Colleges Sales Majors Give Undergrads a Major Lift

When most college students arrive on campus for the very first time, the idea of graduating and launching a professional career can appear to be so far away it almost isn’t real. There’s a long and winding road ahead, filled with a lot of work (and some fun!) to get from point A (“I just arrived on campus!”) to point B (“I just graduated, now what?”). Time will stand still while college unfolds.

The professional “real world” looks so distant you have to squint to see it.

Yet statistically speaking, we know a little bit about the path college students will take. And we also know where they will likely go at the end of the higher education journey. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, since the year 2000, the most popular college major category (by far) is business.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

The suite of business majors (Marketing, Finance, Accounting, etc) make a smart choice for college undergraduates. These degree-holders gather important professional skills during their college days and typically go on to jobs that consistently provide good income earning opportunities.

A comprehensive study put together by Georgetown University a few years ago titled, “The Economic Value of College Majors,” showed that business majors earned a median income of $65,000 annually – a number that outpaced most other undergraduate major groups including communications, education, humanities, social sciences and liberal arts.

That fact may not blow you away, but this next one will.

According to the non-profit Sales Education Foundation, more than 50% of college graduates will take their initial post-graduation job in sales. That figure cuts across all majors! And if you earn certain business-related degrees, such as a degree in Marketing, the numbers go even higher. In fact, 88% of Marketing majors start their post-grad career in sales.

This is great news for current college undergrads. As outlined in prior posts on the memoryBlue blog (see: “Software CEOs and University Presidents Agree: Inside Sales Experience is Legit” or “How to Capitalize on the Death of Retail”), professional sales careers are packed with immense opportunity and incredible financial upside. But what this also means is that a very large number of future college grads are headed for a career start in sales somewhat unexpectedly!

English and Psychology majors, are you listening?

This all squares with data from a 2017 Hubspot survey of hundreds of sales professionals across the U.S. and UK. The survey found that a whopping 46% of these professionals didn’t intend to go into sales initially (Communications majors, perhaps?). Those figures were even more pronounced for women when compared to their male colleagues:

These individuals all learned that professional sales careers are opportunity-rich, highly rewarding and well worth pursuing. Armed with this sneak peek into a highly possible sales-flavored future, what should current undergrads do to prepare for life after college?

The answer is simple: lean into it!

College Sales Majors – The Golden Ticket

There are an expanding number of opportunities designed to help college students get an incredible head-start on sales-specific training.

The most important first step is to get connected with a college sales program. This natural move pairs undergrads with campus access to seasoned faculty, sales-related courses, sales-focused activities and like-minded peers all oriented around building towards a future in professional sales. The training and skill-building these university sales programs offer helps students learn basic professional sales fundamentals, understand natural strengths and learn the importance of choosing the right sales position after college.

Better still, collegiate sales programs typically have a wide range of corporate partners and strong relationships with sales industry professionals designed to benefit students. Those partners assist undergrads in numerous ways such as by leading in-class educational sessions, conducting job previews, providing internship access and, ultimately, making these students quality job offers upon graduation.

Those corporate ties pay off in a major way for students. The job placement rate for college undergrads who take part in a college sales program is over 90% (the national average for all majors is around 51%)!

That incredible number crushes the job placement rate for even the highest-ranking individual major. Computer Science, the current leader in this category, features post-grad job placement rates around 72%, according to this Forbes article).

There are currently over 120 colleges and universities across the U.S. with formally recognized sales programs. And those numbers are rapidly growing. The Sales Education Foundation estimates that there were only a tiny handful of these programs when they founded (not so long ago) in 2007.

Despite this strong growth, there is still a long way to go with respect to getting colleges and universities across the country to incorporate college sales programs into their schools of business. With over 2,600 accredited four-year colleges and universities (source: Association of American Colleges and Universities), less than 5% currently have officially recognized programs (although many more do have sales clubs, business fraternities and other helpful extra-curricular options).

This Harvard Business Review article from a few years ago underscores just why these numbers must continue to improve:

“Better dialogue between Sales and Academia is timely, and society can benefit: studies show that jobs in sales are among the highest in career lifetime value, and, given the amount spent on sales forces in our economy (about $900 billion annually—by far, the most expensive part of strategy execution for most firms), this is also a significant productivity issue.

What can colleges and universities do to mind the gap? That’s a big topic in its own right. Selling is not a science reducible to timeless rules, and many variables affect market performance and sales success. But effective training and development should begin with awareness and shelf space in the curriculum: making sure that sales is a topic in management education worthy of the name.”

Leading the Pack with a College Sales Major

College is a fantastic time for learning, growth and, ultimately, preparation for a successful career after graduation. Getting formal, professional sales education during these years gives undergrad students a major advantage over their job-seeking peers as graduation approaches. Corporate recruiters are literally lining up to hire these future professional sales leaders.

The reason for this is simple: college graduates armed with formal sales education have embraced a future in sales, and they are easier to ramp up and train. This saves companies time and money, while ultimately adding a dynamic resource who arrives ready to hit the ground running.

If you’re on campus right now, don’t miss out on the many doors a college sales program opens for you!

To see some of the top universities offering professional sales education and programs, click here. And to learn how memoryBlue helps new college grads launch a lucrative career in professional high-tech sales, visit our Careers section now.