Professional Selling: Readings and Content

This book contains readings and content links for the independent learning activities in the UConn business undergraduate course MKTG/BADM 3452 Professional Selling.  This version has been updated for the Spring 2023 semester.

Unless specifically noted, all material in Professional Selling by Mary Caravella is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  Any material provided through embedded links are licensed under the terms of the link sources.

About the Professional Selling Course

Professional Selling provides an introduction to the role of professional selling in generating customer demand and delivering compelling customer experiences as part of the marketing mix. In your independent learning activities you will learn concepts and skills to create mutual value at each stage of the sales process, with a focus on business-to-business marketing contexts. These are complemented with virtual group workshops, team meetings and role play competitions, which will help you gain experience interacting virtually with clients and colleagues and practice these skills in an integrated manner to win orders for an organization.

This course specifically focuses on understanding how sales works in Business to Business (B2B) professional services industries, where products and services are customized to business clients, and sold through professional sales forces. This includes industries like consulting services, advertising and marketing services, business technology, medical technology, business legal and accounting services, business financial and insurance services, engineering services, and commercial real estate.

Professional sales forces are also a big part of consumer products industries, where salespeople work with retail and other key trading partners (known as “trade marketing”). And of course professional salespeople work with individuals needing financial, legal, accounting or real estate advice and services too.  The majority of the concepts and skills covered in this course are also relevant to these industries.

Who will get value from this course

This course serves undergraduate students exploring a wide variety of career goals:

• If you see yourself potentially working in sales roles in one of these industries, this course will help you hit the ground running in an entry-level position with sales concepts and skills that you can directly apply to your job.
• If you don’t see yourself in sales roles but do envision a career in digital marketing, there are two ways this course will help you (and why it is a Digital Marketing elective option). First you will gain an understanding of the business side of digital marketing. Second you will be better prepared for job opportunities in B2B digital marketing, where sales lead generation is often a primary goal.
• If you see yourself as an startup founder or solopreneur providing professional services to businesses, this course will help you learn more about how B2B professional service companies go to market, and learn and practice marketing and sales concepts and skills that are crucial for entrepreneurs.
• And if you don’t see yourself in either one of these categories right now, this course will still help you build skills useful for success in your professional life. Learn more about why in Module 1. And who knows, like some other previous students, you may find that sales roles are more interesting than you originally thought!

Curating and integrating content from research and practice

We will be drawing on the best science that informs professional sales, along with the best from professional practice. Sales scholarship has a rich exchange between practice and research.  There is core social science research that connects well to what sales practitioners find to be effective.

However this does introduce challenges because sales practice and sales research don’t necessarily share a common language.  For example, are many very successful sales consulting organizations who have developed their own proprietary and widely used variations on core concepts like the phases of a sales process, buying decisions and buying teams, sales funnels, and building business cases for change.

Practice also adapts more quickly to changes in the environment than academic research does.  The internet introduced structural changes to the practice of sales that are not yet thoroughly integrated into academic research on sales.  Examples include shifts in lead generation that closely integrate marketing and sales teams, and the increasingly important role of sales operations/enablement teams to successful sales organizations. The pandemic was another structural shift that (at least temporarily) accelerated an existing trend towards using video interactions in the sales process.

The lack of a common language and the different paces of change between research and practice are factors that will continue to be true in the future.   So this book often includes links to original content sources from research and practice, with learning objectives focused on helping you build your skills in abstracting and integrating concepts from different perspectives.

Other required course materials

This book includes links to the following copyrighted materials that are required for this course

 Daniel Pink, 2012, To Sell is Human.  Available from UConn Bookstore or online. See a 2-minute video preview at danpink.com

“To Sell is Human” provides an accessible introduction to social science research that supports modern sales practices. It organizes it in useful frameworks (Attunement-Buoyancy-Clarity and Pitch-Improvise-Serve) that are consistent with modern sales practice and research.

Hubspot Academy, 2020, Inbound Sales Certification Course. Free with registration at academy.hubspot.com

This online course by the provider of a marketing, sales and service automation platform provides relevant and accessible content about marketing and sales from a practitioner perspective.  Hubspot’s course content is organized into a practical sales framework (Identify, Connect, Explore, Advise) that is aligned well with research, and that we will adopt in this course.