Round peg in a square hole: Why there is no MBA in Sales, in India?
I am visiting prof in few of the premium B-schools in our country. I teach marketing courses, with a specialization on data-driven marketing & inbound practices, and standard courses viz., Strategic marketing, Marketing Research, B2B marketing et al.
For the past few years, I have been watching the placement trends in many institutes. Over 70% of the MBA marketing folks, end up in a sales job, during placements. Some aspire to land in sales, and most accept it as reality — with a hope to transition into a marketing job after a few years.
Now there are couple of questions that pop up,
1. Will they do the sales job, by trial and error?
2. Why there is no MBA-Sales course that matches the demand?
The first question I received answers in affirmative from students who are in touch with me, due to my corporate/industry experience & background. For example, most of them struggle to get meetings, and the bigger challenge is how to deal with objections during the meetings. Sales and marketing are two different functions, one focused on direct engagement, relationships, and the other focused on indirect multi-touch, experience. While there is a strong link between the two, the skills needed to excel, are quite different.
The second question I have voiced in few academic councils that meet for curriculum development. The standard answer I received is there will be no takers for MBA Sales, as ‘sales’ is always looked down. While on the other side, there are less known training institutes that make a killing of charging anywhere between 10k to 100k per day of sales courses. Corporate trainers and sales coaches are plenty in the market, whose charges range from 100k to 500k for running sales workshops. A research published in Economic Times claims, barely 8 per cent of sales leaders (directors, VPs and AVPs level) went to tier-1 MBA universities. In fact, as many as 62 per cent of these sales leaders are actually just under-graduates, with sales learnt outside of our B-schools. And this isn’t surprising!
Are our B-Schools equipped? If not MBA sales, please think of an EMBA Sales.