Sales directors and vice presidents are invited to an “Inside Sales Leaders Roundtable” hosted by the Center for Sales Innovation to be held at 3M on February 12, from 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Participants will benefit from learning about inside sales competencies, processes and operations that successful organizations employ. The discussion will be based around an eight-month, 3M task force that is benchmarking inside sales. The College of St. Catherine’s Lynn Schleeter is a member of the task force. If interested, call Lynn at 651-690-8762.

St. Kate Sales Alumna Named Wells Fargo Store Manager

The Center for Sales Innovation congratulates Heather Danks on entering the management ranks of Wells Fargo as its Store Manager in Lakeville. The 2001 business-to-business sales and marketing graduate joined Wells Fargo in 2007 in the banker development training program for personal bankers — a manager-in-training program — followed by a management position in the Burnsville store where she reported to the Store Manager. She now reports to a District Manager.

According to Heather, the key to her professional development at Wells Fargo has been a very supportive training and high-touch coaching environment. “The managers are really involved with their people and coach them on performance,” she says. She also was prepared for a future management role by the Center for Sales Innovation and credits professors bringing their own experiences into the classrooms and being set up to be a leader through a wide range of activities and assignments. “Being in smaller classes with intelligent women and motivated peers was helpful in that we were always getting ideas from each other,” Heather says.

By Greg Di Novis
Associate Professor of Business Administration
College of St. Catherine

The objective of our Professional Sales: Customer-Centered Selling course is to build student confidence in planning and making effective sales calls. This theory-based, applications-oriented course is grounded in sales research. It also incorporates the contributions of our sales faculty and professional selling corporate partners.

We employ a customer-centered sales model that maps the buying process and helps guide the future salesperson in how to listen and ask questions, identify needs, understand buyer decision processes, build trust, and manage time and territories. Experiential techniques of the course include:

Guest speakers – Professional business-to-business (B2B) sales representatives discuss how they have handled an ethical issue.

Tele-sales lab – Sales students participate in the college’s annual fund drive by “working the phones” to polish their approach, build rapport, listen and gain commitment. Making “cold calls” on alumna, without the benefit of non-verbal communication signals, provide many useful lessons.

Role plays – Role plays reinforce specific selling techniques. A series of labs culminate in a formal role-play assignment where each student plans and conducts three sales calls on three professional B2B buyers. The interactions are recorded and critiqued by each buyer; the student prepares a self-evaluation of what worked well and why — and what might have been done differently and why.

Time and territory management – A field-researched sales case “places” students in a recently vacated geographical territory and requires them to “hit the ground running.” Challenges include addressing immediate customer issues and closing the territory’s sales performance to quota shortfall.

Role modeling – A mentor project requires each student to “shadow” a professional B2B salesperson to observe an actual customer call, and compare and contrast what takes place with what is discussed in the classroom.

The time-tested theory and application approach helps students learn the language of selling. Course assessments show that students acquire new skills and unload some misconceptions about relationship building and consultative selling.