Selling As an Honorable Profession, by Mike Bosworth

I recently gave a keynote talk to 100 college business professors. The subject was "Selling As an Honorable Profession." A few thoughts for you. First, for 50% of all college graduates without a specialty, their first job is in sales. Yet, out of 4000 colleges and universities in the US, only 33 have an emphasis in sales or sales management. "Sales" is still not a "profession" most college students aspire to.

Why not? In my opinion, it is how selling is defined in our society. The prevalent definition of selling is "convincing, persuading, getting prospects to do what you want, when you want them to, handling objections, taking at least 5 "no's" before you leave, etc." With a definition like that, how will selling ever be thought of as an honorable profession?

An honorable definition would be "helping people understand how if they had your offering (product or service), THEY could achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need." If this were the standard, accepted definition of selling, then I believe we would get many more college students thinking about careers in sales and we would have many more colleges and universities facilitating that vision.

What do you think? Poll some of your peers and have them write down their definition of "selling." See if their definition is honorable.

One Response to "Selling As an Honorable Profession, by Mike Bosworth"

1. Dan Wisniewski Says:
   August 29th, 2007 at 5:57 pm

   Selling is not an Honorable Profession because selling is actually nothing more than a transaction. The honorable profession that you are referring to is probably inaccurately named. In the honorable profession of selling, the exchange of money for a service or product is actually a very small percentage of what is done. Of course, lets not get confused, it is the goal that we are aiming for, however it is very little of the action. Any "Sales" person that is worth their compensation knows that they spend far more of their time listening, diagnosing, strategizing, confirming and connecting. This is at least my justification of why you find so few people in the "honorable profession" called "Sales" people.