Professional Sales is one of many communication channels that marketers can use to integrate their messages to their target audiences. This course clearly positions itself within the IMC umbrella with an emphasis on organizations as the target audience. It is this emphasis on communications in a professional manner that make the course so valuable to all marketing majors. The value of verbal and listening skills will become evident throughout your career. During your first and subsequent interviews for internships and careers, the benefit of engaging business role-plays becomes evident. The favorite quote we see from former students is that “this class is unlike any other you will take at JMU.”

The Sales Leadership course (MKTG 455) provides an experiential learning environment where students practice the necessary training, coaching and mentoring skills necessary to succeed in a leadership role and then use those skills to train, coach, and mentor fellow JMU students taking the MKTG 430 class, Professional Selling.  Since this course focuses on the training, coaching, and mentoring of other Professional Selling classes, to be eligible for the Sales Leadership, students must first excel in MKTG 430 and be recommended by their instructor.  As part of leadership training students must complete two classroom presentations. The first presentation focuses on a current leadership topic in business and students must deliver to the class a 30 to 40 minute engaged, interactive classroom presentation.  The second presentation is an inspirational assignment where students may select a topic of their choice and then present to the class with the goal of inspiring their fellow classmates. The Sales Leadership class is responsible for organizing and smoothly running all classroom role plays and on-campus sales competitions.  In this role, the sales leadership students act as liaisons between the sales program and the many corporate partners that join us on campus each semester to participate in role plays and classroom presentations.  Tomorrow’s sales leaders must be able to train, coach, mentor, and inspire sales teams in order to achieve exceptional results and the Sales Leadership course prepares students for a leadership role in competitive sales and business environments.

CRM Technology for Sales Professionals is about understanding the theory and practice of customer relationship management. We focus on understanding and applying technology to the sales process: how to source sales-relevant information, how to manage it using a CRM system, and how to efficiently and effectively use it to form and sustain business relationships. The heart of the course is a sales development project with an outside client. You will apply what you learn using Salesforce.com and WebEx technologies to manage your customer relationship. A frequent comment from JMU alumni working in sales is “I wish there was a course like this when I was here.”

Would you like to be the star of your first sales training program?  Do you want to learn skills and techniques that can carry you to success in your first sales territory? That’s the purpose of Advanced Professional Selling. The course is small (16 students) and mimics a typical employer’s sales training class to prepare you for the first stage of your career. It features a minimum amount of lecture and it doesn’t use a textbook - because you don’t learn to sell from a book. Instead, the class hones skills and teaches techniques through role-plays, in-class exercises and detailed feedback. By the end of the course, you will have the tools you need to star in your training class and succeed in your first territory. Along the way, you will also laugh a lot because in MKTG 466, we work hard, we laugh out loud, and we learn -- a lot.