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Today’s show is a special “Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged” episode featuring Deirdre Jones Director of the University of Toledo,
Find Deirdre on LinkedIn.
DEIRDRE’S ‘ TIP: “We create a safe environment where students can fail fast, learn, and get back up stronger. We teach our students to sell with confidence, courage, and compassion.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited today. University of Toledo, Deidre Jones. First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you’ve had a long tenure at University of Toledo. Give us some of your background and your journey to leading this program.
Deirdre Jones: My journey actually started and is also still at University of Toledo, although I did leave University of Toledo for a bit before boomeranging back in. I am a two-time proud graduate of University of Toledo, marketing degree with a professional sales concentration, back when the program was just a concentration. Minored in information systems, did my MBA in information systems. I spent time in business technology consulting, sales, and services, for a couple of years.
Like a lot of University of Toledo students, I was working while going to school to help pay for things and take care of stuff. While I was going through the program, had a sales internship, got that sales job after I graduated. Enjoyed it a lot. Then I had the opportunity to go ahead and get my master’s, because my honors thesis advisor was also the leader of the MBA program. He said, “Hey, would you like a GA-ship to get a free MBA? I think you’d be great in the program.” I said, “Sure, fine.”
Did that. Got my MBA in information systems. Got to work with the sales faculty more so as a GA behind the scenes to help with research. I got to tag team teaching our basic sales class because I was already working in business technology consulting, sales, and services, because I worked full-time and did my MBA full-time while also being a part-time grad assistant. That was a crazy year. Really got to do more stuff behind the scenes, got to teach, loved it, got good reviews, enjoyed working with the students. Then graduated, worked in industry and tech sales.
Then an opening came up to be a full-time visiting instructor. At that point in time, I was married. I had just had a baby. I was looking for more work-life balance at that particular point in time and really enjoyed what I did previously. I had stayed in touch with faculty, came back, worked as an instructor. Also, a quick side note, when I was still in corporate, we actually hired University of Toledo students as interns at the company I was working at, because I was an intern once upon a time, and then we hired interns. Faculty member in the program, spent some time. We did zero outreach and engagement. I went to one board meeting and I was looking around and I’m like, “Oh my God, so much low-hanging fruit. We really need to be more involved with the business community.”
We started our corporate partnership program and other events to better engage with the business community so we could make sure that our curricula and our research was as aligned as possible so we could best serve our students and also the business community. My role just continued to evolve over time from full-time faculty, assistant director, associate director, and then now director of the program, but always in response to what can we do to better serve the community. I’m just so incredibly blessed thanks to Ed Schmidt, who endowed the program, and then our corporate partners. Ed was generous seed money, our corporate partners watered the seed, but our program has really been able to benefit from that external funding so we can better serve everyone.
It’s just been neat to have that perspective of being a student in the program, a graduate assistant behind the scenes, in corporate hiring and working with our interns, having sales experience in the field myself, and then coming back to also teach and then now run the program. I’ve seen this from every single angle. I really try to use that to better understand where all of our customers and stakeholders are coming from.
Fred Diamond: That’s quite a journey. Let’s get a little bit deeper into the program. One thing you told me is that you focus on non-seniors. Tell us why that is and give us a little more insight into why you’re doing that.
Deirdre Jones: When it comes to our internal competition, but then also our national competition that we run, the UToledo Invitational Sales Competition, we do, we focus exclusively on the non-senior as far as competitors go. Seniors can come to the competition and are more than welcome, but in the capacity of a peer coach, because as I’m sure you’re acutely aware, part of that skill mastery is then being able to teach and coach someone else in that space.
The reason we wanted to focus on that, and just quick side note, it wasn’t my goal to start that way. When we started with our internal competition, I was only letting the older students, the ones that were already in classes, compete. The younger students came up to me, they were saucy, but respectful, and they said, “But we want to try. We’re ready.”
I said, “Well, you haven’t taken your class yet.”
They said, “Well, we love this and we want to try it out.”
Then the older students said that they would help out, and I said, “Okay, fine. Next year when I do it, you can do it, but we’re going to give you a separate division. We need to be transparent, we need to be fair. I don’t want you getting slaughtered by a seasoned senior.”
Did that, was very nervous that second year, and partway through that first round, we take a break and our corporate partners were like, “I cannot believe that was a sophomore. Where have you been hiding these kids?” I’m like, “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and just having that moment that cream is cream. It was also a moment for us too, because even though higher education we’re in the heat of the enrollment decline right now, this was something that higher education has known about for quite some time, that enrollments were going to be more of a challenge as we look forward. Our enrollment decline is the hiring pipeline talent challenge for corporate, because it just keeps going further down the supply chain, so to speak.
We really wanted to make sure that we were doing everything that we could to recruit more students into our programs so we could keep up with corporate demand. But it was also about giving students a space to explore their careers before they get into upper division. So many programs, you don’t have major specific classes until you get to upper division. We wanted to give younger students the opportunity to shine outside the shadow of a senior, that opportunity to do something that they see as fun and relevant, because it’s what they want to do later on. It was about helping out those students, helping University of Toledo and other universities that come to be a part of our competition, helping them with their own recruiting because we’re the conversation starter for those universities with their students to try and get them into sales programs, because now it gives them something to talk about with freshmen and sophomores about getting involved with their sales programs so enrollments are growing not just at UToledo, but in other locations as well.
Fred Diamond: I might have actually jumped ahead with that particular question. What I meant to ask you first was it looks like a big part of your program is the sales competitions. For people who don’t know what they are, and then you gave a great answer about why some of the younger students are involved, but tell us what they are and what is the value to the student to be competing in these competitions. Actually, you reached some interesting things, which we may or may not go to, about the pipeline for a lot of these selling professional excellence programs, being the pipeline into companies that are looking for people who can hit the ground running. Some people that we talk to say it might take you 10, 12 years to really get your sales career going, because you have to understand customer, you have to understand process, you have to understand what you’re selling. One of the reasons why we’re doing the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged show is because what we see at these universities is just amazing, how well prepared you’re getting these kids. A big way that they’re demonstrating this preparation and readiness is through the competitions.
Deirdre Jones: Absolutely. University of Toledo hosts the national, there’s other universities that host national competitions. Most of us do internals as well too. With them, they are sales call interaction role plays. We give them a selling scenario, there’s varying levels of complexity, really depends on we’re talking internal or national, and then what types of key learnings we want the students to be experiencing. Because this isn’t about having good energy and being a good people person. There are actual rubrics that are research and best practices based that we go through. That’s part of why companies actually love coming to the competitions, is because it’s great refreshers for them and their teams to see how sales interactions really should be, how they really should flow. These are not scripted situations. These are very organic conversations that if you train and you coach right, they can be very organic conversations.
There are just sales situations that the students will have to role play through, everything from your opening, rapport building, information gathering, solution presentation, handling objections, and then a close. Then some things that encompass everything, like communication skills, product and service knowledge. Some of the interactions might be more information gathering based or value proposition based. They can be done on a one-on-one or in a team situation. It just varies based on the curricula and also the competition. But it’s all about putting theory into practice.
We do role plays in our classes and obviously at the competitions as well too, because University of Toledo and plenty of other university sales program schools very much about turning that theory into practice because it can sound great in your head, but until you are actually in that scenario, and role playing it out, you never know how it’s going to go. University of Toledo and others, we’re also doing role plays with AI as well too, AI sellers, AI buyers, because we’re exploring both sides of the table. It’s important for the students to get practice to build their competence and their confidence.
Fred Diamond: I want to talk about your curriculum. It’s interesting when you talked about the competition, about the various stages that the student goes through in the competition, eventually getting to some form of close, which might just be scheduling a meeting. As a matter of fact, I’ve judged a couple competitions and it finally occurred to me, the whole goal is to get to the next stage. As we know in sales, the close is the next stage, the follow up. I noticed that you have a purchasing class, for example. I think that’s brilliant. Tell us a little more about the curriculum and why classes like that are so important.
Deirdre Jones: For us at University of Toledo, when you look at what is the top skill sets of top-performing salespeople, regardless of industry, the number one skillset of a top-performing salesperson is understanding customer perspective. What better way to understand customer perspective than to more fully engage in a purchasing class to understand that? What we do with our purchasing class is we also include them in the role plays. When our basic sales class goes to do their role plays, they are actually role-playing. Their buyer is the student in the purchasing class, and they connect twice throughout the course of the semester, one time on an information gathering call. Then what happens is, prior to that, the purchasing student is actually working on their RFP, their request for proposal. That’s what they’re looking at putting that together.
The seller student is going to ask the buyer student questions to learn more about their needs because they’re going to reconnect later in the semester to do a proposal presentation based on the needs that they uncovered in that information gathering role play, and what they saw in the request for proposal. They’re going to present that proposal. There’s going to be some conversation about it. They’re going to try to close, but the fun thing is our purchasing students are role playing with multiple seller students. They’re hearing different types of proposals, different types of ideas, and then ultimately that purchasing student is going to put together a purchase recommendation on who should get the business and why.
Some of the other stuff that we cover in that class, obviously there’s legal things that get covered in class. We talk about negotiations in that class, because if you’re looking at multiple options, you’re going to have to potentially negotiate, but also internal selling. That purchase recommendation, that exists because there is some buying center that you need to explore because different people have different needs. They might have different thoughts and opinions, rational and irrational about what should be happening and why. We also cover internal selling in that class. We talk about project management, because it’s about how do we get something approved, but then also steward that throughout the execution and implementation phase, and also customer journey is a really big part of that conversation as well.
Fred Diamond: I like the fact that you mentioned legal stuff, because contracts obviously in B2B and B2G are a big part. There are so many things that you need to know about as you’re going into a professional selling career. There are multiple buyers that you have to have in the process. It’s not just like, “What do I got to do to get you to buy this pen?” That never happens. But you also need to know and understand the technical buyer, the financial buyer, the program buyer.
You talked a lot about bridging the worlds between the business community and your students. I want to talk about that for a little bit. What is the value that businesses would see from being teamed with the University of Toledo and what are employers looking for when they’re hiring a college student from your program?
Deirdre Jones: I think the very first thing they’re looking for, which is why they come to University of Toledo and other university sales programs, is they know our students already want to sell. One of the things that we’re really big on teaching is there’s two things you’re actually selling when you’re selling. First off, you’re not selling, you’re teaching someone how to buy, but you’re selling somebody on concept of change and then change with me. You have to make sure you are working on both of those sales, those concepts in parallel. From a company’s perspective, when they’re going to recruit, because it’s absolutely a sales cycle, the full first concept of you should go into sales, that’s done. We took care of that. Not that there aren’t some students that are still contemplating or trying to navigate that space, but the number one reason why they come to us is they know our students already want to sell.
The number two reason why they come to us is because our students really know how to sell. They’re looking at our curricula. Some of the stuff that really stands out at University of Toledo, we are the only university in the entire country that has a major, a minor, some other third undergraduate degree designation, and MBA level programming. We’re the only ones with that particular depth in our program. The role play integration I was talking about earlier, where you have the sales class and the purchasing class where they interact, another aspect to that is our salesforce leadership class also provides coaching to our basic sales students on how that first role play went, so they can get coaching before they go into that proposal presentation. Our corporate partners are also part of that coaching session as well.
That 360-degree review, that’s unique to University of Toledo, as is the fact that we’re the only university that requires our students to take a purchasing class. It makes a difference when you have a major and other things that are required and baked into the program to have those students be ready. But also, like a lot of other sales programs, Sales Education Foundation is a wonderful resource. They track university sales programs and they found, through their research, they looked at UToledo students and students at other programs, they ramp up 50% faster than their non-university-trained counterparts, the retention is 30% higher. When you’re looking at the training cost to onboard somebody, they’re usually saving about $180,000 when it comes to training and onboarding costs. Because our students, they go to training once they get hired and they’re like, “I already know this.” They’re jumping ahead to, “How do I take our value proposition at wherever I’m working and deconstruct that into figuring out who are the different types of buyer roles that I should be talking to? How can I tailor my questions to that? Which parts of the value proposition would resonate more, and which objections should I be ready for and how can I handle that?”
Fred Diamond: The way you described it is perfect, because a lot of companies, we work at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling with world-class B2B and business to government companies. They join the IEPS, and a lot of them say, “We’re pretty good. We’re very good at onboarding our new employees, particularly those that are more on the junior side, on our products. We’re good at that.” They also say, “We’re generally pretty good at getting them onboarded on our technology, using Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever it might be.” What they all tell us, and that’s why they join the IEPS, is they say, “We’re not very good at teaching them how to be selling professionals.”
Getting that head start at University of Toledo, all the stuff that you teach them, the whole process, getting coached, like you just mentioned, from the students who are a little more senior than them in their education career, I love the fact you said 180,000 bucks to get them started, the savings that companies will see. That’s why we see so many great companies.
I have a question about the sponsors. Are they local mostly, or do you have a global reach? What type of a company would be looking to hire these kids? Actually, one of the great things you said, which we see so much is, a lot of the kids, if not all of them, who are in these professional selling programs like yours, they want to get a job in professional sales. Now, we talk to a lot of people who are engineering majors, or computer science, who at some point after graduating, they discovered, “Well, I’m pretty good at explaining this, and I like working with customers.” But the kids who are going through the professional selling programs, they know that they want to go into those programs.
Deirdre Jones: The companies that we’re working with, we do have some local companies that work with us to hire students, but we also have large international organizations as well. We’re working with companies like International Paper, Hilti, Airgas, Schindler Elevator, and others, to recruit and work with our students in companies like Adobe and Waste Management. There are some very large national and international companies that work with our program. There are even some larger companies like Owens Corning, large international company, headquartered in Toledo. We’ve also got a little bit of that local, but also very much national at the same time.
Fred Diamond: I’m so impressed with your program and I know you’ve been one of the schools that have had a program for a long time. You’re involved with the University Sales Center Alliance, and we would love to come to your competition. When is your competition, by the way?
Deirdre Jones: The UToledo Invitational Sales Competition for 2026 is February 19th through the 21st. It’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday in ‘26.
Fred Diamond: How many universities compete in that competition?
Deirdre Jones: We have 36 different universities that compete in the competition, and usually, we have a couple more beyond the 36 that come to attend because it’s way more than just a role play competition. We’re also doing interactive workshops and panel discussions, coaching and interviewing sessions, a career fair, and a social media competition. We’re looking at role play performance and also engagement performance. There are usually a couple of other universities that come just for the engagement side, but also be a part of the social media competition as well, too.
Fred Diamond: Very good. Before I ask you for your final action step, I’m just curious, what expectations do the graduates have from their sales career? Again, you just mentioned some of these world-class companies that are coming to recruit and there is a big struggle these days, I guess, with using your college education to get into your career. You want to get started right away in a lot of cases. You want to go from a program like yours, right into a job, start your career, hopefully you’ll be successful, it’ll be fruitful. Where do these kids expect their degree to take them? In the back of my mind I’m thinking, do they expect to be the VP of Americas for International Paper, or how do you train them for what a career looks like?
Deirdre Jones: Great question. Some of them, yes, they do expect to have those particular roles at some point in time. They are all different. The way we talk to our students is we talk to them about it as if it’s a career lattice, because we want them to understand that yes, you might start in an entry level sales role, but you have so many wonderful options as your career evolves over time. Some of them, because there’s higher level sales roles, there’s strategic selling roles, there’s industry or product-specific or solution-specific type product roles, you can get into key accounts. Some people will eventually go into marketing, training, leadership, pricing and promotion strategies. That’s the conversation we have with them, is we don’t want them to think that they’re locked in at like, “Well, the next step is I have to go into leadership.”
There’s lots of different options for what you can do. What’s really great about starting in professional sales is you understand the customer, which is the whole reason the company exists, by the way, is to serve that customer. Understanding the customer, but then also that customer journey. How do all of the other functional areas factor into that customer’s journey and customer success? As a sales professional, especially one if you’re doing your job right, you are understanding what’s going on in R&D and production, finance, shipping and receiving, and all of those other aspects, to understand what parts of our company are functioning really well, what are some areas where we might need to do a little bit or a lot of cleanup type work. Typically, they’re really well versed in the overall operations of an organization.
Fred Diamond: First of off, congratulations on the program that you run. It’s so amazing at how well compensated it is that you have the entire spectrum of the various classes and the only university to do the purchasing class, and that it’s also part of the MBA curriculum. The reputation that University of Toledo, when we started announcing the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged, a couple people reached out and said, “Have you interviewed the team from University of Toledo yet?” This is great. I’m excited to publish this.
Congratulations on your success and for your journey as well, and for the impact that you’re having on two people, on the companies that are hiring talent, because there’s always a war for talent. If the economy is going down or whatever it might be, or the economy’s great, there’s always a war for great sales talent. Secondly, for what you’re doing for these kids. We’re the Institute for effective Professional selling. We believe that selling is a profession. We work with great organizations, great selling professionals. It’s not just a great career choice, but it’s a great lifestyle helping customer services. Sales is always about service. It’s about bringing value. The most commonly-uttered word on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is value. How are you making a difference with your customer who is struggling to make a difference with their customer? Since the pandemic, there’s even a bigger struggle to make a difference with your customer’s customer’s customer. The whole supply chain has been affected and what you’re doing to prepare these kids to help these companies achieve their noble goals is significant.
Deidre Jones, thank you so much. We like to end the show with a final action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas. Is there something specific you’d like people to do after listening to today’s show or reading the transcript?
Deirdre Jones: I would love for folks to continue to promote the career of professional selling, because it is a profession that is always going to be there, is always going to be needed. As you said, it’s very honorable and valuable to the business community, just frankly how the world functions. Go judge a DECA, or FFA, or BPA competition at a high school, go to a career day and talk about sales careers and encourage those students to become aware of those careers in that K12 space, encouraging them to be aware of those types of career options in your own communities and to be proud about what you do, so we can continue to see those students come to the University of Toledo and all the other university sales programs across the country, so we can continue to produce those individuals for the business community.
Fred Diamond: How many kids come to the University of Toledo to get into your program? What percentage of kids that are in your program, presently or over time, matriculated to University of Toledo to be in your program versus how many kids maybe came without knowing what they were going to major in and they took one of your classes, or they met a kid in their dorm? Would you say 20%, 50%, 80%? Just curious.
Deirdre Jones: I don’t have a specific number. What I can tell you is the number of students that come here from the get-go and they’re like, “Ed Schmidt School of Professional Sales, lock in, let’s go,” it’s actually a relatively lower number because a lot of times, usually high school students, they’re just thinking business. They’re usually just thinking business. If they are thinking beyond business, it’s accounting/finance, or marketing/sales. They’re thinking hard skills, soft skills. It’s usually not until they actually get into the university and they start taking different classes and interacting with other students and businesses, where they start to realize that there are these other areas like sales and supply chain and stuff.
I think most of them, they don’t necessarily come here specifically for the sales program from the get-go. Would love to see that change over time, but I know a lot of that comes down to what people are familiar with in their own backgrounds and growing up, which is why we would love to have the community reaching out to their K12 space to create that level of awareness and interest so they can come to programs like University of Toledo.
Fred Diamond: Well, thank you once again, Deidre Jones. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo