This is the premiere episode of the new “Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Podcast.” The show will feature interviews with sales professors at Universities with a sales excellence programs.
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Today’s show was the premiere episode Dr. Terry Loe from Kennesaw State University. He is the founder of the National Collegiate Sales Competition.
Find Terry on LinkedIn.
TERRY’S TIP: “We’re not just teaching students how to sell—we’re helping them build meaningful careers with integrity, professionalism, and purpose.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: This is an Office Hours Sales Profs Unplugged show. Terry, this is a new show that we launched. We did a couple of interviews, and then we met you. We went to your conference. We went to the National Collegiate Sales Competition, which you founded in 1999. We’re going to be talking about that. Met a lot of professors. Your world is our world at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. You train kids to get into jobs in B2B sales. I went to your competition. We were so blown away by how professional these kids were. We’ll talk about that in detail.
I want to welcome you to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, our Office Hours Sales Profs Unplugged, and you’re retiring. As a matter of fact, this show will be posting in May of 2025, and if people are listening to this show after June, you will have been retired. I’m excited to talk to you about what you’ve been teaching for the last however many years, and things that you’ve learned, some passing remarks that you want to pass on to everybody who’s listening. First of all, congratulations on the successful career and on retiring.
Terry Loe: Thanks, Fred. I appreciate it. I appreciate anybody who is getting the word out, especially about university sales education. We’ve been fighting for years to gain recognition in the academic community. Most of the schools, most of the professors I’ve worked with over the last 30 plus years, we have constantly made the case that sales is a great profession. It’s a credible profession and one that belongs on a university campus. It’s been a little bit of a long trek. We’ve made a lot of headway and I’m excited about sharing some of that with you as you wish.
Fred Diamond: You had about 70 universities competing at the National Collegiate Sales Competition. I actually was honored to be a judge for some of the presentations. For people listening, the kids did a 20-minute role play. Gartner was your big sponsor, so they were selling Gartner services to a buyer. I tell you, man, even the kid who I ranked the lowest was great. These kids were professional, and these kids were thoughtful, and they were empathetic, and they didn’t pause, and they also gave the customer time to speak. I know there were things that were being measured, but it was truly a remarkable environment.
My partner, Gina Stracuzzi, who runs our Women in Sales Program, and I went down to Kennesaw State and we just loved the environment. Any B2B employer who was there watching these kids, interfacing with these kids, they were all professional. They were all well-mannered. They all looked the part. That’s what you need to be when you’re selling critical, important stuff to large B2B and B2G customers.
Terry Loe: We’ve had a great partnership with industry. It’s been a concerted effort on the part of the professors in academia. Probably 95% of us have been in sales. I was in industry for about 11 years. Then I got into academia in the early ‘90s. In our constant, I don’t know if struggle is the right word, but our agenda has been to bring on sales education, sales curriculum, and the sales profession on college universities. That competition was I think part of a bigger strategy to bring together all the professors. We all know each other. We’ve worked together in doing research. We have to publish.
That first competition I did in 1999, the goal was to bring the professors together, bring all the students together so I could actually watch somebody else’s student go through a sales call. But in addition to that bring in industry. A couple things happened with that. One, they lend credibility to what we’re doing, and what we’re doing in the classroom, in the curriculum, et cetera is really what’s going on in industry right now. They come in, they not only get to see our students and evaluate, give us feedback on the curriculum and what we’re teaching, but they also have an opportunity to recruit. The professors get together and talk to each other and learn how to better teach and develop the next generation of sales leaders. But also, the industry input, we have a lot of input from industries on what we’re teaching. Plus, obviously, they want to recruit and hire good salespeople.
Kids coming out of these programs over the years, and there’s been research, they have a 30% lower turnover rate and a 50% faster ramp up time. That’s a third-party research that came into that. It’s a very, very high-quality pool of candidates. Getting together in the ‘90s, and now we’ve been doing this for, this year was the 27th time that we’ve conducted the NCSC, and it’s just a great networking opportunity for companies, for professors, for the students who are involved. It’s a lot of sharing that goes on with the curriculum. How do you teach sales? What are some of the most effective means of engaging your clientele, your leads, your prospects, and what’s going to help the prospects the most?
Industry’s involved, the professors are involved, and all of the students obviously get to network with other students who they develop lifelong relationships with. The professors, we get to talk to each other and we get to connect with industry. There’s not just some theory that we’ve come up with. It’s something that obviously theory is a part of it, how does it actually work? But how does it apply in the real world? Role play is not exactly real world, but it’s as close as we can get to right now. Industry has supported it over the last 27 plus years and we’ve developed great relationships to the companies that have partnered with us.
Fred Diamond: I just want to follow up on something you said before. We’ve been saying for years at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, that there aren’t that many professional sales programs at universities. I like to use the stat, it may not be true, that there are 5,000 marketing degrees across the universities, and there’s about 70 to 100 universities that offer a sales program, a sales major, that have a Center for Professional Selling.
Without going into too much detail, and we don’t want to make this a political show, but give us an idea why that is. I’ll be honest with you, I liked what you were just saying, because when we were watching the students do their role plays, if any B2B company was there and watched, they would say, “I want that kid,” or, “I want that kid.” As a matter of fact, I actually was a customer of Gartner services, and some of these kids were better at showing the value than the Gartner sales reps that I’ve been pitched to in my careers. Why is that? Why is there a dearth of sales programs at universities?
Terry Loe: I have a theory, and I think over the last 30 plus years, I’ve gotten an idea of what academia is like. I’ll give you an anecdote. When I first did that sales competition in 1999, I was very fortunate, I had some really great companies that participated. There was only eight, but Xerox was one of them, Accenture was, Office Depot was. But the VP of North American Sales for Xerox, and his name was Bill Patterson, he came up to me about halfway through that competition. He said, “Terry, I’ll look at 100 resumes to find 4 to just interview.” He said, “Over those four, I might hire one. I might not.” He said, “I would hire half of these kids right now.”
I’d like to think we’re really brilliant and that we’re teaching just brilliant stuff, but we’re teaching basic sales. Most of the kids coming out of universities, most people who first get into sales, they don’t understand there’s a process. There’s some science behind it. How do people make purchasing decisions? Most people have no idea that it’s going to be very, very hard. They’re going to fail 7 or 8 times out of 10, and most people didn’t plan to get into sales. The kids coming out of these programs, we do lots of role plays. We are engaged with industry. They’re part of what we do. They’re in our classrooms. They are providing input into our curriculum, which I think is a brilliant way to, I didn’t invent it, but I think it’s a brilliant way to teach anybody coming out of sales, regardless of the profession that you go into.
After 30 something years into this, I’m still trying to figure academia out. Sales historically, although there’s been a lot of research beginning back in the early 1930s and 1940s, sales belonged in a trade school. It didn’t belong in an institute of higher learning. That’s part of what we’ve been fighting, we’ve been trying to push back against, is that sales is a profession. All the professions out there, law, medicine, engineering, architecture, they all started as trades or as apprenticeships. But when they got on a college campus, it provided a couple things.
One, it provided a body of knowledge of the research that we do on what are the best practices, what’s the most effective approaches to persuading people ethically to make decisions? Doing it with the best interest of the customer in mind, as well as the salesperson and the organization. Academia has looked at it not necessarily as a redheaded stepchild, but they’ve looked at it as a trade school. For a university to accept it on a college campus, you have to have a body of knowledge, a lot of research behind it, which over the years, again, research in sales has gone back to the 1930s, 1940s. We’ve developed a large body of knowledge with the theory and everything else that academia wants to look at, that has provided credibility for the profession for what we’re trying to do and accomplish. Academia is coming around.
When I got into academia in the 1990s, there were probably only 24, 25 schools that had standalone sales classes. Now, to correct a couple of numbers that you have there, now there’s about 185 to 189 schools in the US that have standalone sales courses. There’s another 14 or 15 schools in Europe, Canada. There’s actually a couple in Mexico, universities that have standalone sales classes. Right now, we started the University Sales Center Alliance in 2003, which is a byproduct from that national competition we started. We started the University Sales Center Alliance that would help other schools develop curriculum programs, degrees, minors, certificates, and sales centers on college campuses.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about some of the curriculum. Give us some of the insights into the curriculum that students go through in your program and some of these other programs. What are some of the things that you want to teach them? Curiously, who teaches them? Are they professors? Are they people who work and come to teach at night? I used to teach at the University of Phoenix. I used to teach MBA classes. I was a marketing professional, so I would teach the marketing classes every once in a while. Give us some of those insights.
Terry Loe: I like to tell our students when we get in there and start talking about sales and sales approaches, sales methodology, that I don’t make this stuff up. A lot of what we teach in our curriculum is from industry, but it is all supported by research. It’s not something somebody made up somewhere. It’s something that, you look at Zig Ziglar and some of the old guys who taught, who did training and they were in the sales world, they stumbled across a lot of the approaches that were the best approaches to it. Then we started doing research. The training that was done then, and early on way back, has proven to be based on the research and the empirical data that we’ve put together, that there are certain approaches that work better than others.
We have industry that are involved in our classes. Many of the universities have sales centers. We partner with a lot of the companies like Gartner and a lot of other companies who they’re very interested in making sure that their salespeople are affected. What’s taught in the classes is not something that’s invented. It’s something that’s based on the research that supports the methodologies and the approaches that industry uses right now.
Fred Diamond: You spoke a couple times about employers. It’s interesting, as we were talking before about academia, I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent here, but I would think that colleges and universities are now pressured to deliver value to their kids, to their students, especially as parents are footing the bill and student loans get so high, et cetera. Obviously, having your kid graduate and then go work at Gartner or go work at Schneider Electric or any of the companies that were there, is easily managing the return on the investment, if you will. I have a daughter, by the way, who graduated from college, and she went right to work at Hershey’s in sales. She’s managing a rep, and she texts me every day with questions and observations that she’s made. Speak about the employers there. What do they look for when they’re hiring a college student with a sales degree?
Terry Loe: I shared earlier that understanding the process, knowing it’s not going to be easy, and wanting to go into sales, and I’ve worked with the programs that we conduct here at Kennesaw State, and we put on in the National Collegiate Sales Competition. I’ve worked with thousands of HR people and employers. One of the big things they look for is just people who want to go into sales. A lot of the pharmaceutical companies and the medical device companies, they say you have to have three to five years of experience. The reason they want that is because they want someone who has shown they can be successful in sales, but also they figured out that, “Okay, sales is what I’m going to do.”
The kids come into these programs, one, we’ve tried to present sales as the profession that provides those opportunities. That’s a lifelong career. Most of it is companies who, they want people who want to go into sales. But if you can start parsing and looking at the details in that, and obviously you want someone who is interested in succeeding at a high level. They have a lot of drive and they want to make money, but they’re not just self-interested. Most of the people, and the kids over the last 10, 15, 20 years, they really want to make a difference. They’ve been taught all their lives that money is not the only thing, and that is very true. I’ve learned that over my career, that money is not the only thing. It’s a good driving force, it’s a good goal, but the biggest thing is making a difference. This is something I’ve picked up from other books and research I’ve looked at.
The most successful salespeople are the ones who are trying to make a meaningful difference in the lives of their customers. That’s something we teach our kids. I think that’s something that the companies are looking for, that I’m not just extrinsically motivated. I’m intrinsically motivated to do what’s going to be right. Obviously, I’m going to make money from it, but I also want my customers to do well economically. All the other customers that I want to improve their quality of life. I think a lot of companies have figured that out, that they need people who are, one, very motivated, they’re willing to once you get knocked down, and you’re going to do that in sales, you’re going to fail a lot, and being able to get back up on your feet and saying, “You know what? I am doing something that’s worthwhile. I’m doing something that’s going to impact society, et cetera. I’m going to impact these individual customers in a very positive way.”
Fred Diamond: We talk about that a lot at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, that the great sales professionals are the ones who are all about their customer mission. Now, it’s harder than ever to engage with your customers. It’s hard to get in the door. It’s hard to get them to respond to you. They can get a lot of the information that they need on the internet or ChatGPT or whatever it might be. The sales professionals who are really making a difference are the ones who are thinking about their customer down the road. “Hey, Mr. Customer, I know you may or may not be thinking about this, but this may help you serve your customer better, or may help you bring more value to what you’re offering to the community.”
I’m just curious, do the kids coming to KSU, to Kennesaw State University, who want to get into your program, what percentage of kids come to KSU knowing they want to go through the center of excellence, or how many kids just go to Kennesaw State, they get into the school, and then they’re like, “Gee, should I be a poli sci major or a sales major?” How does that look?
Terry Loe: I would say that majority of students that we get into our program, and we do have a sales degree, we’ve got about 200 students who are either a sales major or sales minor, the majority of them stumble on it. I wish I could have gone back and done my career differently because I would’ve been much more purposeful in determining, “Okay, what do I want to do with my life?” I don’t think that’s changed a great deal. But more and more we have seen students and parents who come to our program, they are doing research on the different schools that are out there. We have a percentage, it’s not a large percentage, who are coming to Kennesaw State because we actually have a sales degree.
Part of those are parents who are in sales or they’re actually a partner of ours and they are aware of our sales program and their children, whether they see that they have this gift of being able to communicate effectively with people, or they like people, or whatever it may be. They think, “Okay, my son, my daughter, may do very well in sales.” That’s how they find us. We have a percentage, it’s not a large percent, maybe 15% or 20% who are seeking us out.
Most kids are still just stumbling upon us. They go by our center, or they’ve been involved in some orientation. They talk to one of our students in the sales program. That’s probably the biggest recruiting tool that we have, is they talk to students who are in the program. Our students really enjoy the program because we teach them about sales, but we also help them understand what it takes to be very effective as a leader, being effective as a communicator, but also just being effective in being able to develop relationships. That’s good for anything you do. It doesn’t matter what career you go into.
Fred Diamond: Terry, congratulations on what you built with the competition and at the Kennesaw State University. Best of luck to you as you embark upon your next phase of life in retirement. Look forward to continuing to go to the conferences. Before I ask you for your final action step, I’m just curious, is there any major observations that you want to share, that you want to bring to our attention now that you’re moving into the retirement? I run the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, and we believe that sales is a profession, especially at the levels where we’re talking about. We service people who have made it their career to be in sales. The things that I saw at your competition in talking to the professors, or talking to as many kids as we could, is the passion that they had for this profession.
Sales now, it’s not, what do I got to do to get you to buy this pen? You’re never going to have the opportunity to do that. That’s not sales. Sales is, imagine your big sponsor, Gartner, they’re helping companies make big decisions about IT. They need information to help grow their business, tens if not twenties of hundreds of millions. The impact that sales has on the companies that are hiring them is so critical because of what they’re bringing to their customers. Seeing that nonstop was just really fascinating. I’m going to ask you for an action step, one thing people should do, but I’m just curious, you’re in academia now, what are some brilliant observations that you could share with us as you drift on to the next part of your career?
Terry Loe: I’m not sure if anybody’s ever described me as brilliant. I’ve done a couple of things that have caught on because I think they’re just good things to do. I think that the biggest takeaway and the thing that somebody, especially in your position, we cannot as academicians, we need partnerships. We need partnerships with industry. The more companies and the general community, because the general community, medicine, law, economics, architecture, they gained a lot of credibility when they got onto university campuses. When we were able to get sales curriculum, sales degrees on an academic campus, or a university campus, that built a lot of credibility to our profession. Letting people know of what we’re doing, letting industry know that we’re doing this, we helped grow the profession itself.
I think that was our original agenda, was to partner with industry, but also to let the general community know that you can do sales and be very, very ethical, have a great professional approach to what you’re doing. Help people, help industries, and help companies grow their organizations, help individuals have better quality of life. Those things are really what salespeople do. If I could quote Zig Ziglar, because this is something we actually have etched on our walls, is you can have everything you want out of life if you help enough other people get what they want out of life. Spreading the word, letting people know that this is a great profession, it’s an honorable profession, and it’s something that anybody can feel proud about being a part of.
Fred Diamond: As we like to wind down every Sales Game Changers Podcast, give us an action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, a lot of things people can implement. Give us a specific action step our listeners should take right now, after listening to the show or reading the transcript, to take their sales career to the next level.
Terry Loe: If you are, one, going to a university, if you’re young, which I’m not sure how many of your listeners are in their teens or in high school, find a university that teaches sales. But if you’re in industry, academia needs the support of industry. We need to partner with industry, one, for the resources, but also because we gain a lot of credibility. When we have an IBM, or a Gartner, or a FedEx, or UPS, or any of those companies that are partnered with our program, that help educate our students so that they’re better prepared to be good contributors to society but also good contributors to the organization. Partnerships with these different schools around the country and being engaged with them is going to be the biggest thing that a company industry can do to help us out.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Terry Loe for being on today’s Office Hours Sales Profs Unplugged Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo