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What factors influence undergraduate business students’ decision to pursue sales education? What’s the role of self-efficacy in sales education? Can an interactive computer simulation teach students sales ethics? Journal of Marketing Education‘s Special Issue on Sales Education and Training explores these topics and more!

James W. Peltier of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Andrea L. Dixon of Baylor University collaborated on the issue’s Editor Corner:

Welcome to this Journal of Marketing Education (JME) Special Issue on Sales Education and Training. We proposed this Special Issue as demand for college graduates with a sales degree/major/minor/emphasis/interest continues to escalate. In addition to being the most common career entry point for marketing students, a 2010 Georgetown University study found that sales is a top-ranked career for a number of disciplines outside of marketing. Interestingly, sales ranked second for students majoring in general business, economics, international business, and management. Sales ranked third for students majoring in finance, operations management, HR, and management information systems. Across campus, sales ranked second/third for students in the social, natural, and physical sciences and in liberal arts and communications.

While the demand for graduates to work in sales grows, there is a shortage of scholarly articles dealing specifically with sales curricula and sales pedagogy. In fact, the marketing education literature has been relatively slow in responding to changes in sales education and training. Of the over 800 articles published in JME’s history, only 27 papers deal with sales education (see Gray et al., 2012).

The absence of research in sales education is not due to a lack of activity or paucity of scholars in this area. According to DePaul’s Universities and Colleges Sales Education Landscape Survey, sales curricula grew from 44 U.S. programs in 2007 to 101 programs in 2011. As demand for sales-ready graduates grows, universities are trying to meet this demand by expanding curricular offerings, opening sales centers, and hiring sales faculty. We initiated this Special Issue with a goal of engaging scholars in this area and sparking additional research.