A November 2005 New York Times article examining a trend among pharmaceutical companies to hire former college cheerleaders as sales reps riled many in the industry. The article failed to depict pharmaceutical sales with the high degree of professionalism they felt it had earned.
“Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force,” stated the Times story, which carried the headline “Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales.”
“Your article reinforces shameful stereotypes that fair-minded Americans have rejected time after time,” Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, wrote in a letter to the Times. “These stereotypes are unfair, and they are wrong.”
At the time the article was published, B2B sales was still a career that many college graduates fell into almost by accident. Few 20-something students were learning the intricacies of the B2B buyers’ journey or studying methods to deploy when a large sale stalls. For starters, only a handful of colleges and universities offered such courses.
What was it about college cheerleaders that made them attractive candidates for pharmaceutical sales jobs? Their physical attractiveness, for starters. “There’s a saying that you’ll never meet an ugly drug rep,” one doctor was quoted as saying in the Times story.
- Lynn Williamson, a cheering advisor at the University of Kentucky, told the Times in 2005 that he regularly fielded calls from recruiters looking for talent. “They don’t ask what the major is,” Williamson said. “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm – they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.”
That was then. Surely, successful selling in today’s complex B2B environments requires more than a firm body and a welcoming smile. With all the technology, behavioral psychology and data analysis that’s involved in sales processes, a formal education in sales will clearly provide a young salesperson a leg up on competitors who haven’t majored in sales, right?
Right?
A History of Sales as a Curriculum
In an article on the history of sales as part of a post-secondary education, Eric Janssen, a Canadian-based leadership consultant and sales educator, states that many aspects of salesmanship were regularly taught in colleges and universities into the early 1940s. However, the percentage of schools offering sales courses declined between 1943 and 1947. Janssen’s research indicates that educators felt that sales courses were “too vocational and lacked analytical rigor.”
Sales as an academic discipline reemerged in the 1980s. The first dedicated Center for Professional Selling was established at Baylor University in 1985. Four years later, Northern Illinois University launched its professional sales program, which became the first university program to receive a Certified Sales Curriculum from the Professional Society for Sales and Marketing Training (SMT).
Currently, more than 250 universities in the U.S. offer dedicated, formal professional sales education programs. One report puts the number of higher education institutions that offer a full sales major at 37.
A report from the Sales Education Foundation (SEF), a nonprofit organization that promotes academic sales programs worldwide, states “when employees with sales backgrounds receive standard company training, they ramp up
50% faster than other new workers, turn over an average of 30% less, and potentially save companies approximately
$200,000 per hire within the first year and a half of employment.”
What Sales Curriculums Cover
Sales education programs are typically housed within a university’s business college. Core coursework includes prospecting, identifying needs, CRM technology, sales analytics, negotiation and sales management.
Stefanie Boyer, heads the Bryant University Sales Institute outside of Providence, Rhode Island. Boyer believes a key element of acadmic sales programs are the simulated sales competitions held regularly that draw hundreds of students from multiple schools. In these events, which typically last two days, students role play with real-life business representatives who serve as judges, honing skills such as building rapport, speed selling, handling objections and closing.
Through sales competitions and course work, students are constantly receiving feedback on their techniques, Boyer said. That doesn’t happen in the real world.
“Who is giving you regular feedback in the work world? It takes a lot longer [to learn effective selling approaches] if you’re
not required to watch a conversation that you had, or if no one is reviewing them regularly with you,” she said. “In the real world, your manager may be able to ride along with you once a quarter or review a call or two per month. That’s not the same as having a semester filled with constant role plays, learning the science behind the structure, and understanding what good and bad look like.”
Real-World Observations
Faster ramp up to productivity is something sales managers who we heard from agree that college students who complete sales curriculums often bring to the table.
“I’ve seen how formal sales training can move a new rep to baseline productivity in 60 days, while those without it are still struggling with discovery calls four months later,” said Branden
Wells, CEO and founder of TrueCraft Construction, a general contractor in Garden Grove, California. “An organized curriculum prevents your team from eating lead time on basic skills that should be mastered by week two.”
Rick Elmore is founder and CEO of Simply Noted, which provides robotic technology for companies to create handwritten notes for marketing campaigns. He said he has hired, trained and managed sales representatives with a formal education in sales as well as those who did not study sales in college. In his experience, those who completed a sales curriculum “know the funnel stages, understand pipeline management, and speak the language from day one.”
Volen Vulkov is a human resources professional and co-founder of Enhancv, an AI-powered resume builder. He said he has been part of internal studies that showed university-educated sales reps outsold equally qualified sales reps without a formal sales education by more than 20 closed units on average in their first year.
Vulkov credits the edge that sales-educated reps have – at least early in their career – to their learned ability to build rapport with prospects through stories, humor and making connections about each buyer’s business.
“Unlike self-taught sales reps, sales grads are more likely to elicit an emotional reaction from a buyer that ends with a sale,” Vulkov said. “Emotional traction is the secret sauce and curriculum touch that sales grads bring to the table.”
“I’ve hired salespeople with formal sales degrees and salespeople without them,” said Christopher Coussons, director of Visionary Marketing, a UK-based SEO and digital marketing consultancy. “The graduates with sales degrees come in stronger on process. They understand pipeline stages, know CRM
hygiene without being told, and can articulate a sales methodology from day one. That’s genuinely useful. It took our non-degree hires four to six months to develop that same structural thinking through experience alone.”
Some Skills Can’t Be Taught
Nearly all the sales professionals we heard from stated there are aspects of selling that can’t be learned in a classroom, chief among them being resiliency.
“What is not taught in any classroom is rejection absorption,” said Andy Wray, sales manager at Ace Commercial Laundry Equipment, which sells commercial-grade laundry equipment to laundromats, multitenant housing developers and other businesses.
“Selling equipment to businesses is a gradual plod with tough losses. It takes four months to [strike] a deal in building a laundromat and then, over a financing term on a Friday afternoon, you lose it. Those who get through that without losing their heads are almost never the ones with the spotless academic histories; they are the ones who had previous employment where things went bad and recovery was not a choice,” Wray said. “You can learn the mechanics of follow-up sequence in degree programs, but you cannot get a feel of what it is like to have a deal pulled out from under you and still make a call to your next prospect an hour later.”
“A degree does not equip you with what will become of a deal frozen in the middle of a pitch,” adds Branden Wells of TrueCraft Construction.
He said one of the best sales reps he has ever hired had no college education in sales, but came with four years of door-to-door sales experience in four cities. “He met quota during his first 45 days and has not missed a quota since.
“It’s possible to take someone through a closing structure step by step on paper but impossible to recreate that feeling when a client who was about to sign a job becomes silent on a
$20,000 job,” Wells said. “The latter is a volume instinct, big pickups, missing out on deals that you thought you had won, re-pitching without anyone marking the score. Those degree graduates who overlooked that initial volume tend to stop at
some point in production, and they are familiar with the theory. The reps that made 200 cold calls during the first year are those who cease to second-guess the process.”
Degree vs. School of Hard Knocks?
One thing that most sales curriculums get wrong is they teach selling as if the tools and channels are static, said Runbo Li, co-founder and CEO of Magic Hour, an all-in-one, browser-based AI platform used to generate and edit video and image content.
“The reality is that AI has fundamentally changed how you prospect, how you personalize outreach and how you close,” Li said. “What I’d tell any young person considering a sales degree is the curriculum will give you vocabulary and frameworks.
That’s valuable. But the real edge comes from doing the work in the wild, experimenting with new tools, building in public, and learning to read people.”
Boyer – and likely most other academicians in sales programs around the U.S. – would disagree vehemently with Li’s assessment. A new course on applied AI in sales has been added to the curriculum at Bryant University Sales Institute. Boyer said students are now learning all about using AI to find, move and close deals, as well as conduct better prospect research to prepare for calls and have better conversations.
Consensus among those we heard from seems to be that a sales degree can equip a new rep with the skills necessary to speed past some aspects of career development. However, a degree is no assurance that a rainmaker is waiting to be set loose.
“Hiring someone with a sales degree tells me they were serious enough about the profession to study it deliberately. It does not inform me whether they are able to cope with rejection, or whether they can develop a real rapport or bond when the pressure is on. Those appear during the interview and during the first 90 days,” said Cal Singh, head of marketing and partnerships at Equipment Leasing Canada, which leases to transportation, agricultural, construction and industrial businesses.
Singh said he has employed top-performing salespeople with both types of backgrounds. “The similarity was never what they learned. What did it was their desire to get better, their capacity to be honest in looking at what was not working, and their readiness to do the unpleasant aspects of the job on a regular basis without being forced into it.”
Sales degrees accelerate the learning curve on methodology and give people a professional vocabulary, but they can create a false sense of readiness that breaks down the first time a prospect goes silent for two weeks, said Rick Elmore.
“The most underrated skill in sales is pattern recognition. Knowing which deals are actually progressing and which ones are just friendly conversations. That only comes from real experience, not coursework. The ideal hire combines both worlds: formal training provides the framework; real-world experience gives them the flexibility to adapt when the playbook stops working.”
Adds Li, “The best salespeople I’ve ever met, whether they had a degree in it or not, shared one trait: they were relentlessly curious about what makes people say yes. A sales degree is a head start. But the race is won by whoever adapts fastest, not whoever studied longest.”
