Marketing Programs, U.S. News & World Report (2024)
Sales
Entrepreneurship needs sales to set sail. Students who pursue degrees in sales know that the ability to persuade and build win-win relationships is essential for business and non-business settings.
Seeking to understand and be understood is central to all human interactions and relationships. This concentration truly prepares you for life, both professionally and personally. Courses and hands-on opportunities in the Babson sales concentration provide students opportunities to study sales, learn time management and relationship building, and provide effective sales communication training.
Where the Sales Concentration Will Take You
Are you wondering how to learn about sales and whether you should pursue a sales and marketing degree? Pursuing a sales concentration within your business degree allows you to explore career options while building a portfolio of transferable professional skills. Whether it’s selling their own ventures or they’re interested in going in house, students are setting themselves up to be strategic, thoughtful thinkers who can navigate tricky interpersonal relationships and situations.
People with a sales background or a bachelor's degree in sales are effective, engrossing public speakers, as well as influential internal communicators in their organizations. Many business students go into sales in private and public companies, as well as transfer their skills to the non-profit sector. They also find success as entrepreneurs, business development executives and customer relationship managers across industries.
What You Will Study in Your Sales Courses
When you study sales, you will take courses across divisions, with offerings in sales, marketing and consumer behavior, finance, sales law, communications, and operations management. Classes will stretch your listening, presentation, writing, and project management skills, while building out your knowledge of trends, markets, and business development.
Because Babson students take courses across the liberal arts and sciences alongside business foundation courses, they are equipped with the communication, presentation, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills sales jobs demand. Our undergraduate concentrations are designed to help you specialize or explore options within our bachelor’s in business administration degree, but the courses offered are comparable to what’s offered in a sales and marketing degree program, as well as a bachelor’s degree in sales.
Required Courses
Students in the sales concentration take at least two of these courses:
Customer acquisition and retention is the driver of revenue and the lifeblood of every company. Also, for entrepreneurs, professional selling is critical for their venture’s success. This course equips you with the knowledge and skills to excel in professional selling, business development, and entrepreneurship.
Explore the ways individuals think about and practice conflict resolution. You learn about your negotiating preferences and the consequences of the choices you make in negotiations. The course requires both intensive involvement in negotiation and mediation simulations and exercises, and thoughtful application of theory through class discussion and written analysis.
A vital skill for any sales professional is the ability to communicate value to current and potential customers. Engage in the practice of selling, receive exposure to how hard salespeople work, and become excited about professional selling as a career. The sales knowledge gained in the traditional sales classroom is fundamental for learning about what needs to be communicated. But it's one thing to study sales, it's another to achieve the “ability” to communicate value. Thus, this experiential course gets you in on the action, as you observe and participate in real sales processes.
Elective Courses
Students also will also take elective courses to round out their concentration work, which include some of these offerings:
It’s time to learn from the best in this course and learn about an area of entrepreneurial interest directly from entrepreneurs themselves, through guest lectures, one-on-one interviews, and secondary research. The goal of this course is to immerse you in the stories of entrepreneurs and to provide them with the business communication competence to retell these stories to a wider business audience.
Learn the fundamentals of sales law and commercial real estate transactions from a legal and managerial perspective. Explore how legal considerations affect decision-making in valuing real estate assets, selecting effective ownership structure and control, managing financial risk, allocating financial returns, and developing exit strategies for real estate investments.
Draw upon interdisciplinary theories in psychology, marketing, and persuasion and influence to explore the nature of behavioral change at the individual, consumer, and societal levels. Through a social marketing project, you test theories of persuasive communication and choice architecture to explore how to use the knowledge of human experience to shape behavior for social good.
Get to know yourself and your leadership style. By wrestling with concepts and experiences, ideas and actions, identity and aspirations, you explore leadership through the different lenses you all bring. In class, you work to identify and challenge assumptions and mental models of effective leader behavior and consider what it means to be an "entrepreneurial leader."
Project management is an in-demand field because every industry needs a strategic, organized thinker to keep everything moving efficiently. In this course, you use project management tools and methodologies to learn the critical skills and best practices for leading cross-team projects of all sizes. The course focuses on case-study discussions and teaching practical applications all project managers use.
Explore more undergraduate courses
You Will Learn from the Best
At Babson, our faculty are experts, innovators, and forward thinkers in their chosen fields. Here are just some professors sharing their expertise and support with our students in the sales program.
Sandra Bravo
Sandra Bravo specializes in marketing entrepreneurship, strategy, and communications. Outside of Babson, she is the former founder and owner of a marketing consultant firm for small- and medium-sized businesses called Bravo Communications. Currently, she is the founder and president of the 440K Project, Inc., a non-profit focused on the humanitarian crisis within the foster care system.
Kristen Getchell
Kristen Getchell is an associate professor of business communication and teaches business communication courses in graduate, undergraduate, and executive education programs. She currently serves as Co-Director for Babson Executive Education’s Leadership Program for Women & Allies.
Her current research and consulting interests include virtual communication and collaboration, AI and business communication, and persuasive strategies in virtual sales interactions.
Melissa Manwaring
Melissa Manwaring, a former attorney, teaches negotiation and organizational behavior. She serves on the editorial board of Negotiation Journal and has published articles and book chapters on negotiation. Before joining Babson, she was the Director of Curriculum Development at Harvard’s Program on Negotiation. She practiced law at private firms in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, focusing on commercial litigation, intellectual property counseling, and dispute resolution with clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.
Vini Onyemah
Vincent “Vini” Onyemah teaches and conducts research on professional selling, entrepreneurial selling, sales and revenue management, sales force development, and marketing management. As a teenager, he started two companies, and after obtaining a first-class BSc honors degree in civil engineering from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, he worked many years in industry before pursuing his academic career. He has taught and conducted consulting projects in over 25 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe
Sharon Sinnott
Sharon Sinnott, an educator, speech consultant, and entrepreneur, offers specialized teaching and consulting experience in corporate communication. Her specialty is in public speaking, leadership and managerial communication, persuasion, conflict management, nonverbal communication and generational differences in the workplace. She is a contributing author to the communication textbook Communicating Well.
Amanda Weirup
Amanda Weirup teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in negotiation and conflict management. Her research focuses on negotiation and conflict management, as she studies conflict in early-stage entrepreneurial ventures. She also writes about best practices in negotiation pedagogy and designs experimental exercises to be used in the negotiation classroom.
Have Questions?
Faculty Contacts: Vini Onyemah
Sponsored by: Marketing Division
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