Professional Selling Program

The world is full of those who say that young people no longer have the opportunities to achieve what older generations had. We disagree. There also exists a myth that the strong, hard-driving salespeople who use hard-sell tactics get things done. While such hard-sell tactics may achieve a degree of success, most people ask the wrong question. They ask “Are these salespeople successful?” The question they should ask is, “Could they have been more successful?” Truly successful sales professionals achieve their goals because they create a culture in which serving their customers first is the priority. Yes, there is mutual gain, but true sales professionals do not focus on themselves, first. We are committed to students’ success. In essence, “You have a contribution to make here. Your needs, wants, preferences are respected.” In the Professional Selling Program you will learn much about known and effective sales techniques and the application of those techniques from our approach to teaching professional selling known as Selling A.S.A.P.

Our mission is focused on providing students with the knowledge and skills employed by successful sales professionals who are winners, and not only winners across multiple business categories. They are winners in life and winners in their dealings with their customers and prospects. Here are some differences between winners and losers.

• The Winner is always a part of the answer, The Loser is always a part of the problem.
• The Winner always has a program; The Loser always has an excuse.
• The Winner says, "Let me do it for you;" The Loser says, "That's not my job."
• The Winner sees an answer for every problem; The Loser sees a problem in every answer.
• The Winner says, "It may be difficult but it's possible;" The Loser says, "It may be possible but it's too difficult."

The sales faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington, the College of Business and the Professional Selling Program maintain a long-term Vision that encompasses the following:

• Ensuring, to the best of our abilities, that students matriculate with a complete understanding of the importance of upholding the law, relevant regulations, and acting in accord with high ethical standards wherever they conduct business.
• Being a leader in knowledge creation concerning significant sales ethics and compliance issues
• Promoting the maintenance of exemplary standards of personal and professional integrity and conduct
• Being a leader in the formation and promotion of ethical sales practices in response to and/or in anticipation of changing business conditions, strategies, and opportunities
• Being a resource for other business schools with respect to teaching, research, promotion of professional sales business activity and adherence to codes of ethical conduct

The sales faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington, the College of Business and the Professional Selling Program also has a long term commitment to passion, integrity, and energy. Our ultimate challenge is the provision of timely and timeless information that will serve for a lifetime.

The Professional Selling Program is dedicated to excellence in sales and business education. As part of the Department of Marketing in the College of Business at the University of Texas at Arlington, the Professional Selling Program seeks to be recognized as the preeminent sales education and leadership resource for university sales students and sales professionals.

What Is The Professional Selling Program?

• It is student focused - we constantly seek ways to improve our efforts in the classroom in order to provide better prepared students with coveted skills when entering the professional marketplace.
• It is innovation - we continuously seek ways to advance the knowledge and skills of professional selling and salesforce management
• It is learning - we actively engage in a variety of inquiries in the pursuit of new knowledge, ideas and programs to foster the skills and professional development of our students
• It is Relationships - we strongly encourage long term relationships with our students as a key to building a world class professional sales program
• It is focused on the timely and the timeless - we strive to create innovative ways of advancing the timeless skills of professional selling and managing salespeople while emphasizing timely and innovative ways of seeking excellence in the sales profession

The University of Texas at Arlington, the College of Business and the Professional Selling Program maintain a long-term vision that encompasses the following:

• Proving an excellent learning experience for our students that gives them a solid foundation on which to assimilate in a professional sales career.
• Teach timely and timeless known and effective sales techniques for based on our research and from our direct experience with representatives of successful companies in the world, both B2B and B2C.
• Teach best practices for recruiting, training, motivating building and managing high-performing teams that perform with agility and understand how to manage change.
• Proactively advocating the integration of ethical business practices into all aspects of professional sales education.
• Ensuring, to the best of our abilities, that students matriculate with a complete understanding of the importance of upholding the law, relevant regulations, and acting in accord with high ethical standards wherever they conduct business.
• Being a leader in the formation and promotion of ethical sales practices in response to and/or in anticipation of changing business conditions, strategies, and opportunities.
• Being a leader in knowledge creation concerning significant sales ethics and compliance issues.
• Promoting the maintenance of exemplary standards of personal and professional integrity and conduct.
• Being a resource for other business schools, the sales academic community and sales professionals with respect to teaching, research, promotion of professional sales business activity and adherence to codes of ethical conduct.

In the Professional Selling Program, our business is education. Our commitment is to improve the quality of personal and professional life of those we service through the provision of value to everyone with whom we come in contact.

We do this with our commitment to P. I. E. which stands for passion, integrity, and energy. It is an acronym coined by Mr. Bernard Rapoport, entrepreneur and founder of American Income Life Insurance Company (AIL). Rapoport believed that how people work to achieve company goals and personal success is far more important to a person’s character than outcomes achieved. He was a believer that hard work contributes to integrity and that short-cuts are destructive actions that undermine integrity.

Rapoport‘s passion for the insurance business and passion for AIL’s people led him to expend tremendous amounts of energy and effort toward the success of both. Rapoport was passionate that the quality of any organization is developed by leaders throughout the organization. Leaders must be passionate about the objectives of an organization. They also must be passionate about the personal and professional development of those with whom they are associated.

For Rapoport integrity was a way of life. It was about playing by the rules and doing everything possible within the rules to be successful. Integrity includes the qualities of absolute honesty, trustworthiness, uprightness of character and high moral principles. Rapoport set an example that fostered:

• Telling the truth.
• Standing for what one believes in, even if the belief is unpopular.
• Using power to work toward common goals even when these objectives do not lead to personal gain.

Rapoport also championed the value of energy - his view of energy was that people must want to get up and go. He sought to instill the desire to want to come to work in all AIL people. He talked about work not only as a “have to do”, but also as something that people want to do because they have a passion for it and are willing to devote energy toward it.

Rapoport understood that people seek guidance from those they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, people in leadership positions only become true leaders if they act with integrity in their organizations. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future. A person's observable behavior is an indication of his/her character. Observed behavior can be strong or weak, good or bad. A person with strong character shows drive, energy, determination, self-discipline, willpower, and nerve. He/she sees what is wanted and goes after it. He/she attracts followers. On the other hand, a person with weak character shows none of these traits. He/she does not know what is wanted. Those lacking in character vacillate and are inconsistent. They will attract no followers.

Passion, integrity and energy are at the heart of everything we do in the Professional Selling Program. P. I. E. is the foundation we seek to instill in students choosing to study professional selling. We seek to develop and maintain relationships with all those who seek P. I. E. Our approach to P. I. E. makes us unique and defines our future.

Selling A.S.A.P. has been chosen as the focus of the Professional Selling Program. It is reflective of how sales professionals view selling today and into the future. Selling has elements of art and science in its practice. Sales professionals emphasize agility in their sales and business activities as they pursue performance excellence.

• Selling is an Art as creativity and spontaneity are keys to success. The demands of the marketplace are constantly changing and creativity is needed to anticipate these changes and respond to them.
• Selling is a Science as there are proven sales approaches that work based on psychological and behavioral scientific evidence. Deductive reasoning, observation, and analysis used to find marketplace solutions are as important to sales professionals as they are to scientists in the lab.
• Sales professionals who have graduated from UT Arlington are Agile. They are in a continuous state of looking to the future and of being ready to make changes that allow them to meet customer needs more quickly.
• Sales professionals who have graduated from UT Arlington Perform. Selling is not just about selling products and services. It is about earning and maintaining long-term relationships with customers.

Our sales faculty and staff approach education with questions like, “What role can we play to improve learning opportunities for our students?” We consider our profession an honor accorded us by others. We ask questions like, “What characterizes the world’s best leaders? One thing is certain. Great leaders are introspective. They are also externally focused. We also ask, “How can education improve?” Implied is our willingness to engage in objective self-examination – “What are we good at?” “What are we not good at?” “In what ways can we get better?”

Our sales faculty encourage students to understand the value of education, linking students’ college experiences to future experiences as often and deeply as possible. As an analogy, a sustainable business provides value by focusing on wise resource use and developing peoples’ abilities to think through choices that ensure a better quality of life for future generations. Sustainability in education is about helping students, as future leaders, see and understand economic opportunities through adoption of sustainable business practices. These education endeavors are consistent with the mission of business – to aspire, communicate and organize a commitment to serving customers for the long-term. The sustainability aspect of the learning of knowledge and building a skills foundation is one that lasts longer, can be grown, and is durable in its use. What students learn sustains if they embrace business planning fundamentals through active learning and service projects such as crafting business plans for small businesses.

The sales faculty at UT Arlington offers timely information in the form of lectures, guest speakers, class discussions, reading materials assigned, and other class activities (e.g., sales role play). Members of the business community provide timely information through classroom presentations, internships, and mentoring. Our greatest education value added , however, lies in the timeless skills that will serve students for a lifetime - skills such as written and verbal communication, decision making, analytical skills (both quantitative and qualitative), listening, and creative and critical thinking. Only through faculty providing opportunity and students participating in active learning, and through rigorous critique and evaluation, can these skills be sharpened. Here is where the Professional Sales faculty seeks to have its greatest impact – by developing skills of entry, skills of growth and transition, skills of lifetime success.

The faculty in the Professional Selling program emphasize “learning to learn” as a foundation for lifetime learning. We encourage students to develop the capability to discern the difference between timely and timeless skills and information because, as students move into the professional world, they must continually upgrade knowledge of products/services, skills and industry.

In the Professional Selling Program, we believe in impacting students for life. As such, we seek to provide students with lifetime learning value in two ways:

Timeless Business-Focused Education-Related Goals

• embrace the importance of all coursework as useful and instrumental in their development of a foundation for lifelong learning.
• develop an appreciation of all the key aspects of business that are necessary for the effective function of that business.
• become experts in sales, but to focus on achieving literacy in other functions of business activity.
• manage and supervise project teams; which lead too learning how to manage and resolve conflict as well as to encourage, rely on and evaluate the performance of team members.
• learn to seek and use learning resources - class materials, other classes, business publications, other faculty, and local business professionals.

Timeless Education Goals

• recognize that our classes provide skills developmental activities that are critical to their professional development.
• understand that they have been provided a foundation for the business and life skills knowledge areas that they must have for success, recognizing that prior knowledge is essential for student skills development.
• know that have been provided a framework for the integration of all coursework, student activities, and to see that their coursework is relevant to their professional and personal development.
• begin development of a personal and professional strategic plan.
• seek out the more challenging classes, instructors and learning experiences.
• work diligently, take risks, and select a sufficient number courses in which skills developmental activities are emphasized.
• realize the value of knowledge management throughout the course of the students’ time at The University of Texas at Arlington which instill in them the desire to use their college education as a foundation for life-long learning and create the foundation for a professional knowledge management portfolio.

The knowledge exchange between our sales faculty and students is focused on cultivating the raw intelligence of our students in powerful ways. Such cultivation depends on our capacity to understand and engage with the needs of the students and the business community while engaging the business community to augment business school education through their experiences, knowledge, and skills. The results can be astounding.