Home

Multimedia

The Center for Sales Leadership has produced videos of support material for our classes. Below is a list of some of our videos.

About the Effective Business Communication class:

Marketing 376 .

Effective Business Communication Mixer Videos

The video series below features Dr. Joel Whalen and Clancy Ryan, MBA, instructing students on how to work a networking event at one of the Center for Sales Leadership’s quarterly networking mixers. It covers topics including managing anxiety, introducing yourself, shaking hands and creating and delivering an effective twenty second pitch.

Videos:

The Peanut Presentation

The Peanut Presentation is a demonstration of the required techniques for team presentations in the MKT 376 Effective Business Communication class conducted by a team of DePaul alumni.

DePaul Insights Articles

VOL 1 - RETENTION – How will you break the costly cycle of turnover?
VOL 2 - WANTED: Motivated Millennials For Team Environments
VOL 3 - TRUST: The Key Component in Personal Financial Sales

About the Center for Sales Leadership

This video, produced by Fave Media Inc., provides a quick overview of our program.

General News

The 2009 Universities and Colleges Sales Education Landscape Report is done! DePaul University’s Center for Sales Leadership conducts a biennial survey of the existence, content and scope of sales education programs in universities and colleges in the United States to determine individual and overall progress towards excellence in the education area across a variety of sales education programs. Read more about it here.

Newsletters

Inside Sales, the Sales Leadership Program quarterly newsletter, is designed to keep Sales Leadership Program students, prospective students, alumni, partners, prospective partners and DePaul staff and faculty informed of program changes and news. It is distributed on a quarterly basis and available for all students in the program in email form, on Blackboard and in hard copy in the Marketing Department’s office (DePaul Center, Suite 7500).

Check out our latest issue from Spring 2010 and previous issues from Winter 2010 and Fall 2009.

DePaul at Dreamforce

salesforce.com has an annual conference which is called Dreamforce. In 2007, for the first time, they featured a complete track of sessions developed to educate government, non-profit companies and educational institutions on how to use on-demand CRM to assist in superior delivery of their mission. Our very own Dan Strunk spoke about our use of Salesforce.com and how other universities could use it to improve performance. See the full video below or if you would just like to watch Dan's section fast forward to about 35 minutes in.

3M Frontline Conference

Throughout the 2007 3M Frontline Conference hosted by DePaul University, 3M’s newest class of summer interns participated in a specially designed competition titled “The Apprentice - Chicago Style.”

The interns represented a diverse group of students from 3M partner universities, including three students from DePaul University. Students were divided in two teams from outside their own school. The challenge was to create a product, develop a marketing plan and price point, secure the components and sell the final product to students, faculty and staff on DePaul’s two campuses - all in three days.

The interns were each provided CTA passes and city maps, as well as a list of potential places to secure the product components in the city. Although apprehensive at first, each team hit the ground running to produce amazing results. The “Think Red” team focused on selling three levels of product at the Lincoln Park Campus, the most popular of which was red apples with a red ribbon and a message tied to each apple focusing on the serious statistics of the worldwide AIDS epidemic. With each apple sold, they also requested a donation to the New Orleans AIDS Taskforce.

“Team 4 Life” prepared a snack pack consisting of light snacks and candy, focusing on a raffle of an iPod and donation to the Susan B. Korman Foundation for breast cancer on the Loop Campus. They also provided each purchaser and donor with a pink ribbon.

Initially, each team was provided $500 in capital to launch their product. After the event was over, the two teams had earned enough to return the capital, as well as donate nearly $1,000 to the two charities combined. The teams presented their concept and product to a panel of 3M executives. Judges and conference participants were overwhelmed by the quality and successful outcome of the challenge. Congratulations to all the 3M interns!

Articles

DePaul Insights is a continuing series of information-transfer papers based on accumulated wisdom from academic research, practitioner research, and field experience in the sales profession. The focus of these papers is to share knowledge on the key issues of acquiring talent, building skills sets, leveraging knowledge, performance management, and talent retention in high performance professional sales organizations.

DePaul Insights Articles:

VOL 1 - RETENTION – How will you break the costly cycle of turnover?
VOL 2 - WANTED: Motivated Millennials For Team Environments
VOL 3 - TRUST: The Key Component in Personal Financial Sales

TRUST:The Key Component in Personal Financial Sales
By Kathleen Jackson, M.B.A.

Kathleen Jackson on Vimeo.

It is often said, and generally agreed, that trust is an important factor in personal financial services sales; investments, insurance and financial planning. In fact, trust is an important factor in most sales, and its importance in the personal financial services arena is frequently understated. To understand this, it helps to look at the requirements of trust – under what circumstances will one person trust another – and then to understand why and how trust matters in a sales environment and why personal financial services is a special case. In a future article, having understood the imperative to generate trust, we can explore the steps required to make this happen. The good news for people entering the world of personal financial services sales is that this is something we can all learn to do better.

The Elements of Trust

Three conditions are necessary in order for trust to be present in a business environment (and most personal environments as well). In order to trust someone, you must firmly believe that:

They have your best interests at heart, meaning that they will not knowingly give you bad advice or do the wrong thing for you, and that if called upon do to so, they would sacrifice their own self-interest in favor of yours;
They are reliable, which in this case specifically means that they will do what they say they are going to do;
They have the competence and capability to deliver on their promises, to deliver the results they say they can deliver.

Success with Trust All three of these elements are prerequisites for trust. It is interesting to note, however, that competence is last on the list. If you do not believe someone who is offering to help you solve a problem truly has your best interest at heart, why would you ever trust him? Likewise, if you find yourself working with someone who, however well intentioned, does not follow through on promises, you quickly will find that there is no point listening to any promise that person makes. In most cases, these two elements come into play long before any results, through which competence ultimately will be assessed, are actually delivered.

Why is Personal Financial Sales a Special Case?

Trust is especially important, but also elusive, in the sale of personal financial services. Why is this the case? Trust is important in part because we have certain social taboos about money. For example, we are taught from an early age not to talk about it. So merely having a candid discussion about your finances with an outsider requires a high degree of trust. However, the most significant factor that makes trust essential in financial services is simply the fact that the consequences of a bad outcome can be devastating. Losing a significant portion of your wealth, or even just not having it grow as much as you planned, can prevent you from fulfilling your family obligations and living the life you expected and worked many years to achieve. That is about as material a consequence as most of us could imagine.

As important as trust is in financial services, figuring out whom you can trust in that arena historically has been quite difficult. For one thing, the industry operated for years on commission structures that created an inherent conflict of interest between advisor and client. No matter how honest and well-intentioned the advisor, the presence of that conflict cannot be ignored or understated. Similarly, because commission-based sales could produce quite high incomes, the industry attracted some people who were more motivated by their own acquisition of wealth than the wealth of their clients. The combination of these factors gave entire sectors of the industry (for example life insurance and to a lesser extent stock brokerage) a bad name. Even as the industry slowly migrates to compensation structures that align client and advisor interests, the shadow of that negative reputation continues to cast a pall.

Trust Article In addition, it is particularly hard to assess the competence of a financial advisor, even after the fact. Everyone knows that it is very hard to get into, let alone through, medical school. It is safe to assume that even a doctor who finished in the bottom half of his/her class is still pretty smart. In addition, doctors can achieve board certification in their specialty as further evidence of competence. There are no specific academic requirements for entering financial services, especially in a sales position. There are some professional designations, and licenses, but these tend not to be very helpful to prospective clients. And where investment decisions are concerned, no one is right all the time. It is a business of judgment calls, many of which can be defended as good decisions even if they produce a negative return. So how many unsuccessful decisions does an advisor have to make before the client should rightly question his or her competence? There is no good answer.

Interestingly, however, changes that have occurred over the past 10 years or so in personal wealth management have reduced the importance of competence. Asset allocation is now a very standard offering. In fact, that and assessment of client risk tolerance often are the only services the advisor actually performs. Both are relatively mechanical and not subject to much judgment. The actual selection of securities increasingly is outsourced to mutual fund managers and other investment professionals. In this environment, the substantive differentiation between financial advisors is quite small. Ironically, the ability to engender and maintain the client’s trust now survives as the primary source of differentiation.

Think back to the elements of trust described earlier. Competence has diminished as a source of trust. Doing what you say you are going to do is a matter of fundamental professionalism – anyone who fails on this score is in trouble for a host of reasons. That leaves as the primary source of differentiation between financial advisors the ability to get clients to believe that you truly have their best interests at heart.

For the print version of this article click here.

About the author: Kathleen began her business career selling retirement plans and within 18 months earned the distinction of one of the top ten commissioned sales people out of 23,000 agents in the company. She holds a BS from Portland State University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She also serves as an Adjunt Professor for the Center for Sales Leadership in Chicago, IL.

In a future article, we will discuss the Seven Steps of Building Trust.

WANTED: Motivated Millennials For Team Environments
By Jeannie K Sticher

Numerous articles, documentaries, films and books have examined the Millennial Generation. Uncovered within these works is an unusual paradox. While Millennials are often labeled as “high maintenance”, they also have potential for high performance. Millennials are entering their careers with more information, greater technology savvy and a firm desire to connect to work and society. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? In addition, Millennials have high expectations for themselves. They expect and rely on their employers to offer constructive and timely feedback. Millennials see effective evaluation as a way for them to improve their own performance as well as their teams.

In customer management today, companies rely on employee teams to actively develop relationships with customers. Strong customer relationships often lead to more profitable and effective business relationships. These teams may be directly or indirectly connected through a myriad of organizational design and management systems.

Baby Boomer or Gen X generations may recall attending training sessions focused on building, managing and motivating teams. There courses were designed to improve or create unity as well as learn how to share and define success in terms of the entire team. While previous generations have had to undergo training to learn how to effectively work as a team, Millennials are already highly focused in this area. Today’s educational system revolves around the importance of teamwork. Teamwork and collaborating toward a mutually beneficial outcome is as natural to the Millennials as downloading songs to an iPod or programming a Blackberry.

Many current employees of sales organizations recoil at the idea of another task force or team to solve problems. However, Millennials look upon this as an opportunity for connecting with peers and other departments. Teamwork is considered a natural way to learn, problem solve or be heard throughout the organization.

Millennials have grown up collaborating, voicing their opinions and using technology to stay connected. This can be a win-win for sales organizations hunting for talent.

The average Millennial spends 72 hours per week using electronic media, i.e.; cell phones, internet, music and video games according to a 2006 study.¹This time spent networking has created the most collaborative and team-oriented generation the world has seen in decades. “There is an intense focus on openness, sharing information, as an ideal and practical strategy to get things done,” explains Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook.²

Millennials place a strong value on being heard due to their team orientation. They can act as each other’s resources or peer mentors, providing feedback quickly and effectively to each other, rather than waiting for a monthly or yearly review.

To better understand Millennials and their value to sales organizations and customer teams, a few myths and realities need explanation:

MYTH: Millennials are not competitive.³

REALITY: They have not grown up with the zero-sum game where in order for someone to win, someone has to lose. Millennials are more interested in beating their own game, so feedback and keeping score are important. They are motivated by team oriented outcomes that allow them to collaborate instead of compete.

MYTH: Millennials are slackers.⁴

REALITY: Motivated differently than previous generations, Millennials value relationships over money and status. If they believe their work is valued and appreciated, they will work hard to make relationships happen. Millennials do not want to disappoint their teams or those with whom they have developed a personal connection.

MYTH: Millennials lack communication and interpersonal skills.

REALITY: Because they maintain larger and closer networks than previous generations, Millennials tend to have an abbreviated etiquette for communication. While they may gloss over some niceties and are not known for superlative table manners, they have a genuine concern and respect for people.

MYTH: Millennials are hard to train.

REALITY: Millennials are not interested in textbooks, company manuals or classroom-type training. They prefer to learn on the job through experience, similar to how they play video games. Millennials learn very quickly from mistakes and are natural problem solvers. They believe in testing a system or process for failure. This allows Millennials to effectively find hidden solutions or efficiencies in business processes.

These realities are all great news for sales organizations and customer teams.

With these skills and their desire to always be learning, Millennials have much to offer sales organizations. In return, they ask for teamwork, constructive feedback, a sense of collaboration and the organization’s willingness to think differently about their generation. It is important and necessary for organizations to embrace their ability to network and develop relationships as a highly valued resource. Companies willing to give this generation an opportunity to work with customer teams will experience a strong competitive advantage in the future.

For the print version and endnotes click here.

About the author: Jeannie K Sticher is a former sales executive with experience in managing large domestic and global customer teams. Jeannie is currently an adjunct professor at DePaul University teaching undergraduate and graduate classes within the Sales Curriculum. She also serves as the Director of Community Development for the Center of Sales Leadership in Chicago, IL.

RETENTION – How will you break the costly cycle of turnover?
By Dave Hoffmeister

Executive Summary Below

The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of turnover in sales organizations today, quantify their various costs, understand the reasons driving turnover, investigate various employee populations and recommend how retention can be improved.