Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What else can I be doing to drive revenue? How do I optimize our go-to-market strategies to ensure effectiveness and ROI? If questions like these keep you up at night and occupy your thoughts by day, have we got a podcast for you.
Welcome to Market Mastery presented by The Bridge Group, the podcast where sales professionals learn to advance their careers. Join host and revenue expert Kyle Smith as he talks to elite B2B sales and revenue experts about the strategies they're using to win in the market.
From cultivating a killer company culture to navigating compensation questions, we'll provide you with the insights, education, and strategies you need to thrive.
For more from The Bridge Group, visit www.bridgegroupinc.com.
Matt Glennon [00:00:00]:
I would think that getting involved with the sales club would be a great decision because, as you mentioned, there's tremendous talent there. The students, when they graduate, even before they graduate, are ready to make sales calls. They have grit, they have a passion for sales. And if I was someone that was in the private sector that could recruit, I couldn't recommend any higher. There's just lots of students there waiting for an opportunity to show you what they got.
Kyle Smith [00:00:28]:
Welcome to Market Mastery, the podcast dedicated to uncovering revenue driving strategies for sales leaders in B2B tech. All right, on today's episode, I have the distinct pleasure to be joined by Matt, aka Professor Glennon from UMass Amherst. Matt, thanks for coming on.
Matt Glennon [00:00:45]:
Kyle, thank you for having me on today. Yeah, very happy to talk with you today.
Kyle Smith [00:00:49]:
Absolutely. So, Matt, you and I met by my forced involvement in the UMass sales club. So I'd seen more and more publicly available information that UMass, my alma mater, was creating. The sales club saw that you were the faculty advisor for that, and then more specifically, that you actually were running a course. I believe it's marketing 425, specifically focused on sales as a profession and helping to enable higher education or university students prepare for a potential career in sales. And so I wanted to start by just asking you, really, what's that course all about and why did you want to create it at the university?
Matt Glennon [00:01:27]:
Well, Kyle, first off, I want to thank you for joining us for that event. That was a wonderful day together where we had a sales competition with over 30 students. And having you there not only as a judge, but also to talk and consult with our students is greatly appreciated. Thank you. So let's go back a little bit in time. I come from the private sector. I was a product manager at Castrol for many years. It's a job that I greatly enjoy.
Matt Glennon [00:01:53]:
I went on to open my own business, and I ran that for several years, and then I rolled that into a bigger business. And during that time, I started to teach as an adjunct at Eisenberg. So that's how I started to get involved in teaching. In 2015, I was offered a full time position to start teaching marketing. And I taught the class before. I greatly enjoyed it and just was a perfect time to make a career pivot and to start teaching. And it was a great decision. So I teach marketing 301 to a class of about 480 students every semester.
Matt Glennon [00:02:32]:
I teach online, and I love everything about marketing, but I also love sales. And I had been selling for just about 25 years when I started teaching at UMass back in 2015. So after a couple of years there, I was asked, would you consider teaching a sales class? We want to get more vested or invested in sales, give that option to our students. And so I said, tentatively, yes. And I started to think, okay, what's that curriculum going to look like? Because for 25 years made cold calls, I've made executive calls. I've done warm calls, and I have a lot of experiences over the years, a lot of successes and some failures, too. So one thing I was committed to was I wanted to make it the real deal. If I'm going to teach sales, it's got to be something that reflects what it's really like to make a sales call.
Matt Glennon [00:03:29]:
The peaks and valleys of selling, the relationship part of selling. And I wanted it to be a holistic course. So I went out and started reading about what kind of textbooks can I bring into this course? What methods can I teach? And I started to look at spin selling. And this is not a knock on what's available out there, but none of it came across as authentic to me. I didn't feel like I'd be preparing students for what I experienced over those 25 years of selling. And so I started to develop the curriculum from scratch. And I started to say, okay, what do I think my students need to know in order not to just succeed in sales and close the sales, but to be happy selling to get the most out of the career, because I think it's one of the greatest careers that students can follow. I'm very passionate about it.
Matt Glennon [00:04:22]:
I wanted that all to come through in the curriculum, and that's what got me started building my own course.
Kyle Smith [00:04:27]:
So who came to you? You said you were approached. And so was it like, you don't have to say this specific name, but was it like a dean of Eisenberg who said, hey, we have this gap in sales curriculum. It's something that we want to fill, or how did that come about?
Matt Glennon [00:04:41]:
The way that it came about? And hopefully I have my timeline right. But I was asked to be the faculty advisor for the Eisenberg sales club. At the time, we had no sales club. So I went out and started it, and I started to build the sales club with just one other student. And I said, okay, I think we can do this. Let's start to work together. What would a sales club look like? And I spent a lot of time doing outreach to other faculty around the country, our partners that I'd work with. I bring a lot of companies in the classroom.
Matt Glennon [00:05:13]:
So I started to reach out to my own network of companies and the sales club actually ended up becoming very successful. But during that time frame, the natural evolution of that was, would you also like to teach a course? Now? At the time, I didn't really have any room in my schedule to teach a sales class. There wasn't a need per se to have me teach it. Did I want to teach that as part of course overload. And I decided that I would go forth with that. And I started to build the class, and then I started to teach it.
Kyle Smith [00:05:47]:
And so something that I find extremely interesting, but you would know, you've been in academia longer. But from my perspective, one of the key success metrics for the university, one of the things that they look at is cost versus five year earning potential for each individual major. And so to me, granted, I live and breathe sales, and I look at compensation plans for sales professionals that we're working with, and especially those who are five years into career. It's significantly higher than most majors that would be on the list. And so it's just interesting to me that the latest information that I saw it was from 2022, so it could be a little bit outdated. But only 38 universities out of basically 4000 offer a sales major, 68 offer a minor. So you're talking about one and 2%, respectively, of universities who offer sales as a major or a minor. And with the earning potential, and that being a quality success metric for universities, do you have any insight as to why more aren't formalizing it or codifying it into a real program?
Matt Glennon [00:06:52]:
I do have an answer, and again, this is just my opinion. The first is I do believe there's a sales stigma, that sales somehow, and this is just a perception that maybe you don't need a four year degree to go into sales. Right. And so somehow it's like lower on the pecking order than other areas of study. Now, with that being said, that is a stigma that I've never understood, ever. I don't understand it one bit. Sales is a lifeblood of most companies, as you mentioned, it's one of the highest paying professions there is. Why it's not taught more, I don't know.
Matt Glennon [00:07:31]:
My other comment on that is I do believe there's a misunderstanding on what sales is. We're all sales people. I'm on the board of directors right now of a japanese company. I made presentations last summer for five days straight, and I was selling the entire time, even though it wasn't technically selling, I was trying to convince people of my ideas. The fact that this is the direction I thought they should go now technically, it wasn't a sales call. Technically, it wasn't sales, but I was selling. And that's the misconception, I think, that prevents it from having a larger footprint at many colleges and universities. It's just the misunderstanding of the role of sales.
Matt Glennon [00:08:13]:
Whether you go into a sales job or profession, or you go into a job where maybe it's not technically sales, but you're still selling your ideas, you're selling yourself. I think once that concept of sales kind of expands, I think you'll see more universities incorporate that into the curriculum. You'll start to see more sales minors, more sales majors. And as I tell all my students, you don't have to go into sales to benefit from this course. You're all going to be selling ideas. You're all going to be selling yourself. You're all going to be negotiating in public speaking. So why wouldn't you want to study sales? So I'm still not clear on why it's not offered at more universities, but I know that there are many sales faculty around the country really advocating for it, and there's a lot of folks at Eisenberg, my department chair in particular, that's advocating for it.
Matt Glennon [00:09:09]:
I think it's just going to be part of a process until it gets to be offered at more universities and colleges as a minor in a major.
Kyle Smith [00:09:17]:
Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean no disrespect to anyone who does it. I've spent 14 years solely focused on B2B, but I think that's where some of that comes. If you've never been part of it, then the only reference point for you is a b two C interaction, where you have been the consumer of something that you as an individual consumer have purchased. And so that stigma that exists to me is solely defined by b two C interactions. And 100% of the sales professionals that I engage with play in a B2B space, which is a completely different sales motion. And so I think that having that massive blind spot on what B2B true, like enterprise professional selling looks like is a pretty significant one. And closing that knowledge gap to make somebody both at the dean or whatever, the executive level of the institution, but also at the student level, to say there's this whole world of things that you never even knew existed that help companies operate, that you could ultimately sell, that could help with that mind shift and maybe get some more adoption.
Matt Glennon [00:10:22]:
Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought that up, Kyle, because one of the things we talk about a lot in marketing, 425, and we actually do a sales simulation. To illustrate that salespeople, especially B2B, do a lot more than just selling a product or service. They're managers managing the supply channel, whether it be distributors, they're managing complex relationships at accounts and they act as an intermediary between their company and the account that they're selling. Try to bring them together. Sometimes there are issues with what a customer wants you to do and what your company is willing to do. You're training other folks, you're motivating other folks. It's a very complex role being a salesperson in a B2B environment. And it's those complexities that I think more people should be talking about, because when we talk about sales, we always think like, do you want to buy of x, y, Z? But what we don't talk about is trying to design a business plan for a distributor and trying to make sure they're advertising it properly and that they're training their people properly and that you're helping them really as a partner in that growth.
Matt Glennon [00:11:31]:
So that's a part of sales that I wish got more attention, and I think as it does, yeah, the study of sales will grow as well.
Kyle Smith [00:11:38]:
Or the most common one is like used cars, that's the stigma, or it's telemarketers. When you think about phone based sales, it's a telemarketer who, now I'm already dating myself, but who calls at dinnertime and is trying to sell you some, I don't know, consumer product, an extended warranty on your vehicle or something. And if that's the whole world of how you perceive sales, and you don't think about the fact that even at like a student level, whatever the online platform is that you operate like, someone had to sell that to UMass, and now UMass deploys that to the entire student faculty base for utilization. And that is the only way that the university operates or is able to deliver curriculum and be the recipient of like work product and like that piece of technology helps the university to operate, somebody sold that to UMass, but you never think about that if you're 18 to 22 years old at the university.
Matt Glennon [00:12:33]:
Yeah, there's an old saying, Cal, that nothing happens until a salesperson sells something. And it's true, until a salesperson actually sells something, nothing happens. And yeah, it's just a different way of thinking about the role of sales, not only as a profession, but in.
Kyle Smith [00:12:50]:
Our everyday life, 100%. And so you have the class and you mentioned a couple times, and I was a part of some things with the sales club for those who don't know well, what's the purpose of the sales club?
Matt Glennon [00:13:02]:
So the sales club, when I started it back in 2016, was an opportunity for students to participate in an RSO, a registered student organization, to where they can refine their sales skills and they can work together as a group to do that. So as part of starting that club, I licensed my sales approach, which is called GSD, that they could use that to help train his salespeople. So as part of that, they would practice and learn how to optimize a cold call, a warm call, when someone knows that you're going to be calling on a particular day, and also an executive call when you're presenting in front of a group of people and trying to convince them to make a major decision. So the premise was for them to practice with each other and to work toward becoming a professional salesperson. Now, as part of that, we got tied into a network of sales faculty around the country that have sales competitions, and we started to enroll in some of those competitions, and very surprising to me, not that I didn't think our students could do it, but we had a lot of success early on, we went out and competed and placed very high in several competitions around the country, which was a little surprising to me, only that we were competing against some colleges that had sales as a major, sales as a minor sales centers. But we, as a small little group, ended up doing very well at those competitions, and that just allowed the sales club to grow and to grow. And it's been a wonderful thing to be a part of it.
Kyle Smith [00:14:39]:
So being part of it firsthand and seeing, I don't know if this is the intention, but how much pressure is applied to those interactions. You're sitting in a room where a student walks in and has an expectation to execute a sales call, and in the room is a sample prospect. So it's essentially a role play exercise, but then also one to two judges. The timing was so perfect because I was with 75 early career like sdrs for a company the week prior. But these are people who have been doing the job anywhere from six to 24 months. And the amount of composure that students who have only gone through your class in the sales club have in that environment, compared to people who have been actually doing the job in two years. But still, that roleplay setting is just anxiety producing. But the amount of composure was one of the most impressive things to me.
Kyle Smith [00:15:30]:
Their ability to still execute a role play sales conversation, even when faced with some tough objections with an audience, was really impressive.
Matt Glennon [00:15:39]:
I loved it that is so meaningful to me that you are sharing that. It makes me feel great about the students and their preparation for that competition. One of the things we spend a lot of time on in marketing, 425 and in the sales club as well, is pretending this is real life selling. So we'll spend 40 minutes talking about before the call starts. I mean, we get into body language, we get into turning off that cell phone, we get into researching. Before you walk into that call, we spend quite a bit of time on just forming that personal connection with the person that you're meeting with. And one of the differences that I would point to with the GSD is we talk not just on how to connect with someone, but why it's important to connect with someone. And the reason it is, is to show that person that you're meeting with that this is special kind that you're about to spend together.
Matt Glennon [00:16:35]:
This is not just a robocall. You're actually recognizing that, like, for example, meeting with you today, this is special time that we have together. And I want to acknowledge that by having an authentic personal connection. And so we spend a lot of time on those types of topics. And then we get into the mechanics of the sales call. How do you open, how do you position and set the agenda, check on the agenda, go through the discovery? We do a lot of discussion and practice on the mechanics, but we also spend a lot of time on the little things, the nuances of sales, which, if all goes well, they're gonna have good calls. Like the ones that you observed on that particular day.
Kyle Smith [00:17:14]:
Yeah. And I think it was a Friday morning, 08:00 a.m. kickoff. And the club. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, the club doesn't have credits associated with it, is that right? So there's no credits. So this is purely just, you are trading your free time for skill development. And so to me, before they even started, I was already impressed because you're looking at a room of I don't know how many were there, 40, 50 students who are saying, I'm going to wake up early on a Friday morning, I'm going to put on a suit or whatever formal attire, and I'm going to go and put myself out there in front of people that I've never met who are potentially in more senior positions, which is intimidating to begin with, and my peer group, and I'm going to try to do this thing that alone, just showing up, taking the first step to just say, I'm here and I'm willing to try this and put myself out there was already impressive. And then their ability to actually deliver on the instruction that you and the club had already given them was even more impressive.
Kyle Smith [00:18:15]:
I thought it was humbling and also a little funny for me to look at, especially one student who I think was a sophomore and thinking about the way that he in particular executed his sales call, as opposed to what I sounded like when I already had an SDR job. I was like, you are so far ahead of where I was, and you're three years younger than I was when I got the sales job. So I can't even imagine what you'll be by the time you graduate.
Matt Glennon [00:18:44]:
I give all the credit to the sales club. They've got a wonderful president who did so much work to organize that event on his own. And when I first started the club back in 2016 ish that timeframe, I was involved in every aspect of the sales club, including attending the meetings and really sort of walking through each step of the process. But now the sales club operates like a business, and they have a very formalized structure. I spend a lot of time consulting them, a lot of times helping them through different parts of making arrangements for different competitions. They still utilize my GSD training approach, but they've become, in many ways, quite autonomous. And so for me, it's really nice to see that whole mechanism work. And again, I'm so happy to hear your comments about what you observed at 08:00 a.m.
Matt Glennon [00:19:36]:
on that Friday morning, because that's what I see from them every day. I mean, they take their roles in the sales club very seriously. They take sales very seriously. And I have to mention this at least once in this interview. The types of job offers that students that participate in sales club are getting when they graduate are amazing. I can't tell you how many offers I've looked at where I said, oh, my gosh, this is a six figure offer for someone that is just graduating. And I just. The sales club certainly plays role in that.
Matt Glennon [00:20:12]:
And I'm just so happy to see that. For students that really commit to the sales club, in addition to all the experiences they've got, typically there's a really nice payoff when they graduate and they apply for a full time position.
Kyle Smith [00:20:25]:
Definitely. And so one of the things that we talk about with our client base, who hires massive amounts of sales professionals, is finding the best possible talent. And if you're talking about recent college grads like, to me, this is a no brainer, because we want a couple different things. One, an ability to have an intelligent interact with somebody to be curious, ask good questions, and also some grit, which is harder to tease out in an interview process. But somebody who's been like a server who's had a rude customer before, somebody who's had to deal with some type of, like, rejection or a negative interaction so that you know that the first time they get hung up on a cold call, they're not going to say, yeah, this job isn't for me, and run away. And then you've dumped three months of training down the drain. And so somebody who's already opted in to say, I want to volunteer my time to be part of the sales club. They've already done simulated role play exercises.
Kyle Smith [00:21:18]:
Like, they've gone through all this. To me, it is like the perfect place to recruit if you want to early career sales professional. And so for people who want to have exposure to the types of students in the sales club, how do they actually get that exposure? How could they learn more about it or recruit more effectively from the sales club?
Matt Glennon [00:21:37]:
We try our best to connect companies with the sales club and we do a fair amount of outreach, but certainly we are always looking for new partners. We like to have variety in the kind of companies that come in to work with the sales club and come in to work with our marketing 4.25 class. I tell my students every semester, you can learn something from every company that comes in, regardless of whether or not you're interested in the product or service that they sell. So someone can come in selling napkins, and you may have no interest in napkins, but you can learn something from that sales professional that goes through how they go about selling napkins. And by the end of the semester, students start to realize, okay, whether I'm selling like, cloud based technology for Oracle or I'm selling cutting tools or whatever the product is, that there's similarities in that sales process. And so in terms of companies getting connected with the sales club, I do think maybe we could do a little bit more work on our website in terms of facilitating those communications. And that's something that we're continuously working on. But we do have right now a pretty full pipeline of companies that want to become connected with the sales club, and it's kind of hard for us to manage that process, but we're going to try to do our best.
Kyle Smith [00:22:58]:
Okay. Yeah, makes sense. And so you do have sponsorship opportunities and the sponsorships do what? Like why do you need them? Or what's the purpose of sponsorships of the sales club?
Matt Glennon [00:23:08]:
We need sponsors because the students do travel for competitions. We go down to the ICSC in Florida every year, which is considered one of the best sales competitions in the country. I call it the World cup of allegiant sales competitions. And the first time that we went down there, we were much smaller club. I want to say we finished 8th out of 80 schools. Yeah, we won rookie of the year. It might have been eight or ten. One of those two, I can't remember exactly, but we were rookie of the year, and then we've qualified to go back every single year.
Matt Glennon [00:23:44]:
But it does cost money to go down there. There's flights. The competition does reimburse for some of it, but there's quite a bit that they don't reimburse. The club also needs funds to go to different competitions. They handle all of that internally, so that's not something that I'm involved with, but they have an account that helps them, you know, whether it's t shirts, whether it's them going out for pizza, to keep the club fun, to be a part of it, or to travel, they do need to raise a bit of money. So right now that you have a full list of sponsors, but they're looking to grow the club, they're looking to go to more competitions. There's several that we pass on because we don't have the funds to travel to, but those are the reasons why they need sponsorship, and it's always a balance. You can only have so many sponsors.
Matt Glennon [00:24:32]:
You do need to have enough time during the club meetings just to practice sales and to make sure that it doesn't feel like it's 100% recruiting, if that makes sense.
Kyle Smith [00:24:41]:
Of course, yeah. But just an opportunity to even have an investment in what, you know, to be the future of sales. Like these people who are going to be coming through the programs are going to be phenomenal sales professionals. And so making an investment in that, I think, is a positive thing and just something that I want to create more awareness of. Because if companies have the opportunity to or interest in investing, then it's not just for recruiting. There's actual things that they need to spend money on, like access to these sales competitions when. Which is only going to make them better and improve their exposure and their confidence and all of that. So I think that's a really positive thing and something that I would encourage more companies to get involved in.
Matt Glennon [00:25:21]:
Yeah. And Kyle, as I mentioned, I do some work in the private sector over the summer, and so I cannot recruit from the sales club. There's reasons for that that I can't, but I can say this as someone who works in the private sector. If it was me, I would think that getting involved with the sales club would be a great decision because as you mentioned, there's tremendous talent there. The students, when they graduate, even before they graduate, are ready to make sales calls. They have grit, they have a passion for sales, and if I was someone that was in the private sector that could recruit or become involved with the Eisenberg sales club, I couldn't recommend that any higher. There's just lots of students there waiting for an opportunity to show you what they got.
Kyle Smith [00:26:07]:
Absolutely. So if you look at three years out, what in your perfect world would the sales curriculum and sales club look like?
Matt Glennon [00:26:18]:
I believe that we would like to add more courses. Marketing 425 is a very comprehensive sales course. We do a lot of things in that course. We actually do a simulation where students are sales managers and they run a company and they set pricing and they hire and fire salespeople. You know, we do this over a course of twelve weeks and they get an opportunity to see what sales management looks like, what kind of decisions that they make, what the impact of those decisions are. That's one part of the class. But that in itself could be an entire course, just sales management could easily be, but I give them an experiential opportunity to see what it might be like. But I can't dedicate enough time to that topic.
Matt Glennon [00:27:05]:
We do the training modules, we get into CRM and we do pipelines and the meaning and importance of pipelines, how they are probably one of the most important things that a salesperson maintains. But what I could certainly see is adding more courses to spend appropriate time on these topics. So sort of a 300 level sales class where they can spend more time on these topics than eventually marketing 425 would be a senior level class. So I think there's room for potentially one or more classes, whether it's a sales certificate, a minor, who knows, maybe a major. None of these are set in stone by the way. These are just discussion topics. I can't tell you that that's going to happen.
Kyle Smith [00:27:55]:
No, just a vision, just like perfect world, what does this turn into?
Matt Glennon [00:27:59]:
Yeah, yeah, perfect world. I would love to see all of those things happen and I would love to see our sales competition grow to where we have 80 schools coming every fall. We move it over to the student union, we have a huge trade show and we have people hiring at the trade show and then it becomes a much bigger event. And I hope that sales grows. And probably the biggest thing for me is that and I think you and I touched on this earlier, changing, like, how people think of sale and the fact that it is, yes, we do sell things, and that's important. We make calls. But actually, to look at sales more holistically, in terms of the fact that you're also a business manager, you're also facilitating and navigating issues between end use customers of a company, that you are a trainer yourself in terms of motivating other people to sell. And we start to look at what professional sales really means in a greater context.
Matt Glennon [00:28:58]:
And I think if we were to expand the curriculum, that would be my recommendation, is how we market the sales program. I'd like to see that reflect my previous comments. That would be important to me.
Kyle Smith [00:29:10]:
All right, well, fingers crossed. I would love to, in three years time, see UMass listed with a sales miner on that, what is currently a short list, and then take it from there. So that would be great. But, matt, I really appreciate you coming on, sharing all this. I'll definitely have you back on so we can keep our finger on the pulse of what's happening, both with the sales curriculum, you, and the sales club at umass. But thank you again.
Matt Glennon [00:29:33]:
And Kyle, I want to thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you today, and also, once again, thank you for your involvement with the eisenberg sales competition, and we hope to see you there next year.
Kyle Smith [00:29:44]:
Absolutely. I'll be there. Thanks for listening to this episode of Market Mastery brought to you by the bridge group. If you're a revenue leader in the B2B sales space or know someone who is, connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes.