A $ales Force

MTSU’S Center for Professional Selling fills vast void in business education

by Skip Anderson

Thom Coats is a congenial Mississippian with a gentle Southern lilt that serves to enhance his laissez-faire friendliness. Conversations with him are effortless, and he is an engaged listener, to boot.

These qualities create an overall lightness about him. He’s genuinely an easy-to-know person. But his personality is no act. He is who he is: a smart, outgoing, empathetic person who shares anecdotes as comfortably as did one of his favorite storytelling comedians (and fellow Mississippian), Jerry Clower.

As his impressive curriculum vitae suggests, the decades he spent in sales have honed his skills to a point that he could probably sell shoes to a worm. But in addition to that being an unethical practice, it would violate what he teaches: Successful salespersons seek solutions for their clients, rather than strong-arm a mark into buying something they don’t need.

Coats is the founding director of MTSU’s Center for Professional Selling, which has enjoyed a meteoric rise in prominence since launching in 2019. And that’s no accident. It’s a calculated ascension in reputation propelled by the program’s filling vast—and in hindsight, obvious—voids in the educational experience offered by more established business programs around the world.

Thom Coats, director of MTSU's Center for Professional Selling

Photo by Cat Curtis Murphy

“The problem is that 66% of all graduates with business degrees start their careers in sales. Yet less than 1% of universities have a sales program to train their business and marketing students to be effective salespersons,” Coats said.

“The other part of the problem is most companies have neither the resources nor the patience to train new salespersons to be successful. That’s why turnover [in sales departments] is so high. At MTSU, we’re breaking that cycle.”

LESS THAN 1% OF UNIVERSITIES HAVE A SALES PROGRAM.

Toward that end, Coats teaches his students that a successful salesperson’s approach to the profession is practical, friendly, genuine, and sincere. It’s more like the “Help me help you” approach of Tom Cruise as the sports agent in Jerry Maguire, as opposed to Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross, who ridicules an already beleaguered sales team.

In short, he teaches them to view their relationships with clients neither as business-to-business (B2B) nor as businessto-consumers (B2C)—longstanding categories of sales positions—but as human-to-human regardless of needs. And, importantly, he also instructs them to ask intelligent questions of their clients to discover their needs so they can arrive at a solution together.

“I tell my students of an old poem, ‘If you can see Jim Jones through Jim Jones’ eyes, then you can sell Jim Jones what Jim Jones buys.’ ”

But there’s an important step left out of that adage: Salespersons still must close the sale. And, for some, asking a client to open their wallet is an anxiety-producing prospect. That’s why, according to Coats, it’s important to get what he calls, “little yesses” from the client along the way to the closing.

“That [mentality] wasn’t effective then, and it certainly doesn’t hold water today,” Coats said. “Today, we teach our students that successful salespersons don’t conduct transaction-based sales, but solution-based sales.”

“Get those ‘little yesses’ into the conversation throughout the process,” he says. “By doing so, you’re confirming what it takes to meet their needs. Then, when you ask for the agreement, it’s not a big deal because they’ve agreed to everything along the way. It’s an easy way to ensure all parties have an understanding of the agreement.”

SUCCESSFUL SALESPERSONS DON’T CONDUCT TRANSACTION-BASED SALES, BUT SOLUTION-BASED SALES.

PARTNERS IN LEARNING

The Center for Professional Selling (CPS) relies on lectures and book chapters as well as mock sales calls and real sales calls to help train its students, also enlisting 18 corporate partners from a broad swath of sectors. Coats and the leadership at MTSU’s Jennings A. Jones College of Business additionally took a strategic approach to designing the nascent CPS as a center, rather than just a program.

“Inherently, a center translates to having more community involvement,” Coats said.

It also allowed the possibility of membership in the University Sales Center Alliance; the MTSU center is now an associate member.

“That’s vital to our program because it puts us on stage at a national level,” Coats said. “The criteria are stringent, and fewer than 100 centers and institutes in the world meet the criteria. That is significant.”

Professional Selling students interviewing with regional employers

As a standalone center at MTSU, the CPS is in control of its own funding. Another aspect enviable by many programs is a two-room lab for students to practice effective sales techniques. One room is equipped with two office chairs, a table, and modest decor. The other is an office with an executive desk, chairs, a bookcase, and prints on the wall.

To begin a semester-long project, two students at a time role-play to practice analyzing and solving a fleet-management challenge that might face one of the center’s corporate partners, Enterprise Rental Cars. The first session, they learn the problem. Then next time, they practice asking and answering questions using prescribed sales techniques. Their third session, the students match the fleet-management problems to the features that the buyer agrees to along the way.

That’s where those “little yesses” prove to be an important step in setting up the close. In their final session, they close the deal. Video cameras and microphones enable teachers to critique and coach students.

“We use those rooms more than 450 times per semester,” Coats said. “The top eight performers are invited to meet with an executive from Enterprise in the lab’s executive room. There are cash rewards for finishing the project in the top tier. And sometimes there are job offers.”

Corporate partners of the Center for Professional Selling do more than participate in practice sessions and award prizes. Each company also provides mentors for three to five students, helping familiarize them with the culture of the sales world. And, of course, they serve as potential employers.

Stole ceremony for Professional Selling students

Boston Scientific, Change Healthcare, Dell, Fastenal, and Sherwin-Williams are among the small and large businesses who participate in the CPS corporate program.

“Sales is not a one-trick pony, and these valued partners offer different types of sales experiences,” Coats said. What they don’t do is sit on the sidelines offering platitudes like those typeset upon a poster with a majestic bald eagle. Nor do they pat their protégées on the back. These curated coaches are dedicated and listen to their students’ very first cold calls. “And they each provide mentors for our students, judges for our competition, and coach for our Blue Raider Phone Blitz.”

Quite often, according to Coats, they come to classes, too, and attend etiquette banquets and networking dinners with their students, offering support and counsel at such functions.

EMPATHY IN ACTION

Coats understands other heady challenges can face students that go beyond the scope of a mentor—especially those who might be first-generation college students. Coats knows because he faced financial challenges as an undergrad at Mississippi State University in the early 1980s.

A baseball fan, Coats enjoyed immensely watching two future major league All-Stars play for the Bulldogs: Will Clark and Rafael Palmeiro. But, given the reality of his economic situation as a student, his time spent at iconic Dudy Noble Field was limited by his need to work an unforgiving schedule for a college student. “I was a decent student in high school,” Coats said. “But in college I wasn’t because I had to work my way through.”

That is an understatement. He worked at a convenience store from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. while in college.

State Farm Competition at MTSU

“I was lucky to have ‘Dr. O,’ a professor, understand my predicament,” Coats said. “I was in his Managerial Economics class, which started at 8 a.m. One day after class, he told me, ‘If you’d just stay awake, you could make A’s in my class, not B’s.’ When I told him that I regularly work overnight, he told me not to worry and to just keep studying.

“It meant the world to me that he cared enough to reach out to me, and then for him to see that I was doing everything I could.”

OVER THE PAST THREE SEMESTERS, WE’VE HAD 100% JOB PLACEMENT FOR OUR GRADUATES.

Dr. O’s act of understanding may be the most important lesson Coats took from that Managerial Economics class. And it’s one that shapes who he is as a teacher some four decades later.

“I recently had a student who was working night shifts at Nissan while he was earning his degree,” Coats said. “He was motivated to be the youngest manager in the company. So I didn’t bust him for being distant at times in class. By the way, he was promoted into management before the semester ended.”

Understanding the context of the students’ lives outside of class is a central theme to the Center for Professional Selling.

“Another student spent significant time outside of class pouring concrete with his dad throughout college,” Coats said. “He came to the selling class to learn about starting his own sport-clothing line. Then he discovered that he was very good at selling. He graduated in 2022 and is now believed to be the only State Farm [Insurance] agent in middle Tennessee who is bilingual.”

But does the rare combination of faculty-to-student contact at this level, students’ access to the center’s dedicated corporate partners, a sales lab, relevant coursework, hands-on experience bolstered by roleplay, and other attributes that conspire to set the Center for Professional Selling apart from 99% of offerings at business programs translate to greater student success? Coats can point to a single data point to make the case:

“Over the past three semesters, we’ve had 100% job placement for our graduates.”

Required reading to fuel your inner salesperson

Thom Coats suggests anyone who wants to learn more about effective salesmanship add four books to their library:

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, by Chris Voss

The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, by Jeffrey Gitomer

Creating a Productive Selling Zone, by John Boyens

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie