From Classroom to Corner Office: How ProSales Prepares Graduates for Leadership
by Kevin Tankersley
Shortly after Margaret Spencer, BBA ’17, changed her major to Professional Selling (ProSales), she found herself taking part in a sales competition where she was expected to play the role of someone taking part in a business transaction. That’s when she called upon her years of experience doing theater during middle and high school.
“The sales program was very action-oriented, so it was more doing role plays and you were graded on the role plays,” she said. “It was more presentation-graded than it was test-graded. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.”
Spencer is the chief sales officer for Waco-based Texas Life Insurance Company. She joined the firm as a senior associate for sales after she graduated with a degree in Professional Selling. She had 11 job offers on the table before she graduated, a record for any student in the program, according to Andrea Dixon, PhD, the Frank M. and Floy Smith Holloway Professor and executive director of the Center for Professional Selling in Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.
Other recent graduates of ProSales, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, have titles such as chief revenue officer, vice president of sales, regional vice president and district sales manager. Oscar Velasquez, BBA ’14, is president of the industrial business for Vivify, a leading supplier of specialty colorants and functional ingredients, based in Itasca, Illinois. The program wasn’t always filled with such success stories.
There were only eight students in the program when Dixon became director of ProSales in 2009.
“I inherited a milk crate that had three folders in it,” Dixon said.
Today, the program boasts 168 students with an average GPA of 3.64.
“When you’re in a business-to-business sales role, you actually have to be the second-smartest person about every functional discipline in business,” Dixon said. “You can’t be an expert on supply chain and on accounting, but you have to know all those disciplines.”
A typical B2B sales presentation is to a group of people known as a buying center, Dixon said. Most of the time, those people don’t even know each other.
“They all know that they are coalescing around a problem or an issue, but it’s oftentimes the outside business-to-business salesperson who’s orchestrating the internal conversations to create the opportunity for change,” she said.
Dixon and other faculty members in ProSales incorporate 12 competencies into the program’s curriculum, and while that model is designed to help students in the first decade or so of their careers, there is an overlap with skills seen by C-suite executives.
“We’ve helped students understand we’re preparing you, not just for this entry-level role, but we’re preparing you to experience getting to the top of the organization,” she said.
Velasquez credits the ProSales program with preparing him to navigate real-world challenges and find mutual value and positive outcomes.
“I was well-equipped with the foundational skills of relationship-based selling, which ultimately allowed me to excel early in my professional sales career.”