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Today’s show is a special “Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged” episode featuring Thomas Hosmanek, Director, St. Ambrose University Sales Center.
Find Thomas on LinkedIn.
THOMAS” TIP: “Whatever industry you’re in, the thing that’s going to differentiate you is you—and your level of service.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited. We have Thomas Hosmanek from St. Ambrose University. One of the reasons why we’re doing these shows, Thomas, is the students who are going through programs such as yours at St. Ambrose University, they’re coming out ready to go. Someone gave me the stat recently that a company will save as much as $200,000 on trading and onboarding costs by bringing on someone who has gotten a professional selling degree at a university such as yours, St. Ambrose University. Why don’t you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you and share your journey to St. Ambrose?
Thomas Hosmanek: My journey, like much of life, there’s not a straight line between point A and point B, but after I graduated from college myself, I worked in broadcasting for five years. I was working at a radio station. A friend of mine left, he went into a sales job with a financial services, financial planning company called Modern Woodmen of America, which has its national headquarters in the Quad Cities, where I am. He tried to recruit me, and he said, “Hey, you ought to come and do this.”
I said, “I don’t want to do this.”
He says, “Well, you don’t know what this is.”
He was right. About a year later, I was working with him at Modern Woodmen, where I actually spent the next 32 years of my life. I was a sales rep, I was a mid-level manager, and I was a top-line manager. I was blessed to do really well, retired early, and was looking for things to do.
I had some friends that were running nonprofits, small nonprofits. The one thing that happens in nonprofits is that people have big hearts, but they don’t have big heads in the sense of understanding business, and I thought I would merge the two. I went to the University of Iowa and got a certificate in nonprofit management and started helping some of my friends.
What I didn’t count on, being back in the classroom, was that I really liked it, great energy, great vibe. I said, “Wow, I’d like to do this. I’d like to teach. What do I need to do?” They said, “Get a Master’s.” I got an MBA. Right as I finished my MBA, St. Ambrose was starting a sales program, just a couple of months old. I graduated and probably a couple weeks later, I was in the classroom teaching as an adjunct professor. Now actually, I had several decades of training and working with people. It’s just the transition was a lot smoother than it might be in other cases. Then over the course of the next eight years, I rose to where I am now as director of the sales program. I both teach and then plan the trajectory of what we do in classes and what we do out of classes.
Fred Diamond: For people who don’t know St. Ambrose University, give us a little background. Where are you located? How many students, what the school is known for? Then I want you to talk to us about your Bachelor of Business Administration and Business Sales degree, and what are some specifics that you cover in the program?
Thomas Hosmanek: St. Ambrose University is located in Davenport, Iowa. If you look at a map, we’re right on the Mississippi River area called the Quad Cities, which is composed of five cities. Quint Cities never caught on, so they call it Quad Cities. St. Ambrose right now is about 2,500 students. We’re in the process of combining with another university. We’ll have about 4,500 after that combination is completed. We have three colleges, a College of Healthcare, which is really good. A lot of OT and PT type things. College of Business, in which we’re located, and then the College of Arts and Sciences.
We’re unique, in Iowa at least, we have the only sales major in the state. Other schools have some certificate programs or some minors, things like that, but we’re the only major. What we cover in the program, to give you a little perspective, most universities that have a sales program or a set of sales courses only have two or three courses. Everybody has a sales principles or introduction to sales. Then the next level is advanced selling. There’s never an intermediate selling. I never figured that out. They go from intro to advanced selling, and then they might have a sales management class.
Well, we have all three of those. I got to participate in rewriting a lot of those as I got more involved. Beyond that, we have a negotiations class. We have a sales management class. We have a class called communications and interview skills. We have something called professional practices, which is the only course we have that doesn’t teach you how to sell. It teaches you how to be in sales, which is really good.
Then we require an internship, and we’re starting a new course in the fall called live case studies. I think rather than reading case studies, we’re going to actually participate in real time with students, teaching them. We’ve got a company coming in that has some issues with hiring and retaining salespeople. They want to double the size of their sales force. We’re going to have the kids function as consultants and then present their solutions to the executives of the company.
You could teach a course in analytics, and I’m not knocking that, but if you learn analytics as you need to know them and go through an analysis, all of a sudden at the end of the semester, it’s like, “Wow, I learned a lot.” That’s basically our curriculum. We have a full-fledged major with that and it’s got the attention. We’ve got good partners in the area, and we’re continuing to add more corporate partners.
Fred Diamond: That’s pretty impressive. I really love that idea of the live case study. I also like the class that you’re teaching on what it means to be in sales. We work with a lot of companies that have told us they’re really good at teaching their salespeople, particularly their new and junior salespeople, their products, the market that they sell into. Then they’re also pretty good at teaching them the technology, the Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever it might be. Where they struggle, which is why a lot of them join the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, is because they don’t really teach them how to be sales professionals. We help with that. We help them understand what the community means and all that.
I’m just curious about competitions. We attended recently a couple of competitions, we’re blown away. What are your thoughts on competitions? Do your kids participate? What do you see as their value?
Thomas Hosmanek: They’re great. We have a saying that the first time a student goes to a competition with our team, they never come back the same. There’s always a visible transformation that occurs in that experience. We’ve been involved for a lot of years with the National Shore Sales Challenge in Maryland, Salisbury. They’re on a hiatus right now. Great program though, Perdue School of Business there. But fortuitously, that enabled us to search for another one. We got involved with Rob Hammond down at University of South Florida with the Selling with the Bulls, which is like no other competition. It is awesome. It was really a lot of hard work, but our kids came back just raving about that as well.
Then we go to the ICSC, Florida State sponsors, with 80 universities, International Sales Competition. We send a team to that every year. I think every time we send a team there, at least one kid has come back with a job. We just had somebody get hired by Gartner that was at that competition recently. We’ve had people get hired with Qualtrics, with Tom James, just a lot of different schools. It teaches a lot of things.
Our goal, threaded throughout the program, is to have constant experiential encounters which foster confidence. There’s what we used to call in the corporate world confidence experience spiral. The more experience you get, the more confident you are to try new things, and the more new things you try, the more experience you get, and it just keeps spiraling upward. That’s part of what these do.
We also do internal competitions. That’s a way to help people compete with us to scout talent as well. Who might we want on our teams? This last year, what we really got involved in was online competitions as well. It’s rather remarkable. A number of these are smaller, but they actually have cash prizes, which was just an incidental, it wasn’t anything we were looking for, but we had one kid win a speed sell contest, $1,500 prize. He wasn’t going to turn that down, so that was pretty nice. But we’ve done the Steel City Challenge with Duquesne University. We did one out on the West Coast with Cal State Fullerton, with my friend Brad Anderson there, who heads up that program. We’re just always looking for more of them to do.
We have a virtual team, and then we have a travel team, we call it. Then we’re always trying out kids. Sometimes the online ones are a good way to test under live fire, so to speak, for people what we want. One of the sad things, but one of the good things about college is that you get people really in pocket and they’re doing really well, and then they graduate. It’s not the same thing as losing people in business, but you have to be constantly aware that you’re bringing up people at the same point.
Going back just for a second, I meant to mention our curriculum. We have people teaching things they have actually done. Sales management, I teach that course. I have developed little case studies that we do based on real situations so we can always tell the kids how the scenario turned out. We’ve got a fellow who was a negotiator for a large Fortune 500 company who teaches negotiations. He had a lot of marketing experience as well. Kids get the feel for, it’s the real deal.
We like to say, if you want to learn how to swim, you’ve got a bunch of people in a swimming pool. You’ve got somebody sitting in a deck chair with a book called How to Swim, you’re not going to learn how to swim from somebody who’s not in the water with you. Because we’ve got the experience, we feel that we offer a lot of insights. I think the kids value that a lot. I tell them, the worst thing they can ever do after they graduate is to come back and tell me, “It wasn’t like you told me it was.” I’ve never had anybody do that in eight years. We feel really good that we have given them the real deal and understand how it is.
Fred Diamond: That’s really good. Actually, one of the great things that we’ve seen is a lot of companies want to get involved with programs such as yours because they’re preparing the kids to go right into work. Obviously, as we know, you mentioned experience and things like that, and you have to learn, you got to apply, you got to do all these things, but getting the head start at a program like St. Ambrose is teaching these kids, puts someone well ahead.
I’m just curious, what are employers, you mentioned one of your kids came out of a competition, but I’m sure a lot of your kids with the degrees are getting jobs right away because they know a lot of things that people just don’t know. What are employers looking for when they come to a college with a business degree in selling? What do they expect and what are they looking for?
Thomas Hosmanek: That’s a great question. We have an advisory council with employers. We meet once a semester and we ask them that question at least once a year, because we want to stay current. We also want to know what their requirements are, how they’re changing, especially in light of technology and things like that. There’s been a differentiation for a long time between soft skills and hard skills. Hard skills, what you need to do in the job. Soft skills, the human skills. I would contend that soft skills have become hard skills, because when we ask, what are the things that you don’t like, not that you’re necessarily seeing from our people, but from college people in general? A lot of it, it’s a little scary sometimes, it’s showing up on time, knowing how to act, knowing how to talk, being respectful, things like that. Thankfully, we don’t have that problem. We have almost a hundred percent placement prior to graduation with our sales majors. The employers understand that we get that.
We involve them a lot in our classes of speakers. In my intro class, I have somebody come and speak in personal selling, business to business selling, healthcare selling, consulting, things like that. They enable the people to meet our students, to talk with them, to get to know them. A lot of times they’ll offer internships, a way to try somebody out prior to graduation. They’re looking for also what you’d call business acumen, which sometimes can be a little hard to describe, but it’s just knowing how to be in that environment. We try to do that and try to get a lot of experiential stuff, a lot of employers in our classroom.
The communication class that I mentioned, they start out working with the RNMKRS elevator pitch, doing that. Then we bring in four employers from all different industries, different types of selling. Some do team selling, some do one-on-one. But they come in on a Monday and they spend an hour talking about their company, what they do with their product or services, and how they sell, what their selling system is. They end the class by giving the students a scenario. They come back two days later and the students roleplay the scenario as salespeople selling the company to those people. You can see in the background of my picture here, we’ve got six breakout rooms. This is our main sales classroom. All the employers, they’ll bring extra people and everybody will talk with at least one, if not two, of the employers doing the roleplaying.
It’s a constant thing where they’re supporting, but they’re also getting to try out the people as well. They feel really good with our program and that leads to involvement in other things, and they help us with financial support as well. It’s all very organic the way it operates. I think the biggest thing, having been on the employer side of it, that you would want with somebody with a sales degree, is they have a basic foundation. I tell everybody, you’re still going to get taught how to sell by the way that company or that industry sells, and trust them because they all want to stay in business. They’re going to teach you things that work, not things that don’t work.
It’s really the openness. Yes, you want to understand how an interview goes from the opening to the close and that sort of thing, but also, listening’s a huge thing. It’s always said, but somebody who’s not immediately drawing conclusions, we say selling is really helping solve problems. Either your product or service is going to solve a problem they have. If you solve a problem that somebody has, you’re invaluable. That’s great. That’s what you’re doing. You’re not selling to, you’re helping somebody find a solution from your portfolio of products or whatever. All this stuff intertwines all the way through classes to moving onward, but we will see people identify kids, they do that at career fairs too. They’ll keep a short list of people they want to talk to. I walk around the career fairs as well and talk to the employers, “Hey, who’s your number one and number two,” and when it’s one of our kids, that’s great, because we do a combined fair that has actually five different colleges and up to 100, 120 different employers at it.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious on the students’ journey. What would you say, of all the kids who finally make it to the selling major, what percentage of those kids came to St. Ambrose knowing that they were going to get a degree in professional selling? My daughter declared her major the last possible day of her sophomore year. I’m just curious, do they know that St. Ambrose has this program, so that’s one reason why they’re matriculating? Or is it, “Hey, I just want to go to St. Ambrose because it’s a good school and I want to stay near home,” or, “I want to come from the other side of the state.” Then they come in, they go through the general classes. I’m just curious, how many of the kids who make it into the program started their college career knowing versus how many kids discovered it maybe halfway through their freshman or sophomore year?
Thomas Hosmanek: The answer is probably not a lot. It’s growing and I’m working on some programs with area high schools where we’re going to do some things like integrating students into some classes from some high school business classes. That’s going to help in the future. But basically, you’re right. I think most people are in a similar situation to your daughter. Because generally you’ll take some general education courses, some core courses, if you’re in the college of business, you have business courses, accounting, marketing management, those sorts of things that you take in addition to sales. People get a feel for it once they’ve been through a class.
My intro class, it’s mostly business majors, but I’ve got elementary education majors, I have biology majors, I have communications people. It’s mostly freshmen and sophomores, but it spans the gamut of that. We try to give basic knowledge so if you never take another course again, you’ll understand the basics of sales. But we also try to create the one potato chip effect, which I find most young people are way too young for, they have seen that commercial about that you can’t eat just one potato chip. But we try to create something that will pull them forward to experience the other classes. Maybe that they like a profit, maybe that they truly say, “Wow, this isn’t what I thought it would be. I want to go further.” Probably, again, your daughter’s situation is the most common.
Fred Diamond: I just want to follow up with something you said before about soft skills versus hard skills. We’ve done over 750 Sales Game Changers Podcasts, and we did a count of all the words that were uttered on all, we did it after our 600th show, discounting and all those kinds of things. The three most uttered words by sales leaders, I’ll just say the top two, listening was number two. You need to be good at listening. You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that order. Then we would talk a lot about how do you become a better listener? I think that’s such a critical skill. We like to say, when your customer does 90% of the talking on a call, that’s a successful call.
The number one word that was uttered over 600 Sales Game Changers Podcasts was empathy or empathetic. I remember we had one incident, it was about three months into the pandemic. We actually had people were watching our recordings live, in a webinar type of a manner. I remember our guest, who was a VP of sales at many places, was a great job. One of our listeners asked the question, “When can I stop being empathetic?” Because we kept saying, “You all need to be empathetic because everyone’s going through this pandemic.” He said, “When can I stop being empathetic?” My guest, who was a seasoned VP, 30 years, B2B sales, said, “If that’s the question you’re asking, you need to go to the beach for the weekend and really think about why you’re in sales.” Because at the core of sales is empathy, understanding where the customer’s coming from, why are they coming from this?
Before I ask you for your final action step, you mentioned your relationship with business. I’m just curious, how do you stay up on the trends in curriculum? Like AI, of course, has become a huge thing with ChatGPT over the last couple of years. We talk a lot about the trends in professional selling with the shift from customer engagement shifting to them getting more information from digital means, or from the internet, and now from AI, from the bots, if you will. How has your teaching shifted with some of these trends over the last couple years?
Thomas Hosmanek: We’re like everybody else, I guess, except I think one of the advantages that we have, as I mentioned, the speakers that we’re bringing into classes, and I know that I can’t keep up with every single aspect of it, but I can bring in people that I know who do keep up with every aspect. For instance, in advanced selling, we really do a deep dive into CRM. We talk about it for a week, and then we have speakers come in the next week, and we have somebody who uses Salesforce and we’ve got the Promethean board in the background. We can call up live, they can go through their Salesforce, show the kids how that works. There’s AI already integrating with that, doing trip planning when they’re going a certain route across the state for appointments and clients.
Then we’ll have somebody come in that does CRM on a proprietary basis where they’re using a Microsoft dynamic space. I want the kids to, I say, “You’re not going to be an expert, but if you go to a job interview and somebody says you’re familiar with CRM, that may be the difference between you and another candidate getting the position.” We definitely stay in front of that stuff. I’m doing a lot of seminars now because we’re in the hiatus here between the spring and the fall semester. A lot of AI seminars and learning a lot about AI agents and bots and how to create some of that stuff and how it’s used in education. It’s something you got to stay up with because otherwise we’re not preparing kids for yesterday. We’re preparing them for today and tomorrow.
Fred Diamond: I like the way you’re saying that the company they go to may not be using the CRM you teach, but they need to understand how to make their way through and all the elements. Thomas Hosmanek, thank you so much for being on today’s Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. Before I ask you for your final action step, is there anything else you want to cover that we might not have addressed on today’s show?
Thomas Hosmanek: If there’s any salespeople, sales companies listening, definitely try to tie up with a program in your area. It’s beneficial both ways. I would say though, as you approach sales programs, always have something of value to offer. You’re not coming in to do a recruiting seminar, you’ll recruit as a byproduct, but what area can you engage in? Are you really good with doing the phases of the interview? Are you really good at just different aspects, negotiation, things like that. What is it that you can bring? I would refer them to the Sales Education Foundation Annual, which comes up annually. It has all the contact information anybody could want for sales programs. Don’t be afraid to approach those individuals. But again, come with a mind of, what can I give?
Fred Diamond: Thomas, you’ve given us so many great things to think about. Congratulations on the growth of your program and the success, and setting kids on a great path. We’ve been to some of the competitions from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling and we’re just blown away by how these kids present themselves.
Thomas Hosmanek: Yeah, they’re really good.
Fred Diamond: They’re sharp. They have a lot of the soft skills and you need to be very emotionally-intelligent and you need to know to do the right things, because as we know, in a sales process, doing one wrong thing can lead to losing the business or not moving the deal forward. You got to treat the customer a certain way. You got to show up providing value like you used before. It’s great to see that programs like yours are teaching these kids that. Do you want to give us a final action step? Something specific that our listeners should consider to take their sales career to the next level?
Thomas Hosmanek: This is something that I talk about a lot with the students, and that is that essentially whatever industry you’re in or whatever company, unless it’s a revolutionary startup, essentially, you’re working in a commoditized marketplace. What you offer, somebody else can offer. The thing that’s going to differentiate you is going to be you, and it’s going to be your level of service. That is the one thing that, it may sound old, but it’s current as can be, because when I was a sales manager years ago, I always insisted that my sales reps got back to everybody within 24 hours, even if it was to say, “I don’t have an answer for you, but I’m working on it.”
The level of service, actually keeping your word by doing what you’d said, that just becomes more and more important. It ties in with what you were talking about empathy before. I tell my students, you don’t have to agree with everything you hear as a salesperson from a client or a prospect, but you should try to see it through their eyes to understand how they arrived at that conclusion. That will lead you to give good service and understand how to be a good salesperson.
Fred Diamond: Once again, Thomas Hosmanek, I want to thank you for being on today’s Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. My name is Fred Diamond.
s Podcast Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo