Why don’t they teach sales in marketing undergrad programs?
Where’s the focus on managing a campaign, including tactics, budgeting and forecasting?

How can you properly prepare an undergrad marketing major to be successful in the first 5 years of their career?

Most marketing undergrad programs focus on the big picture – lots of talk of strategy, matrix vs. functional management, international concepts, and so on. The good ones bring in a light dose of market research. But in general undergrad marketing programs largely act like they are preparing a student to be a successful marketing executive, when in reality:

  • This leaves them largely unprepared to be succesful in the first 5 years of employment, where they are most likely to end up in sales, marketing research, marketing communications (building collateral or PR), or low-level marketing campaign execution.
  • The strategy skills will be built up over time through on the job experience and training, not through a class when you have no grounding in tactical execution
  • 5+ years down the road, most marketers probably couldn’t even recall what they learned in Marketing 301, and with the current speed of change, much of that is dated at best, irrelevant at worst

The focus should be on creating skilled marketing practitioners equipped with the tools to be successful right after graduation.

“Strategy” is such a great buzzword, but a new bachelor’s marketing grad likely won’t go near real strategic planning in the first 5 years (and maybe not for the next 5-15, depending on company size. Startups are an exception, to a degree). Tactics and execution, practical real world skills are the key and are what marketing undergrad programs should focus on.

Which brings me back to sales. Many an eager marketing major graduates with visions of becoming a “Strategic Product Planner”, only to find the only jobs that will take someone with no experience are “Inside Sales – Southwest Region”, aka “phone jockey”. By no means am I maligning these positions or sales in general – it’s how I got my start. Beyond it being a likely first job role, understanding sales is critical to be an effective marketing manager in the long run. In the end, your sales force is what brings in the revenue. Your marketing campaigns had better be able to support the sales effort.

Why not include a course focusing on sales? Modules could include prospecting, developing a lead, pipeline management, forecasting, and so on. Even if the student never goes near a sales job, as I noted before, it’s critical they understand this. Too many marketing folks have no understanding of the sales pipeline and challenges, and this hampers the business by creating fanciful campaigns not grounded in real results.

Same goes for tactical management and execution of a marketing campaign. Construct a course that drops a preset strategy on the student – as will happen in most of their early marketing jobs. They get no say in it, that’s the direction the company is going. Now develop some tactics to flesh out the strategy, develop usable research and segmentation, understand impact metrics and how to track and report, and implement, adjust, and manage tactics in market. Define a workback schedule, a Bill of Materials (BOM) for the campaign, develop pre-sales training plans, and so on.

My undergrad experience was great, at Lundquist College of Business at Oregon. I feel I got a good grounding in the fundamentals of accounting, finance, management theory, and so on. The faculty and learning environment was fantastic. But too much focus was on strategy, and not enough on preparing me to succeed in the first phase of my career.

To educators, from a marketing professional: Focus on sales, focus on tactics and execution, nail market research skills, and prepare your students to be strong practitioners rather than strategists. This sets them up for what faces them after they take off that cap and gown.