MBA Strategic Selling and Sales Leadership Concentration

The course addresses topics related to building and developing effective relationships at the customer interface. The goal is to help students develop and practice skills in the areas of interpersonal communications, negotiations, creating value and product solutions, presentation, asking questions, active listening, determining customer needs, and identifying & qualifying prospects. Role-plays and interactive exercises are employed in order to help students apply the knowledge to real-world situations. Cases are also employed on certain topics such as ethics and negotiation.

The course gives students a complete picture of the scientific principles and issues revolving around the management of a field sales force regionally and internationally. Accordingly, the course deals with discussing the sales function and its relationship with a firm's marketing program, crafting a sales strategy and setting sales objectives. It also focuses on performing important decisions such as recruiting, hiring, training, compensating salespeople and implementing a sales program. Cases based on real-world situations and a sales management simulation are employed so that students practice applying tools and frameworks in their own decision-making processes.

The course focuses on building hard/quantitative skills sales professionals need in order to make decisions both inside their firm and at the customer interface. Specifically, the course builds skills in the areas of strategic account identification/selection, calculating customer-centric metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), customer risk analysis, customer acquisition and retention metrics, sales forecasting and opportunity management, performance analysis, sales resource allocation, and analyzing and evaluating sales territories. Students use datasets and software to make decisions about important problems sales professionals face in their work. Cases based on real-world situations are also employed so that students practice the application of theoretical knowledge.