Universities

The way of educating young professionals through apprenticeship changed once universities started offering degree programs to students in fields like law, accounting, and engineering. Business education soon followed with universities starting to award Masters of Business Administration. In a short time, professional certifying groups like the legal and accounting associations started to communicate that the preferred way to be trained in those professions was to go to school.

Somewhere in that transition from apprenticeship to university-led training, the focus on how to engage with clients was lost. Today, we are left with a situation where earning credentials in your field means that you know how to deliver work but don't necessarily know how to sell that work.

That bears repeating:

Selling insights, design, expertise, and advice is NOT something you were taught in the classroom.

Doug knows. He's a professor of business. “We teach students accounting, computer science, engineering but not how to sell those services. Sales is the pariah of the academic world.”

That is because sales, as a discipline, is thought to be beneath the academy.

While business schools have continued to offer some type of sales management instruction—usually within a larger marketing course—they do not offer courses in salesmanship skills. The topic remains, just as it was in the 1910s, more suitable for popular how-to books and memoirs of successful salespeople than for academic classes.

—Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America

Here's the first-year MBA curriculum at Wharton, grouped into six categories of classes:

• Leadership: Foundations of Teamwork and Leadership
• Marketing: Marketing Management
• Microeconomics: Microeconomic Foundation
• Economics: Advanced Topics in Managerial Economics
• Statistics: Regression Analysis for Managers
• Management Communication: Speaking and Writing

Nothing on selling or business development. Odd, you think; your dad's voice rings in your head, “Nothing ever happens unless somebody sells something.” To be fair, he was in insurance, but still, you'd think there'd be a course on how to sell at a business school. Doesn't every company have a sales division? Aren't one out of every twenty Americans employed in some kind of sales job?

Other professional schools like architecture, law, or accounting also ignore sales. Flip through the Stanford Law School catalog, and you will see courses in mergers and acquisitions and in administrative, environmental, criminal, and intellectual property law, but you won't find a sales course.

What gives? Don't professionals run businesses, and don't businesses need customers?

The dirty little secret of professional finishing schools is that they equip you to do the work, but they give you little guidance on how to find customers.

This situation is okay if you are a junior person at a large consulting or professional services firm. The senior people will feed you work and keep you busy toiling in the basement without rest, but…

• if you want to be a senior person, you will need to learn about how to effectively find new business.
• if you spin out and start your own firm, you will need to learn about how to effectively find new business.
• if at any point in your future, you want to stop being at the bottom of the totem pole, grinding away at work passed down from on high, you will need to learn how to effectively find new business.

It's crazy if you think about it—that we would invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into making sure we have the skills to help clients when they walk in the door but not a cent on making sure the hinges on the door are well oiled.

Historically, training of professionals to win new clients has been haphazard. Law, accounting, engineering, medical, and architectural schools teach nothing about selling. This is also true of most business schools, surprisingly so, given that a sale is what defines the existence of a business. Many firms offer in-house education on technical issues, and almost all provide such training on the job, but marketing and sales training is spotty. Most of us must learn by trial and error.

—Ford Harding, Rain Making

Why Business Schools Do Not Teach How to Sell Professional Services

If you want to become a professor of philosophy, there is a thousand-year history of being trained and credentialed by a university as a PhD. Not so with consultants and professional services providers. Their credentialing is a very recent phenomenon. It was only in 1887 that thirty-one accountants decided to band together to create the American Association of Public Accountants to set standards for their profession and to begin to test would-be accountants on their proficiency.

Universities, too, came into the act relatively recently, and when they did, their newly created business schools struggled for academic legitimacy.

We have no record of a business school in the New World before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. The earliest we know of was founded in Plymouth in 1635, probably a transplant from a thriving British industry. Mr. Morton, its proprietor, advertised reading, writing, and the casting of accounts. For two centuries and a half after that, business schools remained purely vocational, concentrating on ‘penmanship, bookkeeping, rapid methods of making computations, and grammatical construction and composition of mercantile correspondence.’

—Richard Rosett, former Dean, Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago

Then at the turn of the last century, a new class of business school emerged, offering advanced courses and broadening their scope away from the techniques of business to include best practices in business. Rosett says:

Chicago's dean in 1928, Leon Carroll Marshall, described a new sort of business professor who would “devote [himself] to the study and presentation of the fundamental processes, conditions, and forces of ‘business with quite incidental attention to minor techniques.'” Marshall advised that, “business education calls for mature contacts with several existing scientific disciplines…the economics of today should place emphasis upon quantitative analysis and upon such…borderlands as between economics and law, or between economics and psychology.”

This push away from the practical and toward the theoretical caught fire, and soon business schools were offering not only MBAs but PhDs in business. Like other social sciences, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology, the study of business suffered from an inferiority complex as newcomers in the academic ranks. Business departments made up for it by emulating the hard sciences like mathematics and physics, teaching economics, finance, the management of resources—anything that could be quantified—while eschewing soft skills like people management or sales, which might be better learned standing at the side of an experienced practitioner.

Sales—the art of finding and engaging with a would-be client—became a relic like computation and penmanship that was best left to vocational “Schools of Commerce.”

And so few of us were trained in how to sell consulting or professional services. This is ironic. As a nation, we pride ourselves on being at the leading edge of business. We love showcasing technology companies at our business schools. And yet companies like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft were built on effective salesforces in addition to great technology. Companies like Google and Facebook, while not as salesforce-intensive, are in the business of helping other businesses sell.

The result of this is that when we think about the need to increase our business by doing more business development, our stomach tightens. It is not something we were taught.

“I wish the quality of my work would be enough to grow my practice.”

“I hate sales. It's beneath me.”

“I'm not a marketing person.”

“Whenever I try and wade into business development, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing.”

If you are having those thoughts, stop beating yourself up. You are confusing your lack of confidence with your lack of training. Tom goes golfing with his company every July. It used to make him tense because he is not a golfer. Four or five times later, though, he was having fun (they're scrambles). This is the nature of humans when they move out of their comfort zone and then expand that zone as they acquire new skills.

Relax. You were taught how to help clients with your expertise, but no one ever said, “Here's how you attract new clients.” You wouldn't expect employees to do a good job on a new task for which they hadn't been trained. Don't judge yourself by a different standard.