Campus Series: Tim Butler – Asking the Right Questions
Sales is an often-misunderstood profession, and it’s not always a “top of mind” career path for college students.
Yet through his dedicated efforts in higher education, Tim Butler is working to change all of that. As the Director of the Steele Center for Professional Selling at the University of North Alabama, Tim is pioneering a sales program that is changing the lives of the students by setting them up for success in the sales world.
As he explains to his students, a sales career is about much more than the money – it’s about adding value to a company. And he refuses to believe there is only one type of person or personality that thrives in sales. It’s about product knowledge, problem-solving capabilities, and critical thinking, all of which can be taught in sales education.
In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers: Campus Series, hosts Kristen Wisdorf and Libby Galatis get Tim Butler’s take on breaking the stereotypes around sales, the essential qualities of a successful sales student, and how he is looking to grow the program at the University of North Alabama to reach as many students as possible.
Guest-At-A-Glance
Name: Tim Butler
What he does: Tim is the Director of the Steele Center for Professional Selling at the University of North Alabama.
Company/Institution: University of North Alabama
Noteworthy: In the fall of 2016, Tim joined the University of North Alabama faculty and became the program director in 2017. Tim’s professional goal is to help students build sales skills.
Where to find Tim: LinkedIn
Key Insights
⚡ Sales requires product knowledge, problem-solving ability, and critical thinking. According to Tim, sales professors should break the stereotypes around what sales is all about and highlight the profession’s unique aspects. ”You need to explain that this is an amazing opportunity. I refer to some of the great companies that we’ve sent students to. I’m selling sales early on. I think that’s effective in driving student engagement because it doesn’t hurt to mention that the base salaries are high and there are great opportunities.”
⚡ Any type of personality can be successful at sales. Tim is an overconfident extrovert, and when he meets students with the same character, he tries to make them humble. Even if they are not aware, it is what they need. ”I’d rather have the ones that are a little bit more concerned and prepare more. Because when they have success, they get empowered, and when they get empowered, they get dangerous. They haven’t lost that process orientation and all those good things, but they also feel confident.”
⚡ The purpose of a salesperson is not to make a lot of money. Success and wealth are the side effects of sales. These are positive side effects, but, as Tim explains, something else is a characteristic of an excellent salesperson. ”The great salespeople are people who love interacting with people, finding out about their situation and then determining whether there’s a solution they offer that could add value. People who listen well ask great questions. That empathy and knowledge they gained are going to sell a lot more than people who want to make a lot of money.”
Episode Highlights
Breaking the Stereotypes Around What Sales Is All About
”Most of them see sales as not a career you would go to college for because of their experiences with an all commission type of sales role or a more consumer-facing sales role. I focus on the idea that not everybody has to be super extroverted to be good at sales. We have sales students that are super processed-minded and have a great attitude and want to succeed. And they do as well if not better than the people who come in thinking they could talk to anyone.”
Most People Don’t Understand the B2B Sales Space
Most parents are similar to most people, and most people don’t understand the higher level of professional selling space. What usually would happen is that the students are at an age where they would prefer not to be listening to their parents; they make that decision on their own. And then, they educate their parents about this. The ones in sales come right up to me at their orientation, and they’re like, ”Hopefully, my son or daughter would be interested in doing this.”
Essential Qualities of Successful Sales Students
”Being competitive and wanting to win, but when they lose, they don’t give up because some people are competitive, but they wouldn’t be considered good sports. If they don’t win immediately, they disappear, or they don’t want to do it. But the ones that face failure and then say, ‘What do I got to do not to have that happen anymore?’ Those are the ones that are gonna work with me and do the work to get better.”
A Salesperson Has to Adapt to Other People’s Feeling
”If you want to be the boss that can yell at people, this is not the role for you. You’re going to have to empathize and adapt to the customer and the people within your organization. When you call up that other part of the organization, they like you and want to work with you because you’ve treated them respectfully in the past, versus you get mad because something happens with your customer, and you take it out on them. […] It does take a lot of energy and a lot of balance to be successful and keep the energy level that’s required to be successful.”
What Should Students Do to Stay Motivated?
”Focus on what their goals are, what they’re trying to accomplish, the positive impact they have. Most companies our students go to have a great product that solves some sort of business problem. So, if you’re going to maintain high energy around that, you have to focus on the impact you’re having on those customers and making their lives easier with the product you sell. And that’ll keep you motivated. Also, developing some work-life balance in terms of other things you’re doing and focusing on.”
I Want to Reach as Many Students as Possible
”I’m not reaching all the students that could be good at this and could benefit from this. So that keeps me motivated, knowing that there are hundreds of students I’m not reaching each year, even though I’m reaching a lot. One thing I signed up for was to teach; it’s called FYE: first-year experience class. I’ll be teaching one hour a week and bringing in all sorts of cool people. It’s a business-oriented freshman class.”
Transcript:
[00:00:09] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:00:09] Hey, hustlers. Welcome back to another edition of the Tech Sales is for Hustlers Campus Mini series. I’m Kristen Wisdorf.
[00:00:23] Libby Galatis: [00:00:23] And I’m Libby Galatis.
[00:00:24] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:00:24] And today we have Tim Butler who heads up the program at the University of North Alabama. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.
[00:00:32] Tim Butler: [00:00:32] Thanks for having me. I’m excited.
[00:00:34] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:00:34] We’re excited to have you as well. For those of you who have listened to our podcast before, The Drill, we like to start every chat with professors, with the same way we actually start our interviews with students, which is, give me give me your highlight reel. Take 60 seconds or so, Tim, and tell us a little bit about you.
[00:00:55] Tim Butler: [00:00:55] My name is Tim Butler and I am the director of the Steel Center at the [00:01:00] University of North Alabama. I did my PhD at the University of Alabama, where they have a sales program there. And worked for their sales program, saw the value that it brought students, got really excited about really focusing in on sales education within my marketing PhD studies.
[00:01:20] And I went to school in Texas for a few years and then in the fall of 2016, I joined the faculty of the University of North Alabama and became the director of the program in fall of 2017. So we’ve run this program and grown it and had a great time helping our students just focus more on communication, confidence, and having that hunger and motivation to go out into a sales role.
[00:01:53] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:01:53] That’s exciting. Okay. So you went to school in Alabama, but I was checking out your LinkedIn ahead of [00:02:00] time and you are not originally from Alabama or didn’t you grow up in the Northeast or New England? Is that right?
[00:02:07] Tim Butler: [00:02:07] Yeah, I grew up in Connecticut, mostly. Moved around a little bit as a child and my uncle met my aunt in New York city. And my uncle is from Alabama, so he really wanted me to go to Alabama for undergrad. I went to SUNY Binghamton instead, but when I was looking at graduate schools he focused in on University of Alabama’s business college
[00:02:30] and that’s how I ended up down here.
[00:02:32] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:02:32] Oh, that’s exciting. Okay. And so when you went to Alabama for your graduate studies, you said their sales program was up and running at that time.
[00:02:42] Tim Butler: [00:02:42] Yes, their program started in 2009 and I went, I started my PhD there in 2008. And then a few years into my PhD I had one year where I worked for the director, Joe Calamusa, for an entire year and saw the [00:03:00] innovative curriculum that he was bringing, served as a buyer in the role-plays and really thought that this was a really interesting experiential opportunity
[00:03:10] and also was seeing that students were getting multiple job offers, lots of great opportunities coming up.
[00:03:16] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:03:16] Yeah. Was that your first foray into sales was getting involved in the program or had you done sales roles or jobs in your career, your life leading up to that?
[00:03:28] Tim Butler: [00:03:28] I’ve worked in insurance, sales, banking a lot of different jobs for about six years before I went back to graduate school. So where I got the interest in marketing and sales and I just didn’t even know that there was this really like specific sales education that was out there at certain universities,
[00:03:47] so when I learned about that and saw it in action, that’s when I kinda decided I wanted to focus on sales.
[00:03:55] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:03:55] Yeah, it’s interesting, you said the program started in 2009 and you started at Alabama in 2008, which kind of tracks. I I left college in 2008 and that’s when the sales program was really starting to ‘boom’ and it’s changed so much in the last 11, 12 years. So it sounds like you got to Alabama, right
[00:04:15] at kind of the start of a lot of universities growing this type of curriculum or adding it to their marketing or business school programs as well?
[00:04:25] Tim Butler: [00:04:25] Yeah. If you were to look at like ancient history for us, it’s about 22 years when the national collegiate sales competition started, and I believe in 1999.
[00:04:33] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:04:33] Yeah, it’s wild. So when you first got involved at the University of Alabama, what did you enjoy most about it and why, what did you want to take with you in your career when you ended up going to University of Northern Alabama?
[00:04:50] Tim Butler: [00:04:50] I would say that the curriculum that Joe taught was a hundred percent created by him, not from a textbook, not from a big publisher [00:05:00] textbook and it was straight from his experience in B2B sales. So that was, when I had gone to school for undergrad, and a master’s and now several years into a PhD and that was the most valuable content. I was looking at it from a different perspective as a graduate assistant, but that was the most valuable content I’ve ever seen in a college course. And it was so unique and it was teaching you basic things that were really important, like how to write an email, how to have a phone call, how to have a productive conversation, all those things.
[00:05:34] So that’s what really got me interested in that because I had never seen anything so valuable, relevant, practical in any of my other college experiences.
[00:05:45] Libby Galatis: [00:05:45] Was there a specific moment that was like an ‘a-ha’ for you, when you realized that was something you were really passionate about? I don’t know if you can recall an exercise or a lecture that was given where just reached you in a way that sort of sparked that interest.
[00:06:00] Tim Butler: [00:06:00] I would say that the closest I have to that is we have sales lab, we had sales labs at the University of Alabama across campus. And being in those sales labs and having the students come in, be pretty uncomfortable with the process at first, because it really does not resemble anything else you do in school.
[00:06:20] In school, you may do a presentation at the end of the semester where everybody stands up and reads the PowerPoints and things like that, but nothing about strategic conversations. And when I was like giving them feedback and working with them one to one and seeing how much they were benefiting from that,
[00:06:39] I think that was where I thought, “Wow, I could really do this and make a lot of impact on young people going through college trying to figure out what to do when they get done with this university experience.”
[00:06:51] Libby Galatis: [00:06:51] It’s so interesting because I think in more times than not, when you hear about sales careers or people jumping into a role like that, it’s [00:07:00] never intentional. It’s something that just happens or is something that you just take that step because it’s a job in front of you. And I’m curious, you mentioned that you started in insurance sales,
[00:07:09] you, you worked in banking, Is there anything that you’ve been teaching, like, how do you feel that your career would have been impacted if you had that sort of exposure that students are now getting, looking back at how to learn about sales from the ground up just through experience without that exposure prior?
[00:07:25] Tim Butler: [00:07:25] That’s a good point. Most people learn sales. They back into a sales career and because of that, they have a lot to learn on the job and while they’re doing it. And so if I had gone to a sales program, I would have probably started at a different company and possibly never even gone back to graduate school to become a sales professor, at least, because I would’ve had been put on such a solid track.
[00:07:53] And so when I talk to people like you or alumni, who went to the University of North Alabama before the [00:08:00] program, they talk about how much they would have enjoyed not having that real steep learning curve. Because when you’re coming out at 22, you don’t know how to talk to people. You don’t necessarily have a ton of business acumen.
[00:08:12] You don’t have the context that you get as you get older and have experience. So there’s a lot that prevent you from really like hitting the ground running. So we take away some of that with the sales program and that’s what I think is so important about them.
[00:08:29] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:08:29] It’s so interesting. You said that the classes that you had, back when or that you witnessed when you were at the University of Alabama, were the most real, right? They were straight from real-world, they were most valuable productive classes and curriculum. And this is coming from someone who has their undergrad master’s and PhD.
[00:08:51] That’s huge that the sales programs were the one, the programs and the classes that like stuck with you and you felt had such a [00:09:00] big impact as you segwayed and you ended up going to North Alabama and you got involved in the program as a professor and now the director of the program. What do you still teach,
[00:09:13] if anything, back from when you got into sales curriculum? Are there things that you took from those such profound classes and curriculum that you still teach your students to this day?
[00:09:22] Tim Butler: [00:09:22] The biggest thing that I saw from Joe and Alabama was an amazing amount of energy and focus on building a valuable class. Because when you’re in a PhD program and you’re trying to do research and take these PhD level classes, it’s an afterthought, the teaching. And because of that, because you have so many other responsibilities your focus is really about, let me get this, these PowerPoints and these test banks from this existing
[00:09:55] textbook and just do your best to live in that up a little bit. And what I would saw was almost a hundred percent correlation between what he was teaching and what was in his head, because he had created it all himself. So the passion he was able to deliver that with
[00:10:11] and then just the practicality of not assuming that they know how to do any thing per se, but just breaking it down, like how to say ‘good morning’ and introduce yourself, like that kind of stuff that you just can’t assume that everybody’s going to know that and so I like how it started from that and taught you things that made you more confident.
[00:10:34] And even if you don’t go into sales, you’re going to have to communicate with people, coworkers, family, everything else and it really just teaches you about framing information in a strategic way to get what you’re trying to get done each day and persuade the people that are important to influence.
[00:10:53] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:10:53] Wow. great. Yeah. I love your comment about not assuming that they know anything. That’s the similar track we take, even if folks [00:11:00] have come in to memoryBlue with sales experience under their belt, everybody still gets the same training, because it is it’s about that foundation,
[00:11:10] just retraining your brain. What do you say when someone picks up the phone and you’re cold calling them and it’s inside sales? I even remember my very first sales training, we literally, the first thing we learned was, how to shake hands the right way, which sounds so like basic, but I think that’s
[00:11:26] good teaching is not assuming anybody knows and just giving everybody kind of the same baseline, so that they can be prepared for life after college and life in sales, especially. So I want to talk a little bit about your program now for at the Steel Center for Professional Selling. What was the program like when you started at North Alabama and how has it changed in the last few years?
[00:11:53] Tim Butler: [00:11:53] So the program was started around 2013, so about three years before I arrived, [00:12:00] and it had grown fairly quickly because of the value proposition. And I was fortunate that I came in the fall of 2016 and worked with the former director for a year and he got an opportunity to move to the UT Dallas program.
[00:12:18] So at the same time, Robert Steele, who we named the Sales Center after, had thrown his support financially to a naming donation, which gave us a lot of resources to really grow what we were doing. And the biggest thing that I got value from was going to these inter-collegiate competitions, even though we didn’t have a strong history of doing that and therefore we’re learning a lot. And just trying to have some success at those competitions, because in order to get on the radar of companies like memoryBlue, doing things like that, that those are great events where there’s a lot of different companies that might not be working with your university.
[00:13:01] And so I did a lot with that. We also started doing sales specific events, so we did our first career fair in the spring of 2017 and we’ve been doing that every semester. And then about three or four events ago, we added a speed sell competition in the morning before the event. So having a really like systematic way of connecting the recruiters to the students, what is a big step in, in moving your program forward from more of an informal thing to it to a really sustainable thing. And fortunately about a year and a half ago, I got approval to have a full-time program coordinator. And I was just working, felt like three jobs all the time on the administrative aspects and the classroom aspects and the competition aspects and everything else we were trying to get done.
[00:13:53] And we were able to get enough resources to justify having a full-time person and that person really contributes a lot to allowing me to do more.
[00:14:03] Libby Galatis: [00:14:03] It’s such a good point because I’m very close to a lot of the directors of the programs that we partner with and just hearing about, yeah, to what you said earlier, the investment that is required to not only be part of a program like that, working with so many different students and wanting to have those intimate interactions and also being focused on the growth of the program itself those formative, initial years where it’s just such a grind.
[00:14:29] This question is tailored more towards the programs that are developing and establishing themselves. What do you think was the first step towards building it to be a more formal program or what was one of the more formative steps that you took, where things were actually scalable? Can you walk us through that development and that, that process from the struggle to now being a more established program?
[00:14:53] Tim Butler: [00:14:53] Sure. And often universities don’t quite understand what we’re doing because it’s a very different [00:15:00] model and it’s labor intensive in terms of we’ve role-play one-to-one with all of our students. And we do things a little bit differently and we’re super practical and less theoretical and academic, like a lot of classes.
[00:15:15] So one of the biggest things that I think was a turning point here is building relationships across the campus and letting them know promoting internally so that it can get promoted to new students, but also so that you get buy-in from the university and the different areas within the university. I think that’s really important.
[00:15:37] I think also I’m really, if you don’t, if you want to do the easy, like job, just teach regular classes, don’t involve with these…
[00:15:46] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:15:46] That’s a lot of work what you do.
[00:15:48] Tim Butler: [00:15:48] It is a lot of work. So you really gotta be into it and you got to see the value, really want to help students. But what I do, and I continue to do this, is to go to all the [00:16:00] orientations, freshman orientation, transfer orientation.
[00:16:03] We also have an American Marketing Association chapter, that’s our student organization. And really focusing on, because you could bring in 30, 40 companies, but if you don’t have students to go to those jobs, then it’s a bad strategy. So you’ve got to build sustainably on both sides, the student side and the excitement around being in sales, as well as bringing in the companies.
[00:16:25] Because on the other hand, if you had three companies and you had all these students then the value prop wouldn’t be there for the students. So you have to build that sustainably those relationships on both sides in order to grow.
[00:16:38] Libby Galatis: [00:16:38] Absolutely. with that said, you mentioned that you’re going into this freshman orientations you’re trying to get them while they’re young. And I think that the students that are exposed to these concepts and ideas, as early as possible, those are the ones that start their jobs right after graduating senior year. They have intention behind the roles that they’re looking at, the industries that they’re targeting, where they see themselves two, three, five years from now. I’m curious, when you’re teaching the younger students that are earlier on in their academic career, is there a specific exercise or assignment that you give that provides the insight to where it’s, they realize it’s a very practical skill and those light bulbs start to go off that, “Hey this might be harder than I thought it was going to be, but it’s going to be extremely useful for me?”
[00:17:25] Tim Butler: [00:17:25] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think first you need to spend a lot of time in that first sales class, breaking their stereotypes around what they think sales is about. And most of them see sales as not a career you would go to college for, because of their experiences with kind of the an all commission type of sales role or a more consumer facing sales role.
[00:17:53] So you need to explain that this is an amazing opportunity. And then it’s really, I think, I don’t know if it’s an exercise per se, but it’s really set like empowering them to… I focus on the idea that not everybody has to be super extroverted to be good at sales, that we have sales students that come in that are super processed minded and have a great attitude and want to succeed.
[00:18:18] And they do as well, if not, sometimes better than the people come in, thinking they could talk to anyone because it’s, there’s some real substance to being in sales, especially tech, but all, all different areas of sales require a lot of product knowledge and problem solving ability and critical thinking
[00:18:38] and a lot of those skills. So explaining to them that this is open for everyone and I refer to some of the great companies that we’ve sent students to. So I think in that respect I’m selling sales early on and the idea of sales and what it can do to engage with our sales program.
[00:18:57] And I think that’s effective in driving student engagement, because also it doesn’t hurt to mention that the base salaries are really high and there’s these really great opportunities. Because a lot of our students, at least at a regional university, many of them really it resonates this game-changing transformational opportunity for them to go to, from where they were at to where they could be, if they were to go through this program.
[00:19:25] And so really highlighting the opportunity there and how it can fast-track their careers, you know, in a way that many of our students would never get that opportunity.
[00:19:34] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:19:34] That’s such a good point. You talked about going to freshman orientation and getting students in young, and we talk about that a lot too, from our own recruiting efforts. Let’s start talking to high schoolers and get some sales classes there in high school so that they can even go into college knowing that it is something you can go to college for. But your point about going to freshman orientation and in the past it hasn’t typically been the type of career you go to college for.
[00:20:02] Do you find in your position that you ever get like parents who encourage or maybe discourage their students from doing this, because of some misconceptions about being in sales? Is that something that you ever interact with, parents and having to open up their minds to this type of career in future as well?
[00:20:27] Tim Butler: [00:20:27] I, yes. I think most parents are similar to the most people and most people don’t really understand the B2B sales space or just the higher level of professional selling space. So that needs, that education needs to be done. What usually would happen is that the
[00:20:47] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:20:47] That’s true.
[00:20:48] Tim Butler: [00:20:48] students are at an age where they would prefer not to be listening to their parents.
[00:20:52] So they make that decision on their own and then they educate their parents about this. Because, yeah, the ones that are [00:21:00] in sales, they come right up to me at their orientation and they’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe this is a, hopefully, my son or daughter would be interested in doing this ’cause I, they know.”
[00:21:09] But for anyone that does it, it’s more the student has to educate them and when they start telling them what types of jobs and what types of salaries they’d be getting, it definitely changes their perceptions of what sales education is. And it’s just not known that we even do this relatively speaking ’cause our the adoption rate is still really low
[00:21:30] and our university and a lot of these universities that you might speak to are all part of the University Sales Center Alliance and there’s about 58 universities in that Alliance. And there’s less than 200 that have kind of robust sales programs out of over 4,000 universities in the country.
[00:21:47] So we still have a lot of growing to do, but that growing, I think before we were talking about how 2008, 2009 it was growing, that growing is so exponential right now, in terms of every [00:22:00] time you turn around there’s a new school and a lot of big flagship schools starting sales programs because the alumni are telling them they need these soft people skills.
[00:22:11] They need these interpersonal interaction skills and communication and sales skills. It’s exciting to
[00:22:17] be a part of it because I know it’s going to continue to grow for my whole career.
[00:22:20] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:22:20] Absolutely. And you’re at the forefront of that growth and giving students that opportunity, like you said, they may otherwise not even know exists. and I want to circle back to something you said about, introverts being good at sales as well. I think that there is this common misconception that you need to be the life of the party, or like such a hard driver in order to be successful at sales, but any type of personality can be successful at sales.
[00:22:48] It’s more about I think learning the game, learning the processes, learning how you work within sales. So how do you, let me rephrase, what part of your curriculum [00:23:00] prepares, the outgoing extroverts to have a process and the process minded people maybe to step out of their bubble?
[00:23:05] Like how do you marry those two and create curriculum for every type of personality or I guess natural skill? I would say I’m the most similar to the overconfident extrovert. And so when I get those students, the biggest thing that I do for them is constantly humbled them, because that’s what they need. They need to be told, like, “This is not gonna work.” And the competitions and things that we do take care of that, because they’ll go in super confident and unprepared and they will come out not getting great results.
[00:23:40] Tim Butler: [00:23:40] I’d rather have the ones that are a little bit more concerned and prepare more and then teach that, because when they have success that they get empowered and when they get empowered, they get really dangerous because they haven’t lost that like process orientation and all those [00:24:00] good things, but they also now feel confident in the way they can communicate.
[00:24:06] And you can also think about it like this. There’s a lot of performers out there who are really comfortable singing in front of people or acting or doing all those types of the dancing, things like that, playing music who don’t want to talk to anybody. So you could be a salesperson who in the moment you can really engage that person, but it doesn’t mean you have to go hang out with a bunch of people at night and be a super extrovert in order to be able to do that.
[00:24:33] And some of our most successful sales students have definitely couldn’t even imagine that they would ever do anything like this. And
[00:24:41] it’s fun to watch that that happened.
[00:24:43] Libby Galatis: [00:24:43] I love that point of the need for students or anybody, in a sales role humbled, especially when you’re first learning. it’s a skill that takes time to establish. And I talk about this with the students that I recruit. There is not a one size fits all script. You can just hand to somebody and say, read off of this and you’ll [00:25:00] find success.
[00:25:00] Everyone’s different in their approaches. And there’s something to be said for the opportunity, for those introverts, that might be turning their nose up at sales, assuming that they have to be extroverted to find success when all it’s going to take is a little bit of tweaking to their own personal approaches to find equal success to those extroverts. I’m speaking from , experience too. I started my first sales role thinking that it would be a walk in the park only to find out that it was far from that. that said I’m interested, between introverts and extroverts or anybody that ultimately find success in sales, in your experience working and collaborating with students. I would argue there are some key qualities to top performers or to individuals that do find success. What do you think a commonality is between your top students regardless of, again, that extr, introvert, extrovert that is there and you see that and can see them driving and finding success in their future in this industry. I would think that being competitive and wanting to win, but when they lose they don’t give up [00:26:00] because there’s some people who are competitive, but they’re not really, I guess it wouldn’t be considered good sports. So if they don’t win immediately, they disappear or they don’t want to do it. But the ones that face the failure and then say, “What do I got to do to not have that happen anymore?”
[00:26:18] Tim Butler: [00:26:18] Those are the ones that are gonna work with me and do the work to get better. And so being competitive, expecting to win, but then when you channeling that, that, that lack of success into more preparation in the future, there are very few students who are immediately good at this. There are, and just to go back to the previous question is,
[00:26:39] it’s you should be confident in your communication because you’ve learned how to communicate effectively and you believe in your product. The confidence that comes from being confident in yourself is often a turnoff, right? So as much as those people who are confident think they’re going to do well, it’s really not about confidence in yourself.
[00:26:58] Now, charisma can [00:27:00] help and it makes it easier for people if they have a little bit of natural charisma, but things like likability are all under our control. How we treat people, how we communicate with people, whether we follow up and do the things that we told them we were going to do is what builds those likability factors in those relationship factors.
[00:27:20] So those are all within our control and one of the biggest things I would think in addition to not giving up is just effort and wanting to put in the effort. So there’s plenty of my students who just don’t like working too much and don’t like doing things. And I say, “Hey, that’s great. You can do something else.” But this is the job where they find out if you’re someone who works hard and actively,
[00:27:47] so this might not be the job for you because if you’re not willing to put in a ton of effort, especially early on, you’re not going to be successful. And put, and it’s not only just maybe working longer, but just more [00:28:00] efficiently and more focused so that you can have the results. And that’s where that competitiveness comes in
[00:28:06] because I, I compare it to I cheat by working harder than everybody else. So I’m going to win because I spent more time and more effort than you, not
[00:28:17] because I’m better than you maybe, but because I put in the effort.
[00:28:20] Libby Galatis: [00:28:20] It’s so funny. We talked about winning and losing and it’s actually a question that we ask in our interviews. Do you love to win or do you hate to lose more? And Tim, you strike me as somebody that hates to lose.
[00:28:35] Tim Butler: [00:28:35] Yeah. And when I do, I love that too, because it puts that chip on my shoulder, like it’s a great motivator. So when I’m recognized and I win and I don’t lose, I like that, but then when I lose, I love that too
[00:28:48] because it’s just more motivation. You’re definitely right.
[00:28:52] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:28:52] You were talking about how you there are some students who really, quite frankly, don’t want to work that and they can, this is the type of [00:29:00] job where you can figure that out, flush it out right away. We have a saying around here, “It’s gold top gold time, not clock time.” So if you want a job where it’s
[00:29:09] eight to five, you punch in, punch out, the job is done when you punch out then great. But if you want a job where you get all your work done and you hit your goal, maybe you can earn Friday off or enjoy a lifestyle with it. I have a feeling that there are a lot of people who want to get into sales because they’re money motivated, because they want to earn a lot of money, but it’s not just enough to be money motivated,
[00:29:35] you have to be disciplined to earn that. And that kind of goes back to your point about working hard, working efficiently, working smart. How do you pull that discipline out of students? Or how do you get them to realize that while they’re still in school and it’s a safe place for them to figure that out before they get into their first job after college?
[00:29:56] Tim Butler: [00:29:56] I think I focus a lot on the purpose of sales [00:30:00] people and the purpose of salespeople are not for them to be successful and make a lot of money. That’s the side effect of sales, which is a really positive side effect, right, in terms of financial success and everything else. But really the great salespeople are people who love interacting with people, finding out about their situation and then determining whether there’s a solution that they offer that could add value and people who listen well ask great questions
[00:30:30] and then present customized based on that, that empathy and that knowledge they gained are going to sell a lot more than people who just want to make a lot of money. So my thing is, if you legitimately just go all in on trying to help others and do the right thing by your company and your customer, the results take care of themselves.
[00:30:51] And you’re actually going to have longer and more sustainable, like success that you have the mindset of [00:31:00] “I want to make the most money this month or this quarter.” Those people can tend to cut some corners in terms of ethics and everything. So how I, so I focus on that, but I also focus on the idea that if that energizes and motivates you, then you have to do a lot of things that you don’t like. As it’s director of the center,
[00:31:22] I have to do a lot of like non-sales related things in order to make this successful. And how I motivate myself to do those more tedious spreadsheety type of tasks is by saying, “If I’m going to go have this fun, which is working with these students and teaching them how to sell, I also have to do this work.”
[00:31:43] And this work gets me the lifestyle that I want, which is to be able to have that impact. And so that’s what I use to motivate myself to do all the tasks associated with the job, because it’s not all about talking to
[00:31:55] people. It’s a lot about time management process.
[00:32:00] [00:31:59] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:31:59] Yeah. That is if there was, a billboard for salespeople, that would be one of them. I love that you said, “I have to do a lot of things that I don’t want to do, in order to do the things that I do want to do and be successful in it.” And I think that’s such like a sales person thing, there’s always the running joke.
[00:32:17] “Salespeople never update their salesforce.com.” And “Take care of accounting stuff, it’s part of the gig.” And, “If you do it right at all kind open up more opportunities for you to be able to do the stuff that you really do love.” Talking to people or in your case, working with students.
[00:32:31] So that’s great. I want to talk a little bit about your experience outside of the classroom and outside of the university. you had mentioned you were in insurance and in banking what was your personal experience, like when you were in sales? Did you when you were in insurance sales, for example, did you work, did you surprise yourself?
[00:32:52] Was it really tough at first? What was it like when you first got into selling?
[00:33:00] [00:33:00] Tim Butler: [00:33:00] I would say I struggled mightily in terms of, I just didn’t have the tools. I enjoyed the, you really feel, it’s almost like being an entrepreneur without having all the risks of owning your own business being in sales, because I really enjoyed how I had control over my success and my effort level. And that good companies that you might work for will empower you to do that and to have that entrepreneurial mindset within their organization.
[00:33:35] So I think, what it taught me was there was so much that I had to do independently and self-motivated and that didn’t necessarily come naturally to me or to most people. So it helped me develop discipline around areas that weren’t necessarily my core strengths. And understanding how the way I plan my day in [00:34:00] terms of trying to sell insurance, it influenced whether I would have a successful day and it really does come back to that process orientation, because if it’s all about people and meeting people, that’s great,
[00:34:12] and you’ll be a great friend and people will like you, but you also have to really apply some discipline. Like I could sit and talk to somebody for two hours and build rapport, but if we have a 30 minute meeting, it’s not a good use of time. So you gotta be, have some willpower around
[00:34:32] understanding what you need to accomplish each day and having that discipline to do it.
[00:34:38] Libby Galatis: [00:34:38] I think it’s some things to be said, if you have that experience in a sales role or your first sales job, I think that there’s commonalities with the typical challenges that you experience. And in the classroom, you’re trying your best to prepare them for those challenges and get them set up for success and to be prepared going in to the industry.
[00:34:57] But until you’re in the driver’s seat, there’s certain [00:35:00] things that you just don’t believe or maybe no matter how much insight you provide a student they just don’t buy into it and have to experience it for themselves. What would you say, and this could be based off your own personal experience or maybe speaking with alumni after they’ve transitioned out of the program but what is the most challenging adjustment or biggest challenge that students are bound to experience? No matter how much prepare, how much you covered in your classrooms or how much insight you share with them, that is still existing in that first role.
[00:35:32] Tim Butler: [00:35:32] I would say two major areas. One of them is technology and making sure that they learn CRM and all of the sales enablement tools that most companies are providing. So we try to expose them to some of those here, but they can’t possibly imagine how technology driven modern sales is. So that’s that, that comes as an [00:36:00] adjustment.
[00:36:01] And then also and going along with that, the documentation and the counting and the things like that. I felt the same way in my sales job, I’d make the sale and be like, “You file it.” But now that’s not how it works. You have to actually take ownership over the whole process.
[00:36:14] So that would be one area, would be that technology and the more like detail orientation, accounting, and finance, and tech managing information and the other one is just the pure resilience and energy needed. So a lot of my students talk about struggling with, they get a lot of rejection.
[00:36:35] They get a lot of, they have to maintain a certain energy level. And I warned students about this. It’s, “You really have to be one of those people that adapt to other people’s situation, other people’s feelings and bite your tongue instead of… If you want to be the boss that can just yell at people,
[00:36:53] this is not the role for you, because you’re going to have to actually empathize and adapt to the customer, to [00:37:00] the people within your organization and make sure that value is delivered. Because when you call up that other part of the organization and they like you and want to work with you, because you’ve treated them respectfully in the past versus you get mad because something happens with your customer and you take it out on them.”
[00:37:17] So really controlling their emotions and keeping motivated because it’s hard to keep up that energy level for years and years. And that’s why many people, some people just have that mindset and would do it forever, but others may want to develop other skill sets so that they can transition into management roles or training roles or marketing or other parts of the organization because it does take a lot of energy and a lot of, I don’t know, like balance in order to be successful and keep that energy level up. That’s required to be successful. Because if you exceed [00:38:00] your expectations or your goals in one month, you probably want to keep doing that.
[00:38:03] That’s, it gets pretty
[00:38:05] like, addictive to do well and it takes a lot of energy and effort and like continuous motivation to do that.
[00:38:13] Libby Galatis: [00:38:13] I think that is such an amazing point. That was actually one of my biggest challenges when adjusting to the nine to five coming out of collegiate life because students are now experiencing one hour and 50 minute class in the morning and then they have three hours of a break and then maybe an afternoon class, but no classes on Fridays.
[00:38:30] And you just don’t realize the toll having to be on nine to five. And sales is a unique industry because in the same way with recruiting and with teaching those classes, you have to stand up and, and put that energy forward. You mentioned the importance of finding a balance and and in an industry where there’s a lot of emotional investment people care a lot within sales. They want to win, they want to achieve a lot of stuff and it just takes a lot out of you to get there.
[00:38:57] How do you personally recharge or how do you find that [00:39:00] balance?
[00:39:00] Tim Butler: [00:39:00] That’s a great question. And I think that’s what’s important for me is to also remain motivated and high energy because the student who I inspired two or three years ago is gone and now we have new students and I have to inspire them and I have nothing built up in terms of credibility because the other student’s gone.
[00:39:20] So I guess my focus, what keeps me fired up about this is knowing that there are students that are relying on me bringing that level of energy and motivation and if they don’t see that they might not gravitate towards our program. So that helps me do it, the impact that I see that I’m having on those students.
[00:39:42] And for the second part where you were asking about what would should students do to stay motivated and I would say focus on what their goals are, what they’re trying to accomplish, the positive impact they have, because most of the companies our students go to [00:40:00] have a great product that solves some sort of business problem.
[00:40:03] And so if you’re going to maintain high energy around that, you have to focus on the impact you’re having on those customers and making their lives easier with the product you sell and that’ll keep you motivated. Also, developing some work-life balance in terms of like other things that you’re doing and focusing on,
[00:40:23] that’s probably something I need to work on as well. It’s just, it’s not all about sales. And we’re doing this because we have a passion for it, but we want to take that energy and that success and bring it to other areas of our lives and make sure that
[00:40:39] we’re doing other things.
[00:40:41] So finding other ways to like, spend your time.
[00:40:45] Libby Galatis: [00:40:45] I think that’s really important, especially with the world being the way it is now. So many universities adjusting to a hundred percent virtual. And I think a lot of universities, memoryBlue from experience, we were very surprised [00:41:00] with how smooth the transition ended up BA. But it takes a toll, your school is your work and you’re also sleeping and that’s your home as well.
[00:41:07] And being able to take a step back and remove yourself I think having those boundaries is extremely important, so that was an excellent point.
[00:41:15] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:41:15] So , you mentioned that, having an impact on the students that you work with motivates you and gets you fired up and rebuilding those relationships. I’m curious, what’s next for your program and for you? What are some goals that you have for your program over the next, let’s say, three to five years?
[00:41:34] Tim Butler: [00:41:34] Within my university, I want to reach as many students as possible because I know I’m not reaching all the students that could be good at this and could benefit from this. So that keeps me motivated, knowing that there’s hundreds of students that I’m not reaching each year, even though I’m reaching
[00:41:53] a lot. One thing I signed up for was to teach, it’s called FYE First Year Experience class. So I’ll be teaching [00:42:00] one hour a week freshman and bringing in all sorts of cool people, like y’all, to talk to them, people on financial literacy, people in sales, and it’s a business oriented like freshman class.
[00:42:14] So other ways to reach out and to grow the program is where we’re looking at because the more people we have, those drive the metrics that universities care about so they can devote more resources. And the more resources we get, the more effective our program is. If you want to work
[00:42:30] in a way where this or, this organization could continue without you
[00:42:34] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:42:34] Especially
[00:42:35] Tim Butler: [00:42:35] You create that much of a system process and thing that…
[00:42:39] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:42:39] Building the engine that can keep going. Yeah, I think that’s a great legacy, especially, you know, in many years, when you look back on your career, not only are preparing people to be very successful, but you’re building something that, future generations will have the ability to learn this. Whether they end up in sales or not, you talked about, “This is stuff that people are going to need to [00:43:00] learn and do in their career.”
[00:43:01] Whether they’re in sales, they need to understand how to communicate effectively and how to build processes for themselves and stay motivated. And it’s just really exciting to talk to another professor who is doing awesome things to spread the good word of sales and obviously we’re biased, but get more people and more students involved in it.
[00:43:20] Tim Butler: [00:43:20] It’s super motivating to talk to folks like you and to see that you’re excited about what we’re doing. ‘Cause I’m definitely excited about it myself.
[00:43:28] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:43:28] You mentioned, Tim, early on we were talking about when you were at Alabama. And I think you said his name was Joe who ran the program back then. And what you loved is the passion in which he was able to deliver the content. And I think, it’s very clear to us and to our listeners that you have a passion for building this curriculum at North Alabama.
[00:43:49] So thanks for sharing a little bit with us today and our listeners. We really appreciate it. And we’re excited to see you at the next competition that we go to.
[00:43:59] Tim Butler: [00:43:59] Absolutely. [00:44:00] I’m looking forward to. I appreciate the time, I really enjoyed the conversation Libby and Kristen.
[00:44:06] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:44:06] Thank you so much, Tim.