UCO offers professional selling minor

BY PAULA BURKES Comments 0
Published: November 1, 2009
Modified: October 31, 2009 at 10:52 am

Career salesman Bob Kaiser said he "couldn’t sell snowballs to Eskimos” when he graduated with a degree in business from the University of Central Oklahoma in 1972. Over the next 30 years, he learned how to sell on the job in local, regional and national sales positions with SSI Custom Data Cards, The Arthur Blank & Co., Fentress Oil and others.

Bob Kaiser

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Today, Kaiser, who also holds a master’s degree in business administration from UCO, is heading a new 18-hour minor program in professional selling at his alma mater. A few other universities in the state offer courses in selling, but UCO is the only in Oklahoma and among a dozen nationwide that offers a major or minor program, he said.

"Some look at selling as a vocation, but it’s a skill,” Kaiser said. In the program, students — through role-playing presentations and case studies — learn how to prospect, plan sales calls, make sales presentations, close sales and build relationships. About 100 are enrolled, Kaiser said.

"The most difficult thing to deal with in selling is failure,” he said. "If you make 100 prospecting calls, you may get 10 people to talk to you. And you’ll sell to less than half of the people you make presentations to.”

Students, he said, also learn how to handle objections and look for buying signals.

In Oklahoma, sales and related occupations account for 158,000 jobs; 64,000 excluding retail and cashiers, said Lynn Gray, economist with the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission. "The sector hasn’t been hit as hard as others in the recession,” Gray said. "It’s easier to get a job in selling because a lot are commission-based.”

According to OESC data, average salaries for salespersons range from $53,000 for insurance salesmen to $67,000 for Realtors to $75,000 for securities brokers to $87,000 for sales engineers.

Jim Farris of James Farris Associates outplacement and search firm applauds UCO’s new program.

"One of the biggest problems people who want to get into pharmaceutical or other sales confront is they have no sales experience,” Farris said. "They’ll ask me, ‘How am I going to get experience, without a job selling?’”