Selling skills.
Anyone can change a revenue growth rate assumption in Excel from 2% to 3%. A monkey could do that, too.
But while you can’t teach a monkey to sell, you can teach a business school student to, but business schools see it as beneath them to do so, and they don’t provide any formal training in it.
Well, this is really unfortunate. Can any business survive or thrive without strong sales? Not so much.
Yet the current state of affairs is that tens of thousands of newly minted MBAs and Masters graduates come out of school each June, and most have zero understanding of or appreciation for how to pitch a product or service to a sales prospect. They don’t know how to think about or structure a sales pitch, in writing or verbally, and if you put them on the phone with a prospect, it would be an absolute disaster. This lack of training is honestly doing the students and the businesses where they land a huge disservice.
All schools conferring any business-oriented degree absolutely need to require all their students make cold-calls for a full week, 8 hours a day, so the students learn what it takes to make a sale, so they have respect for the sales function and sales professionals, and so they think critically before changing that revenue growth rate assumption so casually and quickly.
Thoughts?