Tech Sales is for Hustlers Podcast

Campus Series: Howard Dover – Skill, Drill, and Support

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Howard Dover

What he does: Howard is the director of the sales program at UT Dallas.

Company: The University of Texas at Dallas

Noteworthy: Howard worked for the state of Oregon as a systems analyst, where he designed computer systems for automating business processes for the state of Oregon.

After that, he decided to get a Ph.D. with six children starting at age 35.

Where to find Howard: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡I don’t meet you until I teach you that you’re allowed to be you. One of the most challenging things about being a professor is a so-called power distance culture. “If I interview that person from that kind of culture, I’m going to see because I have power, and there’s distance because of title. That’s the hardest thing for me when dealing with a student in a power distance culture that I don’t get to meet the person. I get to meet this view of, ‘Oh, he’s so much higher than me; therefore, I have to act in a certain way.’ It’s hard to break that down and say, listen, ‘I’m a coach. The title is useful in less it keeps us from being able to help you define who you are and what you can accomplish in this life.'”

⚡ We found a while ago that sales competitions are not predictive. As Howard explains, being good in competitions doesn’t indicate you will be good in real-life situations or every aspect of sales. ”We have data on people who win sales competitions internally, and yet they can’t sell in our selling exercises. We have data on all of our students in multiple dimensions, and we’re very honest with them about it and say, ‘Hey, you’re good at presenting, but you’re not very good in other areas. These are the areas you need to improve.’ Each student gets an individual evaluation of their skills and their competency levels through our program.”

⚡ We teach our students to probe and adjust. The buyer is in a constant state of shift and movement, Howard states. Therefore, sales students must learn how to adapt to every buyer-related situation. ”Curriculums have to think about what are the core elements, but then what are the motions, and the skills, and the tools that allow you to be where the customer moves to. That’s important in a modern world because if we try to scale up on something where the buyer was, by the time we’ve scaled up, the buyer isn’t there anymore.”

Episode Highlights

There is no academic success without the support

“I think the key piece to being able to build a sales program is a supportive dean and a supportive chair. If either one of them is missing, you’re going to have a problem. The advantage I had at UT Dallas when I arrived is that I got my Ph.D. at UT Dallas. I was coming home to an institution where I knew most of my faculty. When I walked in, I had to create a program in harmony with our existing brand, which required us to do things very differently from other programs. I wasn’t going to focus on transactional selling – B to C selling, anything related to things that the research faculty would find that would diminish or dirty the brand. And I also had very intellectual students.” 

UTD provides its students with scholarships for the sales program

“Getting a thousand dollars scholarship pays for the sales class. That became huge. We have zero students, and we have 10,000 in scholarships to give out. We reached a pinnacle at 50,000 a year, a few years back, and then were revamped. We didn’t need 50,000. We needed about 25, 30,000. Giving out scholarships has been a hallmark of our growth. If they’re getting other scholarships from other entities, we don’t consider them because they’re already getting their schools paid. But for the kids who don’t have any other scholarship money, and if their GPA is where it needs to be, we pay for their sales classes when they take them. That’s a huge part of what we ask our partners to help us do, is help these students get through.”

Being analytical is crucial for sales

“The bias is real. And one of the toughest things that companies face when they come to UT Dallas is that they have a goal for diversity, but they don’t know how to attract diversity. We’re a pretty tough place to recruit. If you’re used to recruiting a type, a personality, and you think that’s, what’s good at sales, you’re struggling at our school because we have a few of those. Remember we have, whenever you want to call diversity, we have it. But it’s interesting. There’s research that we’ve been doing. Karen Piskor up at Ryerson, contact at LinkedIn, and I have had a long history. I was brought in by LinkedIn to work with Karen, and we’ve been working on a research project on the future skills that’ll be necessary for selling in the future. The one thing I’m allowed to say at this point, ’cause it’s under review, is that the one takeaway from LinkedIn’s data and this was a global data poll. We did a meta-analysis of that data. The one skill that floated to the top: analytical. Analytical is the future of the profession.” 

Students go through a drill before becoming salesmen

“We have a sales navigator for all our students. And so they have to identify the targets. They have to create a target market. They have to develop a communication strategy. They have to get a meeting. They have to execute on the meeting, and they have to deliver. Oh my gosh, they have to deliver a quota by the end of their sales cycle. At the end of our semester, we do what’s called rookie preview, where we allow them to be evaluated by the industry people in a 15 minute role-play similar to all national events.” 

Transcript:

[00:00:11] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:00:11] Welcome everybody back to the Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Campus Series. I’m Kristen Wisdorf.

[00:00:17] Libby Galatis: [00:00:17] And I am Libby Galatis.

[00:00:19] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:00:19] And we are super excited today to have joining us, Howard Dover, who is the director of the sales program at UT Dallas and like the godfather of sales competitions. I feel like he goes to every event. So welcome to the podcast, Howard.

[00:00:35] Howard Dover: [00:00:35] I will give a shout out to Pat Pallentino that, the godfather of sales is taken in the collegian space by Pat Pallentino and

[00:00:44] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:00:44] All right. We’ll have to give you a different different title then we’ll work on it. Although I do have a Pat Pallentino, I can  mimic Pat Paleantino, but I probably wouldn’t do it in public ’cause he’d kill me.

[00:00:55] That’s exciting. We’re really excited to have you. I know you have chatted with our [00:01:00] co-founder before and some other folks here at memoryBlue. So you know Howard, the way we like to start these conversations is actually the same way we like to start interviews with students on campus.

[00:01:11] And we interview a lot of students and that’s actually… We want to take 60 seconds -ish to walk through your highlight reel. So Howard, if you could take around 60 seconds and tell us a little bit about you, the highlights, what would you say?

[00:01:26] Howard Dover: [00:01:26] Okay. 60 seconds. I’m on my own sales company. When I put myself through school and put my wife through school without any debt, the first round. And then strangely worked for the state of Oregon as a systems analyst, where I designed computer systems from basically automating business processes for the state of Oregon.

[00:01:52] And then I decided to get a PhD with six children at starting at age 35, which [00:02:00] by the way, those are not advised to take six children into grad school. Not a good thing to do. I did survive and got my PhD. And then I went to the University of Maryland System school called Salisbury, Maryland, Salisbury University, and started what I, my wife and I like to call our post-doc years, which was to learn what I really wanted to do now that I had my PhD.

[00:02:25] And then that process, the great recession happened. And I realized that there was a disjoint between what was being taught in business school and what actually needed to be taught to get people jobs. And in that timeframe, I ran into people like Rob Peterson and Terry Lowe and Pat Pallentino and realize there’s this whole world of sales professors that actually teach relevant

[00:02:58] material that actually get [00:03:00] students sales jobs, and my life was forever changed.

[00:03:05] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:03:05] Okay.

[00:03:06] Howard Dover: [00:03:06] Is that 60 seconds?

[00:03:07] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:03:07] Yeah, that’s great. There’s a lot to unpack there. So I want to start with, you said, I graduated during the great recession, so I remember that time quite well, unfortunately. You said there was a disconnect between what students were learning or what business schools were teaching and

[00:03:25] what was actually helpful or could have been more helpful in the marketplace? What were the biggest gaps that you were noticing? What was being taught that was like, “I don’t know if that’s necessarily as useful as this”?

[00:03:38] Howard Dover: [00:03:38] I think the first thing is that the marketing degrees, the marketing profession in business schools is usually taught as the cool major, right? It’s the easy major. It’s the no math major. It’s the party major. Now what I didn’t know, but I know now is that marketing is like the [00:04:00] stepchild of most business schools.

[00:04:02] Because they, finance is the hard science. Supply chain, hard science. Accounting, , those are the rigorous and then you have the marketing and you put really, you put together the people who end up in wanting to go into marketing degrees. They go into marketing degrees because not usually because they’re interested in marketing, although that may be the case, it’s often because they didn’t want to do the harder major, which is actually quite sad because marketing is pretty complex.

[00:04:30] And yet you have students who don’t really want that complexity. So there’s a little bit of a disjoint there in our field now. The other side is sales, right? Sales, if you look at some statistics say between 25 and 30% of students in a marketing area will go into sales. Other people say it’s as high as 82% and yet most

[00:04:55] business schools don’t have sales programs, let alone [00:05:00] sales courses that are relevant to the way in which sales is actually occurring. And so in that moment is you live through that moment, prior to the great recession, my D students, because I was at a party school, my D students were getting 60 K your jobs in Washington, DC.

[00:05:22] In Baltimore. So I, my life was great. I did my nine hours a week. My kids got jobs. I did research. I was, “Oh, I’m going to figure out the world.” And then that great recession hit, my A students couldn’t even get an interview. And so I actually took some time. I went up to Washington DC and I found an education foundation,

[00:05:47] that was designed up in Washington, DC, around marketing. It’s called the DMAWEF. I know that’s a real long, Direct Marketing Association of Washington DC Education Foundation. [00:06:00] And their whole purpose was to try to help educate business professors on what was the modern marketing tool, marketing concepts needed. And they actually hold, they still to this day, actually do a professor’s Institute every January to teach the mid Atlantic professors,

[00:06:20] what’s actually relevant in Washington DC, inside the direct marketing world. And so I was able to sit down with the executives of companies that I was trying to get my students jobs from agencies in the Washington market, and say, “Okay,wait, what do I need to teach?” Everything they told me I needed to teach wasn’t in the textbooks. The courses that the materials weren’t even in courses we had.

[00:06:49] And so I went right back to my old university and I said, “All right, I need several new courses.” And I design new courses related directly to what that [00:07:00] education foundation told me. And that began this journey of saying, “I’m going to talk to the stakeholders to determine the curriculum for me. And I’m going to listen to people in the academic space who use that kind of language.”

[00:07:16] I’ve listened to stakeholders. Therefore, this is my curriculum, and I’ve nev-, and I’ve never changed. I don’t ever, we just went through the pandemic. Lots of universities around the country did not have placement. We had 85% internship placement. 90% of our permanent placements held through the pandemic.

[00:07:40] That didn’t happen to everybody. But part of it was because we were working with our partners to make sure that we were training relevant to the modern motions of selling, before the pandemic. So while people were cutting back in a lot of places, they didn’t want to cut [00:08:00] back from hiring the students that we have because they knew we were telling, teaching them the most modern motions that are required in today’s world.

[00:08:10] Libby Galatis: [00:08:10] That’s, it’s a story that we hear so many times, especially with the educators that we’ve had on this podcast. The importance of sales, the necessity of building the skills, how valuable it is in general. And to be a pioneer with such a successful program that you’ve built literally from the ground up.

[00:08:27] And I’m excited to pick your brain a little bit, to get an idea of what that growth was like, because from past educators that we’ve sat down with getting buy in from universities to invest in, expanding courses and adding faculty. Obviously there’s a lot of hurdles that you have to overcome.

[00:08:40] So can you walk us through some of those challenges when you were trying to get buy-in from the university? And also from the students when you were trying to expand and just share how important these skills were and how important these courses would be.

[00:08:52] Howard Dover: [00:08:52] I think the key piece to being able to build a sales program is a supportive dean [00:09:00] and a supportive chair. So if either one of them are missing, you’re going to have a problem. So what the advantage I had at UT Dallas when I arrived is that I got my PhD at UT Dallas. So I was coming home to an institution where I knew most of my faculty. And I knew who they were.

[00:09:24] I knew what they stood for and I, it is not sales. We are known as one of the most prolific research institutions in the world. And w-, we produce the UTD 100 that ranks every university in the world on research productivity. We’re number four, or number five on our own list. We’re number five worldwide.

[00:09:49] And we’re number four in North America on our own list. So we’re globally recognized for our A level research as an academic [00:10:00] institution. So when I walked in, I had to create a program that would be in harmony with our existing brand, which required us to do things very differently than other programs.

[00:10:18] I wasn’t going to be able to focus on, let’s say transactional selling. B to C selling. Anything related to things that the research faculty would find that would diminish or dirty the brand. And I also had students that are very intellectual. They’re just, we don’t have a s-, we don’t have a football team.

[00:10:45] We’d like to say we’re undefeated in football. Since 1969, we have never lost a football game. Nobody else can say that in the country, but we’ve never stepped foot on a football field either. [00:11:00] Now let’s talk chess. We’ll whoop you. Okay? We can talk some mean chest over the last 15 years, we’ve been in the final four in world and nationals in chess.

[00:11:13] We’re one of the dominant players worldwide in chess. There are chess players in Poland and Russia who dream of coming to UTD to be collegiate. Yeah, it’s crazy. I had a Polish chess player actually go through our sales program. I had a grand master take two of my sales classes. He’s now back coaching our actual co-, our actual chess team.

[00:11:40] We actually have pep rallies. Or the chess team when they go to the final fours, they

[00:11:47] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:11:47] No kidding

[00:11:47] Howard Dover: [00:11:47] go with the.. It’s, you got to understand we’re a little bit geeky weird and we like it. Okay? And You recognize that.

[00:11:54] We do, we lean into it, we lean into it. And so when we teach [00:12:00] sales, we’re teaching it to a student body who is looking for an opportunity to solve the problems of the world.

[00:12:08] Not to sell something to… I would never be able to get away with, “Hey, I can sell the ice to Eskimos at UTD because no student would want to do that.” But if I say, “I want to help. Let’s develop those solutions that allow the Eskimo to stay on Eskimo.” They’re like, “Oh, I’m all in. That sounds like a really complex problem.”

[00:12:28] And so I’m dealing with very intellectual people and I’m having to expose them, to the fact that they may be really good at sales.

[00:12:37] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:12:37] Yeah.

[00:12:38] Howard Dover: [00:12:38] And so it’s a very different process that we have. And so first off, when they recruited me in, they said, ” We need, we realized most of our students are going into sales jobs and marketing it.

[00:12:49] We’re not doing a good job.” So they realize that and called me and asked me to come back and build what I built. And so my first conversation with the Dean, he said, “What do you need?” [00:13:00] And his sons, Hassan’s a great guy. He’s been a Dean for over 20. I think he’s 22 years, 24 years now, which is rare.

[00:13:09] And eight, nine years ago, he said, ” What do you need?” And I said, “I need a lab.” And he said, “I don’t know what a lab is. Tell me what a lab is.” And I told him, he said, “Y’all have a lab.” I said, “I need a center.” And he said, “You’ll have a center. What else do you need?” And then when I got in he sat me down and said, “What else do you need?”

[00:13:25] And I said, “I eventually need three faculty.” And he said, “All right, we’ll get you the three faculty.” But here’s what he told me, and this is why I think he’s really a shrewd Dean. When I was in that meeting, they asked me what I needed. I said, I needed three faculty. The chair at the time said “No,

[00:13:44] we can’t keep on bringing in guys like him.” And the Dean looked at him and said, “Listen, I’ve been a Dean for 17 years.” He said, “Every single year I have executives, tell me I’m stupid, because I don’t have a sales program.” [00:14:00] And he said, “You haven’t been on those meetings. I’ve been on those meetings. We brought in one of our own, and he’s going to build a program,

[00:14:10] that’s going to make us look like UTD sales. So live, let him do that. Let him build something that makes UTD differentiated because he’s not going to mess with it. He’s got it right.” I have a PhD from UTD, I don’t want to diminish my own brand. I want to enhance my own brand. And that’s probably one of the unique opportunities I had to come into a tier one research institution.

[00:14:38] The institution has grown from 17,000 when I arrived to over 30,000 today. So we’re in a phenomenal.. For those of you who don’t understand academic growth, that’s like crazy growth, okay? Institutions are shrinking, not growing. We’ve been growing the whole time. So our Dean has built [00:15:00] new programs inside the bills, the business school that are street relevant every single year, we have new programs that are street relevant to facilitate the growth of our business school and to make sure that we’re relevant to the business community.

[00:15:18] And it’s a fun place to be. So I lucked out coming to a place I already knew everybody with a Dean who had a vision. And chairs who let me do my thing because they knew me. And they knew that they could trust me for what I was about to do.

[00:15:33] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:15:33] Let’s talk a little bit about that. So you were in Maryland at Salisbury and did you got a call and they recruited you to come start the program. Like how did you make that move? I imagine you, you had six kids, right? You had a whole family and you moved back down to Texas. What was that whole experience like in that decision-making process?

[00:15:53] Howard Dover: [00:15:53] So academia, we talk to each other. If you ever get to an academic, like in an academic circle, we’re [00:16:00] all winking at each other.  If I, if Libby was a professor, going to say, “Libby, how’s it going? Are you happy?” And I’d be looking at her going, let’s see, is she lying to me?

[00:16:09] Or is she, she’d go..

[00:16:10] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:16:10] Kind of like tech sales.

[00:16:11] Howard Dover: [00:16:11] Yes. So you’re you’re trying to always probe each other on happiness, “So how’s it going? Are you getting tenure? And what have you been looking at?” And I had a, I got a couple of really aggressive interview processes with Western coasts or PAC 10 PAC 12 universities, and a couple of mountain West universities,

[00:16:34] and, and so my advisor actually ran into me in San Francisco and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” And I said “I got really close to, I won’t say the name of the university.” And I thought about going to do that. And he said “You would do that?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Wow, we just did something,

[00:16:53] we should have hired you.” And I said “I’ve never thought about coming back.” And that was actually, it was an [00:17:00] 18 month negotiation cycle recruiting slash negotiating cycle. They got hot, then they got cold. And they, they wanted to go out and see what they could find in the marketplace, which all of us will do, when we decide we want to have a professorship, you’ll go put it out in the market and see what fish can you catch?

[00:17:20] Sales faculty in the country are hard to come by. Especially sales faculty that understand mathematical modeling are I don’t know too many of them. And most of them don’t teach sales, but they may research sales and they’re very brilliant people, but they don’t teach sales.

[00:17:35] So it’s interesting when they came back to it, they said “We produce this guy. He gets who we are. He gets how we talk. He gets how we do research. And, we know he’s a good teacher.” Cause I was an award-winning teacher when I was in my PhD program. So it was just a, it’s a cording. It really is weird.

[00:17:58] I’m constantly, [00:18:00] I, all of us look at each other and say, “If ever this happened, I’d be calling you.” And I know the three or four places I would call if things got weird, here. And it’s right, because you’ve got to develop that relationship and it is really a pretty small group of friends.

[00:18:17] We all know each other. We know who we’d love to work with in the future. You look at you may end up cutting this, but you look at Kennesaw state and the powerhouse that it’s had, Tarlow’s always been amazing. But when he seeing that and I’m going to lose his name, when he brought over the guy from ball state, and that, he’s going to kill me for not remembering his name, but they’re, they’ve been buddies for years, and now they get to work together as two unstoppable forces.

[00:18:43] And so we all know each other pretty well. We’re all pretty good friends. And we treat each other, like friends, like we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, the goofy things, the fun things. We know how to get in, get under each other’s skin, if we want to. Those 

[00:18:58] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:18:58] a tight Tight [00:19:00] network.

[00:19:00] Howard Dover: [00:19:00] It’s a fun group of people.

[00:19:02] Listen we’re all pretty much givers. If you’re running a sales program in the United States at a major institution, you’ve chosen to give more than you take.

[00:19:12] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:19:12] Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s actually like really good example for students and people in sales that your network is so important and how you treat that network and cultivated and create those relationships over time can impact where you end up or, moving across the country to start a new job like you did from, Maryland to Texas.

[00:19:34] So there’s similarities for what you went through and what you currently go through with what sales professionals and students will ultimately go through in their career too.

[00:19:43] Howard Dover: [00:19:43] Let me reinforce that a little bit. When I moved from Maryland to Texas, I had five companies come with me.

[00:19:52] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:19:52] Oh, wow.

[00:19:53] Howard Dover: [00:19:53] And they, several of them came to me and and one of them said, “Tell me what you need.” I said, “I don’t [00:20:00] have students yet.” And he said, “I don’t care.” He said, “I know what you’re going to do.” And he said, “And I know you need help,

[00:20:07] so you tell me what I need.” And I’ll give a Tom James company was the first company. They gave us $5,000 in scholarships every year for five years. Intel, McAfee now. It was, it’s moved names. McAfee was also working with us. They gave us 5,000 and internships. So our first year zero students, we had $10,000 in scholarships.

[00:20:34] So that made it easier for me to go around and say, “Hey students!” Cause 70% of UTD students work to put themselves through school.

[00:20:44] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:20:44] Wow.

[00:20:45] Howard Dover: [00:20:45] And so it they’re paying their own way. And so getting a thousand dollars scholarship basically pays for the sales class. And so that became huge. We have zero students and we have 10,000 in scholarships to give out.

[00:21:00] [00:21:00] And all of a sudden the students are like Haiti or sales is giving out scholarships. And we actually reached a pinnacle at 50,000 a year, a few years back, and then we re revamped. We didn’t need 50,000. We needed about 25, 30,000. But giving out scholarships has been a hallmark of our growth and it’s been our goal to allow a student to take

[00:21:23] all their advanced sales instruction for free and be paid for buyer partners. Now if they’re getting other scholarships from other entities, we don’t consider them because they’re already getting their school’s paid for, but for the kids who don’t have any other scholarship money. And if they’re, if their GPA is where it needs to be, we pay for their sales classes when they take them.

[00:21:49] And that’s a huge part of what we ask our partners to help us do, is help these students get through. Some of them are first-generation college [00:22:00] students. We’re very diverse at UTD. Whatever you want to define diversity, I don’t care what you want to define diversity. We have that diversity and it’s not one vein,

[00:22:10] it’s multiple veins. It’s a very, it’s a very modern and cosmopolitan style classroom with every possible group represented. And yet many of them are first-generation college students. And I love them. They’re amazing because they’re putting themselves through school, their journey. They have grit, they work hard and many of them are just blown away,

[00:22:40] by the bridge we’ve created between, “I don’t have the network to make my life catapult to another level.” And yet we have this bridge that connects them to a network that will change their lives forever.

[00:22:54] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:22:54] Yeah, opportunities they may not have considered before they ever even got to [00:23:00] UT Dallas or heard about your program. I want to talk about, when you were talking about going to UT Dallas and starting the program and the type of university being a research Institute, you recognize that your university is very unique and that you said the students are highly intellectual, they want to solve the problems of the world.

[00:23:18] I love that you said that. I think there’s often misconceptions that we all probably have heard about when it comes to sales, that it’s not necessarily the most intellectual person or it’s just slinging products and like the slimy type of a sales persona. How do you what, let me first ask, what types of misconceptions do you think people still have about sales and how do you combat that with students,

[00:23:44] and when you recruit new students into your program?

[00:23:49] Howard Dover: [00:23:49] So bias is real, right? Bias is real. And one of the toughest things that companies face when they come to UT Dallas [00:24:00] is that they have a goal for diversity, but they really don’t know how to attract diversity. And so we’re a pretty tough place to recruit, because if you’re used to recruiting a type, a personality and you think that’s, what’s good at sales, you’re really struggle at our school, because we have a few of those.

[00:24:21] Remember we have, whenever you want to call diversity, we have it. But, it’s interesting, there’s research that we’ve been doing. Karen Piskor up at at Ryerson contacted LinkedIn and LinkedIn, and I have had a long history. And so I was brought in by LinkedIn to work with Karen and we’ve been working on a research project on the future skills,

[00:24:43] that’ll be necessary for selling in the future. And the one thing I’m allowed to say at this point, cause it’s under review, is that the one takeaway from LinkedIn’s data, and this was a global data poll, right? LinkedIn has everybody who has a [00:25:00] LinkedIn profile, all jobs posted on LinkedIn. We did a meta analysis of that data.

[00:25:05] The one skill that floated to the top, analytical. Analytical is the future of the s-, of the profession. Why? Because transactional is being digitized. And our SDR, the SDR movement, it can, it may is either great, or problematic, right? It depends on the organization, how they’re using it. But this concept of SDRs almost moves back to transactional

[00:25:34] again. And a lot of companies are transactional, lising the SDR function to where we’re actually losing skill in the analytical space all over again. And when I started this semester we have had a pretty good run on the national circuit for a while. We love ICSE.

[00:25:53] That’s why I love Pat Pallentino. We’ve done very well there ever since their exception. We’ve, almost every year have been in the top [00:26:00] 10. We were number two this last year. We were number one the year before. It’s, it’s interesting that is, as we think about what really makes a top student is that we don’t know.

[00:26:13] That’s the thing that’s amazing to me with diversity, right? If I was at another university, which is a very homogeneous, then I can say, “Oh yeah, no problem.” But I’ve learned at UT Dallas that I don’t know. Because I don’t know, you’re not done yet. Because are you in a power distance culture where you’re not allowed to show me who you are yet?

[00:26:36] So I don’t really meet you until I teach you that you’re allowed to be you. So if I interview that person from that kind of a culture, I’m going to see, because I write, I have power and there’s distance because of title. So that’s the hardest thing for me when I’m dealing with a student at a power distance culture, that I don’t get to meet the person. I get to [00:27:00] meet thus this, right?

[00:27:02] This view of that, “Oh, he’s so much higher than me, therefore, I have to act in a certain way.” And it’s really hard to break that down and become, instead of the professor moved to the coach and say, listen, “I’m a coach. The title is useful in less, it keeps us from being able to help you define who you are and what you can accomplish in this life.”

[00:27:24] And so the current top of our leaderboard is just this amazing woman who is discovering who she is. And she is 200, 270% of her quota right now. I don’t think she’s done yet. I think she’s going to come. I think she’s going to go over 300. And she’s competing with the second best guy who would be the guy you would all pick.

[00:27:53] You’d all go, “That’s the guy.” And yet here’s Jasmine. I love her. She’s [00:28:00] blossoming, in the field because she takes a different approach. That’s effective in a modern world. He’s taking a different approach, that’s effective in the modern world. As long as they can morph their personality and understand the situation they’re operating in.

[00:28:20] It doesn’t really matter. And so this guy at the beginning of the semester said, “So you guys, one last semester Soviet figured out who, the number one person in the world is this year.” And I looked at him and I said, “I figured out long ago, I can’t pick them up. The system creates them.” And we see them bubble to the top in the process that we take them through.

[00:28:42] And we found a while ago that sales competitions are not predictive. We actually put them through other processes. And the people who do really well in these lives, selling components in the motions we put them through, [00:29:00] they also tend to do very well at sales competitions. But we have data on people who win sales competitions internally, and yet they can’t sell in our selling exercises.

[00:29:13] We have data on all of our students in multiple dimensions, and we’re very honest with them about it and say, “Hey, you’re really good at presenting. But you’re not very good in other areas, right? These are the areas you need to improve. You don’t know how to prospect, right? You don’t know how to do. You’re not,

[00:29:31] you’re struggling with objection handling. You’re struggling with pipeline management and meeting, understanding the complexity of a complex decision, but you can do something transactionally, but you can’t do anything complex. Let’s build on that.” And so each student gets an individual evaluation of their skills,

[00:29:51] and their competency levels through our program. And we don’t graduate them perfected. We graduate them fully aware of where their [00:30:00] strengths and their weaknesses are in our model. And those that rise to the top before they graduate, we try to get them out to compete. But to be honest with you, some of our best students will never choose not to compete because they don’t see the value,

[00:30:14] the weird, they actually don’t see the value in it. Because they’re already competing in a regular world and killing it. So…

[00:30:23] Libby Galatis: [00:30:23] It’s just such an interesting perspective that you have, because we hear it so many times that there’s an ideal type of individual that really thrives in sales. And you guys are breaking that stigma. Working with students that are more cerebral not to say, any specific student group isn’t or is, but the pool of individuals that are coming to UT Dallas and getting them bought into sales, which is probably a non-traditional idea of a career for them coming into the school.

[00:30:50] So I’m curious from an assignment standpoint, from a preparation, for your student standpoint what activities and assignments are you giving these [00:31:00] students to help them hone in on some of these skills, or even highlight or focus more on the analytical approach to sales? I’m curious if you provided them with any insight or assignments that might hone in on those specifically.

[00:31:13] Howard Dover: [00:31:13] So the two things that we’ve done over the last decade and we’re always looking at our model to tweak it. we would con-, I would say we have an app, an interactive model that is shifting to market in a continual basis. I was just on a phone call with a VP of sales, and he said, “Can I see your curriculum?”

[00:31:30] And I said “I can tell you the current iteration, but I can also tell you it’s going in for an overhaul over the summer, because we’ve already identified things because we sell to the market.” Right? We are selling to the market every year. And so we were able to, we are able to probe and adjust. We teach our students to probe and adjust. We as a curriculum probe and adjust.

[00:31:55] So we, we think the buyer is in a constant state of shift [00:32:00] and movement. And so curriculums have to think what are the core elements, but then what are the motions, and the skills, and the tools that allow you to be where the customer moves to. And that’s important in a modern world, because if we try to scale up on something where the buyer was, by the time we’ve scaled up, the buyer isn’t there anymore.

[00:32:23] And the efficacy drops off research is showing this constantly CSO data, seismic data sales enablement data research shows, “Efficacy of efforts dropping off precipitously and has been for five to six years.” Make sense. The buyer shifting, but we’re scaling. So it’s tough. We teach our students that

[00:32:44] scale, and this is from Scott Gillum, he just told me this last week, brilliant guy. He said, “Scale is the enemy of innovation and sales. Because if you’re scaling, you’re trying to look for consistency and operational [00:33:00] consistency. And yet that consistency may or may not be working in a very diverse buyer set.”

[00:33:07] So what do we do with our students to get them excited about this? The first thing is we have to debunk what they think sales is. Because they think it’s B to C. They think it’s transactional. They think it’s slimy. We also do a network development project and they’re on quota for this. They have to interview between seven and 10 professionals in their field of preference,

[00:33:31] so it’s not sales. So if I’m going to be an HR professional and I’m an intro to sales, I have to interview 10 HR professionals. If I want to go be a doctor, I have to interview 10 doctors. Doesn’t matter what field you’re going into you’re, I, when I do it, I allow up to two fields. ’cause you may not be sure yet.

[00:33:50] And you have to do 10 informational interviews with the people in that field and you’re unquoted to do so. So what are we teaching them? We’re giving them something that [00:34:00] is a great value to them, but what do they have to do? They have to do motions. They have to prospect. They have to list create.

[00:34:08] We have sales navigator for all our students. And so they have to go identify the targets. They have to create a target market. They have to develop a communication strategy. They have to go prospect. They have to get a meeting. They have to execute on the meeting and they have to deliver. Oh my gosh, they have to deliver a quota by the end of their sales cycle.

[00:34:26] And then at the end of our semester, we do what’s called rookie preview. Where we allow them to be evaluated by the industry people in a 15 minute role-play similar to all national events. We just do it for all of our workies, it’s a scary thing. We call it rookie preview because, we let people see our ugly babies and right as they’re born and some of them are really ugly and some are really pretty and it’s okay.

[00:34:51] Because once again, we’re helping them experience sales, right? Experience that meeting. [00:35:00] Experience a competitive environment. Experience visiting with a sales leader getting feedback from judges on how well they can performance and what happens is at UTD, unlike other institutions have a lot of students who say “I’m going into the sales program.”

[00:35:17] We asked students to take intro as early as we can so they can get the epiphany. “Wow. I tho-, that was fun. I might want to do this. I was really good at this. I did 12 interviews. I did 15 interviews. I didn’t want to stop. This energize me. This helped me discover something, I didn’t know about myself because I’ve been such a nose to the grindstone, a student that has really focused on my education.

[00:35:48] I haven’t explored these other components that maybe I could use that intellectual capacity to understand people, processes, and [00:36:00] challenges and fix the world.” And all of a sudden they light up and they say “Maybe, I might want to go work for one of our partners is IBM and IBM solves problems with technology. Adobe as a partner, they solve problems with technology, Eli Lilly solves health problems with medications.

[00:36:21] Right? And so we, and we have Lennox corporation that solves heating and air problems with with heating and air. And so trying to work with great partners who their whole go-to market strategy is in co, is really a cohesive to our way of thinking. Because if somebody says, “Hey, all I need you to do is knock doors, take money, and just do as much as you can.

[00:36:43] It doesn’t really matter if they don’t need it, just take the money and run.” Our students aren’t going to be that, that this isn’t going to fulfill them. But when they hear that you can, two stories of alumni that beautifully described this. [00:37:00] In the middle of COVID, one of our alumni works at a major company and he got to work with Harley Davidson to transform their websites, multi-million dollar deal.

[00:37:13] And he was ready to do that one and a half years out of school. Another young lady that worked for IBM hospital in Phoenix, getting inundated with COVID patients needed upgrade their infrastructure. She closed a multimillion dollar deal there to get them the servers they needed to be able to treat COVID patients.

[00:37:33] And, what’s amazing in both their cases, they didn’t freak out that they were dealing with an over a million dollar deal. They just saw the problem. “So you’re, you’ve got a problem. Let me see how I can solve your problem. There’s going to be a dollar amount attached to that. That’s irrelevant.

[00:37:51] Cause I’m going to help you solve your problem.” And it was a

[00:37:55] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:37:55] You’re that’s you and you’re prepping those students [00:38:00] b e e , uh, experiential learning. You’re putting them in the seat to experience all different types of sale, like interviewing people in their field of choice. That’s a sales exercise, whether they know it at the beginning of the class or not. That’s exciting.

[00:38:17] Yeah. Yes.

[00:38:18] Howard Dover: [00:38:18] Our intro classes all around exposure and it’s we make them do trail heads so that even if they go off into marketing there, they have enough trailhead experience that they understand a basic CRM system. So there’s some key elements that know whether they stay with us or they go off that they’ve received some skills.

[00:38:39] But we’re also introducing them to motions, sales motions, but without necessarily saying, Hey, by the way, we’re going to make you cold call now.

[00:38:49] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:38:49] Yeah, you’re going to learn how to build a list and prospect today, right? When you say it, we give them the object. We give them the outcome and the object, then there’s something in it for [00:39:00] them, they’re gaining the value. And then there’s the motivation for them to learn the process.

[00:39:05] Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. So I want to talk a little bit, Howard, about life before you being a professor. What did you do before you went and got your PhD? Tell us a little bit about your own personal sales experience.

[00:39:20] Howard Dover: [00:39:20] My first sales experience was being poor. I’m not kidding. I my, my dad really worked hard. He was a chef and then he was a janitor.

[00:39:30] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:39:30] Where’d you grow up?

[00:39:31] Howard Dover: [00:39:31] In California, Marin County. Oh we were the poor family that somehow got a house before it got expensive. And And so I remember being, I, it was either four or five years old.

I was old enough to speak and bold enough to do stupid things. And I looked at my mom throwing away junk mail, so she was throwing it away. And I said, “Hey mom, can I keep that?” And she goes, “Why?” And I said, “I just want to [00:40:00] see if I could do something with it.” So to the chagrin of my mom, I went to the neighbors and sold it to him.

[00:40:08] And I made like a buck.

[00:40:09] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:40:09] You sold your neighbor junk mail?

[00:40:11] Howard Dover: [00:40:11] I sold my neighbors junk mail. I didn’t write it. ‘Cause I saw an unused product and I saw, I said, and so I came home and I was like, “Hey mom, I made a dollar.” I think I sell them for 25 cents. I don’t remember how much, but I sold it to several neighbors.

[00:40:27] And my mom was just a, you can just imagine this is like the nightmare of a mother and you’re like, “You did what to our what? Oh my gosh, who did you do this to?” And she goes, “You got to go back and give them all the money back.” And I was so furious because I was like, “But mom, I earned this.” And she’s “No, you didn’t, you stole it.”

[00:40:45] And I said, “Okay.” I said, and so I began negotiating at a young age because my parents always taught me values. And I said “So let me get this straight. The reason this was wrong is because I sold something that didn’t have value.” [00:41:00] And she goes, “Yes, I was throwing it away. You can’t sell.” I said, “Okay. So if I sold something of value and got the money, you’d let me keep the money?” And she,

[00:41:11] and she just see her face going, “Yes, but you gotta tell me what you’re going to do first.” And I said, “How about my friends and I create a play and then we sell tickets to the play?” And she’s “Oh my gosh.” She’s not going to let up, ’cause I wouldn’t let up. I was tenacious. And so she let me do it,

[00:41:29] and I think I sold $2 and 50 cents worth of tickets. And it was a cash cow because nobody showed up for the performance. So my friends and I were like, “This is a business. You go sell tickets and nobody ever shows up.” Unfortunately, it’s I learned the customers don’t keep buying if they don’t get value.

[00:41:47] So there was no repeat business with the customers and but nonetheless, and then I moved on to at the earliest age I could, I sold newspapers door to door. My parents couldn’t afford to take me to Disneyland [00:42:00] or the other things, but I had a friend that was older, who went to Disneyland from the local newspaper.

[00:42:06] And I went “What, how did you do that?” So I sold a hundred subscriptions and they took me to Disneyland. Why my parents allowed me to do this? I don’t know, but I did go to Disneyland as I think it was an 11 year old. My parents and I earn, I w-, I went to Disneyland every year, that they did that because I was like, “I can, I couldn’t go work every afternoon and sell newspapers.”

[00:42:31] I, there was a guy that would drive by with a truck. This is so creepy now. He’d drive by on a truck, we’d all get in the truck together, a bunch of young kids and he’d drive us to some area of Marine County and literally drop us off. And we would walk down the street and we would go get sales subscriptions.

[00:42:49] It sounds like child abuse now doesn’t it? But anyway, I, and come on it, and I wasn’t the greatest sales person. I was just consistent and I could, I earned my [00:43:00] backpacks. I had the best camping gear of any boy scout. I was able to go to Santa Cruz to the boardwalk,

[00:43:07] every year. I went to Maryanne’s great American, California. And then I went to Disneyland and I said, “Hey, I can sell to get what I want.” And that’s, that was the beginning. And I had a little stint there with the government. I actually went to school, which was its own weird story, ’cause I wasn’t going to go to college.

[00:43:28] ‘Cause I was like, “Why, why would I?” Funny, I’m a professor now.

[00:43:31] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:43:31] Exactly.

[00:43:32] Howard Dover: [00:43:32] I did not want to go to college at all. I tried community college the first time and failed out. I wasn’t motivated. I didn’t see, I couldn’t see, I was coin operated. And I didn’t see the payoff. It wasn’t fast enough for me the first time.

[00:43:47] And I did serve a mission for my church in Vienna, Austria of all places. I, somebody had to go there. I got to go to Vienna, Austria for two years of my life. Came back and [00:44:00] felt compelled slash inspired to go get a degree. And got a degree in economics of all things, but started my own sales company.

[00:44:11] Really, to be honest with you, as I started at BYU in Provo, and I worked for the Salt Lake tribune and deseret news, selling newspaper subscriptions to put me through school and built a business out of it that at one point had a half a million dollars in revenue in 1990$ which would probably be a million in today’s dollars. And which wasn’t really good for me from a student perspective, I’m going to be honest. I really was distracted when I went to some of my econ classes. And if it weren’t for I will say that great teachers make all the difference in the world. And my mentor there, Mark Show Walter, who’s still there on faculty.

[00:44:53] He was amazing. He lit me up academically. He motivated me and were [00:45:00] some professors would be upset if I had a cell phone and my cell phone would go off during class. He’d literally laugh and go, “Howard, “go make some money, dude.” And we’re still good friends. And that kind of awakened in me this desire to maybe be a professor one day.

[00:45:16] I ran my company for 10 years and then lost that company and went to the state of Oregon of all places and design those computer systems. Which to me has been a blessing now, because now I understand massive data problems and system issues and how revenue flows through a company. And I know sales, right?

[00:45:37] So I know sales, marketing, and massive data systems. So it makes me a weird hybrid.

[00:45:45] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:45:45] Howard, the best piece of advice someone ever gave you, whether it was your newspaper selling days, your business owner days, your, early as a professor or even as a student, is there a piece of advice that stuck out to you [00:46:00] that you think would resonate with others?

[00:46:03] Howard Dover: [00:46:03] Yeah I would say it came to very late in my life. I think one of those potent moments in my life was getting to hang around some great sales leaders in the last decade and a half, and really changing my mindset. There’s the skillset, the tool set and the mindset. And if your skill sets great. Your tool sets great.

[00:46:31] Your activity rates great. But you don’t believe in yourself, you don’t believe in the capacity of getting something done. And there’s several sales leaders that this job has just given me the opportunity to hang out with some amazing people that, that just really are, that they’re just amazing.

[00:46:49] They’re the kind of leaders you would love to work with and be mentored by. And I would say I’m still on a journey of writing my mindset, and [00:47:00] just understanding in the human potential. So from a management standpoint, look at somebody for their potential, not for who they are, but also likewise, bring that to yourself. Analyze yourself for your potential.

[00:47:16] Don’t beat yourself up for where you are. And I think that comes around like Zig Ziglar. It’s encapsulated in this quote that I’m going to kill,  and I think he says “Where you were, what got you to this point in life has absolutely nothing to do with your future.” And that’s powerful.

[00:47:41] Because a lot of times what we do is we bring our mindset to this moment of time. We bring luggage with us and we perceive that it’s going to affect our future. And yet we’re the ones putting that heavyweight [00:48:00] and those constraints. It’s in our mind, we, especially in this country, in the United States, we don’t have we, we have a capitalist society where you can accomplish whatever you want and your past really doesn’t matter.

[00:48:18] Don’t get me wrong. It may be easier or harder depending on what happened. But as Ziglar says, “It has nothing to do with what you can accomplish.” That’s a mindset moment, right? “What can I accomplish?” And I grew up in a scarcity mentality. Truly if you’ve read the, “The Seven Habits” it, scarcity mentality is “I’m always afraid of not having enough.”

[00:48:43] Because that’s the way I was raised. And that’s a mindset challenge, because in that mindset, when somebody else wins, you lose. And I think understanding our growth mindset and say “If you went and I learned from you, I win and then you can win and we can both begin to win.” That’s a different mindset and it’s powerful.

[00:49:04] It’s a powerful mindset. And when you hang around people that think that way, it’s amazing. And I, a lot of my partners that I’ve had here, I, Ash Deshmukh, Mike Hart from Lennox is one of those leaders. Greg Louis, he used to be with Texas Capital Bank, Matt Bowman from Paycom, used to be at Paycom.

[00:49:24] If some of these people, they just are amazing. And I think being around amazing leaders that help you realize that your mindset really determines where you’re headed. That would be it. Unfortunately, I ran to it in my forties. I wish someone would go back to the 20 year old Howard and say that to him,

[00:49:47] but the problem with the 20 year old Howard is, I’m not sure he would have listened.

[00:49:52] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:49:52] Yeah. Yeah. You learn things when you’re supposed to. I love that skill set tool set and mindset. And

[00:49:57] Howard Dover: [00:49:57] Not mine, I borrowed it. And I don’t remember [00:50:00] who.

[00:50:01] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:50:01] But the power of your mind is it is it is so great and it can be, especially in sales, so that’s great. I love that.

[00:50:09] Libby Galatis: [00:50:09] I have a fun question. I’m very interested to hear your answer too. If you could have one billboard anywhere that says anything, where would it be and what would it say?

[00:50:20] Howard Dover: [00:50:20] Wow. I’m going to go at it from a programmatic standpoint. It would be wherever all the freshmen of UTD come. And it would say “You should look into the sales program because it might just change your life.”

[00:50:41] Kristen Wisdorf: [00:50:41] There you go. Folks, whether you’re a student at UT Dallas or a student anywhere else look into the sales program, if your school has one or sales as a profession. There are a lot of ways to open your mind and jump into a sales, A sales class and sales learning. So Howard, we appreciate you joining us today.

[00:50:59] Thank you [00:51:00] so much for sharing your story and your wisdom. And I’m excited for the day when we can start traveling again and get back to competitions and we can see you in person. Thanks for joining us.