Foundations of Sales - Foundations of Sales, Group D 2

Participation Prerequisites

Prerequisites

Pre-experience prerequisites do not limit enrollment in this course. To successfully participate, be aware that:

• The course leverages discussion-based, mutual learning in the classroom. Attending all class sessions on campus is mandatory.
• Oral contributions to mutual learning are essential.
• The course requires your full attention to your classmates' comments. I do not appreciate web browsing on laptops or phone messaging in my classroom.
• The course requires preparation for each session. If you do not prepare, you can neither follow the discussions nor contribute to joint learning.
• I would like to address you by name to maintain a personal atmosphere in the classroom. Please bring your name tent to every session.

Co-Requisites

Foundations of Sales (MKT201) and Professor Christian Schlereth's 4th-quarter course, Foundations of Marketing (MKT202), form the study module Foundations of Sales & Marketing. For WHU students, the scores from the two courses will be combined into a joint module grade, weighted equally. International exchange students can choose either or both courses and obtain separate grades.

Course Content

The courses Foundations of Sales and Foundations of Marketing introduce two separate business functions that jointly hold the keys to generating revenues:

• Marketing's first responsibility is product management. This includes researching market needs and designing products that are so desirable that customers want to buy them. Offering attractive products is the necessary criterion for revenue.
• Marketing's second responsibility is branding and advertising, aiming to pull demand from the customers' customers. Marketing encompasses most digital channels of contact with the customer. Marketing generates leads.
• Sales' principal responsibility is customer management. This involves building trusted relationships with the firm's direct customers, including industrial manufacturers, distribution partners, and end consumers. Sales encompasses most face-to-face contact channels to the customer. Salespeople convert leads into contracts. Getting customers to sign on the dotted line is a sufficient criterion for revenues.
• Most university curricula neglect sales or treat sales as a part of marketing. The business world, however, sees far more people working in sales than in marketing. Overall, sales force expenses are three times the combined advertising spending. The average firm expends 10% of its revenues on the sales force. In B2B, Sales dominates over marketing. Merely in a few B2C firms, Marketing is equally powerful.

WHU's is the only German BSc curriculum that acknowledges the real-life significance of sales by offering a mandatory sales course, next to and equivalent to a marketing course. This course introduces financial and social techniques for managing sales performance.

Part One: Foundations of Pricing

Week I: Setting and Getting Prices

• Self-Study A1: Introduction to Selling and Sales
• Self-Study A2: The Anatomy of Profit
• Class Session 01: Bargaining Basics
• Class Session 02: Basic Price-Quantity-Cost Calculations

Week II: Channel Pricing

• Self-Study B: Channel System Basics
• Class Session 03: Cost- vs. Value-Based Pricing Basics
• Class Session 04: Retail Pricing

Part Two: Foundations of Selling

Week III: Building Value Perceptions

• Self-Study C: Presenting to Top Executives
• Class Session 05: Sales Conversation Basics
• Class Session 06: Sales Proposal Basics

Week IV: Building Customer Relationships

• Self-Study D: Organizational Buying Basics
• Class Session 07: Opportunity Management
• Class Session 08: Networking and Account Management

Part Three: Foundations of Sales Force Management

Week V: Sales Funnel Management

• Self-Study E: CRM System Basics
• Class Session 09: Pipeline Coaching and Sales Forecasting
• Class Session 10: Lead Management and Sales Force Scaling

Week VI: Sales Force Control

• Self-Study F: Basic Sales Motivation Theories
• Class Session 11: Sales Compensation Basics
• Class Session 12: AI and Sales Management

Intended Learning Outcomes and Competencies

Meta-Cognitive Knowledge

Meta-cognitive knowledge is the awareness and knowledge of one’s cognition. Most students underestimate the significance of sales in business. The course intends to shift student awareness and priorities fourfold:

First, students realize that the core of business is buying and selling. Nothing moves in the economy unless somebody sells something and someone else buys it. This simple truth applies to materials, capital, labor, and anything else. Studying business without a course in sales is like studying engineering without physics, medicine without anatomy, or law without a court session.

Second, students take away that leading a firm requires learning to lead the sales force. Every business has two sides: a supply side (sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, and operations) and a demand side (sales and marketing). In the economy, more people work in sales than in production. One out of eight jobs is a sales job – and this does not include the part-time sales work of general managers, who spend much of their time with customers. Most country subsidiaries of multinational enterprises are essentially sales organizations. Entrepreneurs sell to customers, suppliers, employees, and investors all the time. Even if selling is not your job title, "the only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you're a salesman, and you don't know that" (Arthur Miller). Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), a 19th-century entrepreneur, emphasized the significance of salespeople by claiming, "You can take away my money and take away my factories, but leave me my sales staff – and I'll be back where I was in two years." 

Third, students are confident that selling is not a magical art but a set of communication skills one can learn. Few people are born sales aces.

Fourth, students will integrate sales stages into their career plans:

• Students considering a corporate career should consider starting their career with a few years in sales. In sales, you learn to view the business through the skeptical eyes of customers and salespeople. It is not by coincidence that brand management tracks in companies such as Procter & Gamble or L'Oréal commence with a mandatory stage in sales. Sales is a career booster on your resume. Although the public image of sales is often negative, business insiders highly value sales. TV mockery of B2C salespeople taints the public image of selling – think of ruthless used-car sales clerks or slick door-to-door salespeople of books, brushes, or vacuum cleaners. However, in B2B, selling is not about extroverted show-stars who talk a customer into buying. Firms are looking for a new generation of key account managers with the analytical skills of a strategy consultant who can meet the customer's top managers eye-to-eye. In other words, they are looking for WHU students as key account managers.
• Students who like consulting should consider a career as a consultative seller. Consulting skills are essential to sellers, and selling skills are vital to consultants. The competence requirements are more similar than most students expect: In a strategy consulting firm, you don't become a partner as the best advisor but as the best project seller. In sales, you don't win projects only by being a nice guy but by adding value to the client's strategic agenda as an advisor. By the way, the pay level in sales is more than comparable to consulting: The best-paid people in any firm are the top salespeople. However, the best-kept secret is that whereas consultants spend their early careers in stifling meeting rooms in the German provinces, a B2B sales career offers more international travel, includes more wining and dining in exciting places, and leaves more personal freedom.
• Students who consider the entrepreneurial path will soon realize that entrepreneurship revolves around selling. You collect capital by pitching your business idea to investors (In fact, some investors will only invest when the founders themselves are the first salespeople). You grow your business by selling products and services to customers. You hire talent by selling your company culture to candidates. You get suppliers by selling your reliability as a business partner. You exit by selling your customer base and technology to other firms. Entrepreneurship requires the two traditional competence areas of commerce: 1) accounting/finance and 2) sales/marketing. As a future entrepreneur, you cannot go wrong by specializing in these two areas during your BSc and MSc studies.

Operational Knowledge

On an operational level, the course intends to enhance four categories of competencies:

• factual knowledge, for example, applying salespeople jargon to discussing the status of a sale (such as the buying center, red flags, mentor, RFQ, gatekeepers), negotiation jargon to discussing the status of negotiation (such as BATNA, ZOPA, walk-away price, non-offer offer), sales management jargon (such as quota, forecast, pipeline, and other idioms), and understanding the specific terminology of sales management in a different sales contexts, such as selling to distributors, selling to large enterprises, B2B2C, and industrial selling,
• conceptual knowledge, for example, explaining the evolution of retailing, analyzing the composition of a buying center, analyzing sales pipelines and generating sales forecasts, calculating price-trade-offs against other profit drivers, analyzing economic value to customers, and mapping the structure of personal networks,
• sales-specific procedural knowledge, for example, applying a structured negotiation blueprint, evaluating the win probability of a sales opportunity, evaluating the needs of a customer through questions, and creating professional selling documents,
• general business-relevant procedural knowledge, for example, preparing for business meetings, making the best out of a limited preparation time budget, making concise contributions to discussions, and constructively building on arguments by other participants.

Instruction Type

☒ Presence

☐ Online synchronous

☐ Online self-paced

☐ Hybrid

Form of Examination

The course score is based entirely on individual written assessments. There are no team scores, peer evaluations, or oral participation scores.

Final Exam

100% of the course score rests on a final exam. The exam is a proctored, bring-your-own-device, laptop-based assessment. It contains numerical, multiple-choice, sorting, and matching questions. There are no text questions and no case-specific questions. The exam states instructions, questions, and multiple-choice answers in English for all tracks. Participants receive a mock exam illustrating the final's style.

The exam is open-book: you may bring any printed or handwritten paper, but no digital resources are allowed. The proctoring software prevents opening apps besides the assessment tool. The only other electronic device permitted is a non-programmable calculator.

The maximum course score is 100 points. All students receive a base score of at least 10 points. I may lift the base score depending on the best exam result achieved. The final exam contributes up to 90 points.

The final exam is held at the end of the semester, typically the last week of April. Make-up and retake exams take place in the last weeks of August. Do not schedule internships or vacations in those weeks.

• For WHU's BSc students, the final represents 90 minutes of the 165-minute module exam Foundations of Marketing and Sales. You can freely switch between Professor Jensen's and Professor Schlereth's questions.
• For exchange students, the writing time ends after 90 minutes, unless they are enrolled in both courses.
• Students from previous cohorts must manually enroll in the make-up or retake exam. The exam builds on this semester's content. It is advisable to enroll early, as registration provides access to this semester's course materials and bonus opportunities. 

Weekly Bonus Point Opportunities

Students have weekly opportunities to raise their course score by coming to class prepared. Bonus points are awarded for completing preparation quizzes before the class sessions. Total bonus opportunities amount to 30 points. Bonus points from previous years do not count.

Literature

There is no required textbook. I have not found a book covering all the topics discussed in this course. The learning material for this course includes presentation slides, articles, case studies, role-plays, videos, whiteboard notes, and mock exams. These and other course-related information are available on the learning management system Moodle.