Several weeks ago I went to Mountain View for a friend's birthday celebration. She went to Sloan for her MBA, and we met a couple times during the MBA Sales Competition at Sloan and other inter-mural events. The catch-up reminded me of this blog, :P because I had wanted to post the script of my final speech for a communication course at Wharton. I founded the Wharton Sales Club and envisioned it would be a great benefit for MBA students to learn how to sell (not necessarily by taking a sales job) in any career path. Since my last post was about recruiting like a salesman, I wanted to share some more thoughts about "selling". So here it is:
Hello everyone, my name is "Mate, I C Bill". I’m a Wharton MBA, Class of 2009. For those of you in Class of 2010, 11 and beyond, what kind of skills do you want to improve the most? I’m sure financial modeling, market research, etc. all deserve to be on your list. And how about the skill of selling?
By the word “selling”, I’m not talking about turning every MBA graduate into a used car sales person. The sales education for MBA should focus on developing the selling skill that can be universally applied to any business and career needs, because essentially business is all about selling.
We come to Wharton for the best business education in the world and prepare ourselves for the next step in our career. Let’s face it – the whole recruiting process is indeed a process of selling! If the career management service can’t find your dream job, you need to do lots of networking to find prospects, in other words, companies which may have hiring needs. Then you try to set up a brief meeting or phone call to introduce yourself and understand their needs more. After the first meeting, you should try to get the second, or even third, fourth meeting, before you eventually close the deal and land the job.
Again, business is all about selling.
After you land your dream job, selling will still continue to be a key element of your career success. Lots of successful Wharton alumni told me how important selling is to their career.
As partner of consulting firm, you sell.
As senior executive at investment bank, you sell.
As entrepreneur, you sell your start-up ideas to VC investors.
As VC/PE partner, you sell fund-raising proposal to the LPs.
And last but not the least, if you’re on a date and if you want to get a second date, you really have to do a damn good job to sell yourself, right? :o)
See? Not only business but also life is all about selling.
I’m sure some of you might be thinking that the skill of selling is really reserved for only a few gifted people. It seems to be true some people are born to be good at selling, but for the rest of us, I believe we can learn and improve, if we start doing it today at Wharton.
Let me tell you my story. I was a chemist before I came to Wharton. I used to think as long as your chemistry is great, you can definitely wow the audience. Soon after I made it to Wharton, such mindset failed miserably. During my first year, I participated in the MIT Sloan MBA Sales Competition, and not surprisingly, my performance sucked. Of course your product won’t sell itself, just because you think it’s good. Understand the customer need and then make a sound value proposition! With feedbacks from the judge in each round, I was able to apply the learning to the following round and instantly showed some improvement. It was an eye-opening experience for me. A year later, I was so excited about the competition that I decided to go to MIT Sloan again. This time my total score was ranked No. 5 out of 70 contestants from the 11 top business schools such as HBS, Stanford, Chicago, LBS and so on.
If a chemistry geek like me can show some improvement of the selling skill, I’m confident you can do even better.
As Founder of the Wharton Sales Club, I’d like to invite you to join this exciting club. Our mission is to promote the MBA sales education and prepare you for your career success. Since the club was launched in November 2008, we’ve brought in professional sales trainer, successful entrepreneur, and even managing director from UBS to share their perspective on selling. We’ve also had the privilege to have Prof. Stuart Diamond as our faculty advisor. As you may know, Professor Diamond teaches negotiations and is the most popular professor in the course auction. In addition to sales seminars and workshops, we will also launch our sales competition and sales conference for you to gain hands-on experience and real-world perspective.
Let’s develop a salesman spirit, because business is all about selling. Wharton will be a great place for us to learn how to sell. Let’s get started now!
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