball hits the batter, then they would come on there and they go, “Ooh, that has to hurt. He needs to call blah, blah, blah injury lawyers.” It was very comical. Someone had to come up with that.
To work in the world of sports, you do, you need to be very creative. You need to be able to understand how do you take the sports fan and all the passion that they have, and how do we transfer that passion to the brand, in this case, and get people passionate about the brand in the same way they’re passionate about their team? That’s a lot harder set. It’s not just sticking a sign up on the outfield and hoping it works. There’s a lot more that goes into it than that, and that’s what we teach at Samford University.
Fred Diamond: One thing we’re going to be talking a little bit later on is about data-driven sponsorship decisions, and all that that gets brought in as well. Do you have to be an athlete to go into sports sales? What percentage of athletes, the young adults who are playing in sports, as compared to non-athletes? What have you seen?
Darin White: That’s one of the biggest changes. If you go back to the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, the front office of your typical pro team was all former coaches and players. That’s what they were. We actually have a mentorship partnership with the Atlanta Braves. We have 25 of their executives mentor our seniors every single year. I can tell you, the Braves have almost nobody that works in the front office that’s a former professional baseball player. They have a few, but not very many. Almost everybody that works in professional sports on the business side have a business degree. They have a sales background.
Same with our program. At Samford University, we have about 200 students in the program. About 10% to 15% of them play sports at Samford. The rest of them do not. Now, almost all of them played in high school, I will say that, but no, you do not need to play sports to work in that industry. Quite often, students will come in saying, “I played baseball my whole life, so I want to work in baseball,” but typically, you don’t end up working in the sport that you may have played. You may end up working in NASCAR or lacrosse or who knows, WWE, you never know. There are so many different ways to work in sports. You see a lot of people move from one league to the next. They might work for minor league baseball for four or five years, and then they jump over to the NFL, then they go over to NASCAR. That’s very common in the world of sports, on the business side of sports.
Fred Diamond: Also, those of us who watch ESPN, there’s always new sports being invented that are coming up that need sponsors. Clif, what are some of the benefits of getting a degree in sales? Darin mentioned a couple students apply to get into the sports program, but do many students come to Samford knowing that they’re going to go in professional sales?
Clif Eason: It’s actually a relatively small percentage of students who come to Samford thinking, “I’m going to be a professional salesperson.” Now, the ones who do that, and they’re the most enthusiastic about that, tend to come from families where one or both parents were in sales. They have firsthand understanding of all the benefits of being in sales. They come into it knowing about the flexibility and the compensation and the other things that draw people into sales careers. We have those students, which are great, but what I love to see as a professor is that student who really never had sales on their radar, and then they take a sales class and suddenly through the curriculum, through the guest speakers, they start to understand the opportunities that are there.
I’ve had a lot of students come into my office halfway through a semester and say, “Hey, you know what? I was planning to be an accountant, but after taking the sales class and learning more about what it is, I’m really passionate about this. I’m going to change my plans.” It’s really exciting to see those students who’ve never really considered sales get a new perspective on it, and really get fired up about that as a career opportunity.
Fred Diamond: Those of us who listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, and at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, sales is a profession. As I tell people, there’s no accountants, there’s no people in finance if sales don’t happen. Most of the companies that we work with, we’re talking professional selling. You might be selling to multiple people. You might be selling strategically over a long period of time, big ticket items, if you will. It’s not just one type of a transaction, if you will, where people might not understand, which truly goes into professional selling.
It’s interesting, we’re talking about sports, but we also talked before during the prep call about competitions. Competitions are a big part of the student experience. How do competitions play a role in the student experience? For people who don’t know what they are, explain what they are and what the value is to students.
Clif Eason: Sales competition in a nutshell is a short conversation, usually 15 to 20 minutes, between a student playing the role of a salesperson and a buyer, who is probably also a judge in this case, judging that student on that conversation between buyer and seller. It takes place in about 15 to 20 minutes typically. They’re going to be assessed on everything from the rapport building they do on the front end, to the questions, handling objections that get thrown at them, eventually closing the deal. It’s really trying to pull the entirety of a complex sales conversation into a shorter version that’s more manageable and replicable so that you can assess different students in that same context.
We do four to six sales competitions a year here at Samford. We travel all around the country to go to different sales competitions. These are outstanding ways for our students to get the immediate benefit of the networking that you get, because companies realize that some of the best students you’re going to find on a college campus are going into the sales programs. They go to sales competitions to get a first look at students that they may want to offer an internship or hire for a job. We’ve had a lot of students who’ve gone to sales competitions and gotten job offers on the spot after they performed in a sales competition.
The longer-term benefit of it, the benefit that extends beyond an internship or a job offer, is the signal that it provides to the marketplace. When that student goes into the job market and they say, “I’ve competed in a sales competition, and it’s there on my resume and my LinkedIn page,” that really separates them out from other people competing for that job, because not a lot of students will have done that. The feedback that I get from people who are hiring students, they rarely have concerns about, is a student smart enough? Does a student have the technical skills? Do they understand the concepts of accounting or marketing or entrepreneurship?
They’re concerned about communication skills. They’re concerned about professionalism. They’re concerned if a student can be resilient and handle tough situations correctly and tactfully. Those are the types of things that you learn in a sales program, and those are the types of things that you get assessed on in a sales competition. It’s a great way to signal to a prospective employer that I have invested myself in those things that you’re probably most concerned about.
Fred Diamond: Darin, anything you want to contribute there about competitions?
Darin White: I’ll brag on Clif. Clif is our sales coach. That’s what I like to call him. For my students that want to work in sports, they have the opportunity every year to work under Clif and then go to Atlanta to compete in the National Collegiate Sports Sales Competition at State Farm Arena. We’ve had students literally hired off the stage by the Hawks, the Philadelphia Flyers, we’ve had offers with the Dolphins, and on and on it goes. Clif is a rockstar coach when it comes to sales, and I love that my students get to work with him, those that want to go specifically into the sales track.
Beyond that competition, there’s another competition that I work with all of our students on, and it has a sales component to it. It’s the National Sports Forum. Recently they joined forces with the Sports Business Journal, which is like the Wall Street Journal of our industry. They have the top global Case Cup competition in sports business. We compete in that every year. We’re one of only 12 schools that gets into that competition. It’s a lot of fun. What the students do is they basically give them a real-world sports business problem to solve for a real-world organization. They have a week to come up with a solution, and then they’ve got to sell their solution to actual real industry executives. It doesn’t get any more real-world than that. I’ll brag a little bit.
Last year we actually finished number two globally. We won the US and we finished number two behind a school out of Australia. But even though that’s not a sales competition, they’re still using their sales skills in terms of presenting their concepts and their ideas and their strategies. We compete in a ton of competitions because Samford is all about experiential learning, in every way you can imagine. The competition is just one way that we do that.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, and Clif, you touched on this a little bit. I’m going to talk a little bit more about what employers are looking for specifically in the young adults who go through both of your programs, and what type of feedback do the employers give you. I like what you just said there a few moments ago, Darin, that at the competition, these companies, and there’s so much risk that goes into hiring the right people. That’s one of the reasons why we’re doing the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Podcast, is because companies that are members of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, that I run, have said to us one of the hardest things is finding great talent. That’s always been the challenge, is finding great talent. Even people not just coming out of universities, but 10, 15, 20 years into your career. Things happen. The world changes. You need to adapt in sales. It’s easy to sell when your product is in huge demand. It’s a challenge, of course, when the world flips and whatever might happen.
Give us some insights into what companies tell you that they’re looking for, reasons why they might jump on maybe a young student, young professional who’s a sophomore maybe, who did really well in a competition, or who’s performing really well in your program. Give us some insights into what you hear from companies that are looking to hire your young adults.
Clif Eason: I’m going to give you an answer that’s a little bit self-serving, but what I honestly hear more than anything else is concerns about whether or not a person has the maturity level and the resilience and the work ethic to succeed. They’re not concerned. They can see what a student’s GPA is. They know the students are smart, but when it comes to what some people might call soft skills or communication skills, their head space, that’s what people can get concerned about.
In our sales program, we’re very intentional about making it really a communications type of a course. As Darin mentioned, the competition that he just talked about was not a sales competition, but you have to have good selling skills and good communication skills as a part of that. We’ve built our curriculum not to teach students how to sell a product, but to teach students how to communicate effectively and persuasively, and hopefully build those skills of things like resilience and work ethic along the way.
Fred Diamond: I like what you just said there, because historically, you were talking before, Darin, about the ‘70s and ‘80s, whatever. We talk a lot about what used to be known as soft skills, communication, listening, empathy, emotional intelligence. We’ve made many arguments over the last couple years at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling that those truly are critical skills. The ability to be flexible, the ability to listen. We’re close to 800 episodes of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I used to ask the question to sales VPs and sales leaders, what is your superpower? Or what is your biggest strength? Listening came up all the time. I’m talking from men and women who work at IBM and Apple and Microsoft and Oracle, and companies like that. We believe that those are no longer demeaned as soft skills. Those are just as important as whatever the hard skills might be.
Clif Eason: They’re the skills that separate you from the competition if you’re looking for a job now. I’ve had a lot of accounting majors take my sales class, and they do that because they want a differentiator. They know they’re going to compete against other great students from other great universities, and everybody knows their debits and credits and how to depreciate an asset, but I had a student last year who was an accounting major, and she did a sales competition with us. She said, “In my job interviews, I spent most of my time talking about the sales competitions and the sales class that I took, because that’s what made me stand out from the rest of the people who were applying for those jobs.”
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about some of the current trends that you’re seeing. Darin, let’s talk about digital transformation and mobile-first ticketing, for example.
Darin White: These are some of the trends that we’re seeing in sports specifically. If you’re going to work in sports, you need to understand that we’ve moved to a day and age now where there are no longer any paper tickets. You may remember back in the day when you would get those paper tickets. Well, I just bought tickets last night for the upcoming college football season, a big game that I’m going to be going to. It’s all going to be digital. 100% of it’s digital. Organizations have moved that way, and there’s a lot of benefits to that.
Now, for the first time ever, we actually have a shot of knowing who’s actually in the stadium. Think about it, back in the day with paper tickets, they got resold 4, 5, 6 times. We have no idea who’s in the stadium on game day. Now we actually have a shot at knowing that. There’s a lot of advantages to the mobile digital direction that we’ve been moving.
Now, it’s challenging. We’ve worked for the last several years with the SEC, some of their events, their big events. For example, the SEC Football Championship game in Atlanta, we had 50 students work that event last year. We specifically were there evaluating the customer experience and how much struggle the customers were having because of the digital ticketing function, and then making suggestions and recommendations of what can be done to improve that. Interestingly, the SEC last year for the first time had facial recognition. There was one line where you go through and you could actually see your face and you could get in that way. you’re seeing a lot of that going on in sports. Sports tends to be really innovative, and when it comes to these things, they’re always on the cutting edge, and this is definitely the case when it comes to ticketing.
Fred Diamond: Clif, anything you want to say about that?
Clif Eason: I would say that in terms of innovations and the evolution of the sales industry, that we’re also trying to incorporate some of those virtual types of elements into sales now in sales education. Whereas 10 years ago in a typical sales course you would’ve had one-on-one role plays, either in the classroom or with your professor live, we still do those things, but now we’ve moved more things into a virtual environment. We’re doing role plays via Zoom or Teams calls because the same core skills are required, whether it’s in-person or virtual, but there’s some things that are different about having a conversation virtually than you have in person. We’re trying to teach those different things and different ways to communicate, because the way that you might send a message over text, a text message, it’s going to be different than the way you would do that in an email. That’s going to be different from the way you would do it in a phone call. We’re trying to get students comfortable selling and being themselves and expressing themselves effectively in different means.
Darin White: I was talking to the Senior Vice President of Marketing for an NBA team recently, and they were telling me they’re now using AI in the sales process. As you’re on the call talking with someone trying to sell them season ticket say, AI is in the background, listening to everything that’s going, feeding the sales rep information, saying, “Hey, maybe you ought to try this direction,” or, “Here comes an objection. This is the likely objection that’s about to happen, and here’s some solutions or ways around that.” I found that really fascinating that you’re literally using AI to help in the sales process that way.
Fred Diamond: It’s interesting. Right before you said that, Darin, I was saying to myself, we’re 22 minutes into the interview and we haven’t mentioned AI yet. We actually have another subset of the Sales Game Changers Podcast called the AI for Selling Effectiveness Podcast, where we get deep into topics like that. Clif, before I ask you both for anything else that we want to talk about, just to follow up with what Darin just said, data-driven. Data-Driven sponsorship decisions, for example, using AI, what are some things that you might want to tell us about that?
Clif Eason: If I could speak to the AI piece of that, we all know AI is disrupting things. It is really huge right now and companies that are not jumping aboard and trying to figure things out are going to fall behind on that. In the sales education program here at Samford, we’re really trying to utilize AI as much as we can. One way we use it is that we allow our students now to role play with an AI tool. There’s an avatar there that they’re talking to, like you and I are talking right now, and instead of just having me or another professor or a student to engage with, they’re engaging with AI, and that AI is going to throw out different objections each time they have that conversation. AI has been very helpful to us in giving our students more repetitions, more opportunities to engage in a real-time conversation.
Also, we’ve really embraced it in the classroom. I’m trying to teach students what I think are good techniques to use, from my experiences, and guest speakers do the same. But if they want to go to ChatGPT or Gemini and ask, “Here’s my situation, how would you address this objection?” If they get good advice from AI, go for it. That’s absolutely a great way to go about getting more perspectives, because ultimately, you as the student have to do it. You can get AI to give you the right answer, but you have to deliver it yourself. AI’s been a great tool for us to use with our students.
Fred Diamond: There’s a lot of competition when you’re selling sports, and it’s not just with the baseball team in town, or the hockey team, or the basketball team. Let’s just talk about sponsorships. You’re selling to corporations that are being invited to purchase many things. They have limited dollars to spend on those types of things. There’s events that are happening, there’s entertainment things that might be happening. At the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we want companies to sponsor our Women in Sales Leadership Conference and our award event and the various things that we do. There’s a lot of competition. It’s not just that I’m competing against, like I just said, if I’m on the football team, with the baseball team or the hockey team, or even the big university in town for that matter. Talk a little bit about data-driven sponsorship sales and how the sales professionals, the young adults that you’re teaching, have to learn that to be more successful.
Darin White: Data is driving everything in sports now. Of course, it all started with Moneyball. By the way, we were the very first school in the country to have a Moneyball program. How do you like that? That’s pretty cool. 2017. We also have the sports business analytics side of our program as well. We have one student, for example, just got a job with the Titans and he’s working in a business intelligence role. Another one’s at the PGA, doing the same work, strategy and analytics. Data is driving everything on the business side of sports organizations now.
Like in ticketing, for example, dynamic ticket pricing is a big, big deal now. That’s coming out of the airline industry where prices are going to fluctuate based on the modeling that we’re doing for the demand patterns. The idea of taking a stadium and understanding what the entire inventory is, understanding how to price differential pricing for different parts of the stadium, how do you maximize the revenue of that stadium for an event? Tons of analytics go into that. Tons and tons of it.
Same thing on the sponsorship side. When we’re selling sponsorships there’s a lot of data in terms of measuring and understanding the value of those sponsorships. A big part of our program is actually sports analytics students that come in wanting to work and help the sales team with all that data analytics in the background.
Fred Diamond: If I’m a corporation and I am approached by someone on a professional team in town, let’s say a professional baseball team, and they want to sell me some sponsorships for whatever it might be. You gave a good example before about the injury law firm, but let’s just say I’m a basic company in town, stores, some type of retail, if you will. What would be attractive to me if I’m the one writing the check to sponsor something at the local baseball stadium associated with the MLB team? What would be the one or two drivers that critically are in my mind as the buyer?
Darin White: When you’re selling sponsorships, if we’re representing the team and we’re trying to sell a sponsorship to a brand, first of all, we’ve got to understand what is the brand trying to achieve from this sale? It’s different for every single brand. You have to understand that to start with. Then you also need to understand that when it comes to sports, sports is not a rational. So much of selling is you’re selling an economic value rational, that side of the brain. Sports is emotional. You’re selling an emotional experience. It’s a completely different side of the brain. It’s a different process altogether when you’re selling. You got to understand that when you’re in that sales process.
To give you an example, we’re working with a pro soccer team in England this semester and we’re helping them understand the value of the front of jersey. Because that front of jersey is one of the most valuable assets you’re going to have if you’re a pro soccer team. They want to know, what is that worth? How much should we be getting for that real estate? Each year, the brand that we put there, what should we be charging for that?
One of the things that our students are working on right now is deep analytics, looking at a lot of different data sources to develop a pitch deck with data. Then we’re going to actually fly to England and present it to the commercial team over there. They’ll then take our data and go out and sell that sponsorship to different companies. Even in the sales process, you’ve got to understand data, you’ve got to understand how to use data as you go in to sell different sports sponsorships. That’s one of the cool things that we get to do at Samford.
Clif Eason: One of the good things about sports fans as an audience is that sports fans are an engaged audience. We as consumers have learned to tune out a lot of advertising, a lot of the noise, but a sports fan, a college sports fan, they can tell you who the athletic apparel sponsor is for their favorite football team. They can tell you if they’re selling Coke products or Pepsi products in the stadium. Sports fans care, and they know about those types of things, and they’re known to support sponsors. It’s a great place to implement your sponsorship program.
Fred Diamond: I want to thank Darin White and Clif Eason with Samford University. When we end every show, we ask for a specific action step that our listeners must take right now to be successful. You both have given us so many great ideas, so many things to think about, so many other ways that we can go. Just want to applaud you for the work that you’re doing to prepare the young adults who go to Samford University to help the sports teams and the other companies that they go work for be more effective. That’s one thing we continue to see over the evolution of the Office Hours Podcast. Darin, give us a specific action step that our listeners should take right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Darin White: We’ve been talking about data and AI and all that, yet I’m going to go a completely different direction. Relationships are never going to go out of style ever, no matter how much AI we get, no matter how much technology we get. Having the ability to build authentic, caring, servant-oriented relationships is everything. That’s one of the things that we work on really hard at Samford University, is really trying to develop that within all of our students, of having that attitude of servant leadership, of being authentic, being comfortable with who they are so they can be authentic and be confident in that. That’s what I would say. I know it’s a little different from what we’ve been talking about, but I’m a big believer in it. If you’re going to be successful in sales, or really almost anything, you just got to care about people. You need to genuinely care about people, and you need to be genuinely excited about who you are and bring authenticity to the table each and every day.
Fred Diamond: Clif, why don’t you bring us home here?
Clif Eason: I hope I’m not blending too far into product endorsement here, but I’m going to mention the company’s name, if that’s okay. All salespeople know that you need to keep improving your skillset. You often hear people saying, “Hey, I read this book, you need to read that. Listen to this podcast. People are listening to this.” But if you haven’t tried out LinkedIn Learning, that is a great resource to continue enhancing and honing your sales skills. Every week, there’s going to be more content out there from a very successful salesperson. Whether it’s your rapport building skills, your closing skills, or something in between, there’s new content out there all the time where people are giving great advice on how to continue getting better.
Fred Diamond: That’s great advice. I want to thank Clif Eason and Darin White with Samford University. This is the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo