Sales Fundamentals Should Be a Required Marketing Undergrad Course

My first full-time job out of college was doing inside sales at an ill-fated enterprise middleware software startup in Portland, Oregon. My second full-time job, after that first company collapsed, was for a tiny 5-person web server software startup where I did sales Monday-Friday and marketing on Saturdays. And the job I had my last year in college was handling outbound telesales for a real estate software startup.

The setup in all three was about what you'd imagine: a computer, a headset, a call list, a pitch script or two, a hell of a lot of "no's" and hang ups, offset by the promise of great pay upside...if I hit monthly quota. The classic dialing for dollars scenario, basically.

In short, as someone studying marketing (with history as a double major) in college with dreams of building inspiring brands and launching epic marketing campaigns, that was an awful lot of sales work to start out my career.

Like a lot of marketing majors, I ended up in sales simply because those were the doors that opened for me at the time, and they directionally lined up with my career aspirations of working in tech marketing. In retrospect, those sales jobs probably prepared me more for a career in tech marketing than the majority of my undergraduate coursework. Not because the coursework or my undergrad business education overall was bad in any way, but because that coursework was missing something fundamental that every aspiring marketing should understand before heading into the workforce.

How to sell.

So I wanted to put something out there: Every undergraduate marketing program in the country should require at least one full course in sales fundamentals, a "Sales Fundamentals" upper-division course.

Not just "sales and marketing alignment" as a chapter in a strategy textbook, or a guest lecture during a marketing strategy course from someone who happens to be in sales, though those are also welcome. An actual required course targeting juniors and seniors, focusing on sales fundamentals - cold outreach, discovery, objection handling, closing - and related sales topics such as modern sales tech, pipeline management, and so on.

I realize this may be mildly heretical in marketing academic circles, where sales has historically been treated as a separate and non-academic discipline. But the more time I've spent in marketing leadership roles, the more convinced I've become that a solid foundation in selling, baked in right from the start of a career, is one of the most useful things a new or aspiring marketer can develop before they ever step foot in pure-marketing role.

Why exactly is that?

1) Marketing's Main Job is to Generate Revenue

Let's start with what should be obvious, but I suspect isn't for many: marketing exists, at least in the for-profit business world, to drive commercial outcomes. Brand, strategy, advertising/media, PR, awareness, demand generation, content, community, customer experience - all of it ultimately has to ladder up to improving revenue, retention, and overall growth.

That shouldn't be a controversial take. And it of course doesn't take into account other applications of marketing which lean more towards pure communications and messaging. But in the business world, this is simply the reality of why companies fund marketing departments: to drive the business. And outside some pure B2C contexts, that means working very closely with the sales function.

Because of this, a solid foundational understanding of the role and function of sales is indispensible for a marketer at every stage of their career, from marketing assistant to Chief Marketing Officer. New marketers should understand exactly how the campaigns they're being tasked with executing will translate into sales conversations, how the case study they are writing or the collateral they are curating will be leveraged by sales to move prospects closer to closed/won, and so on. New marketers also could land in field-centric roles, where working hand-in-hand with field sales reps is the defining part of the job.

As a marketer progresses in their career and seniority, the need for a deep and intuitive understanding of how sales works becomes even more critical - and more glaring where it's absent.

At the peak of the profession, one of the hardest conversations a new CMO has in their first 90-180 days is establishing a credible baseline of marketing's contribution to revenue. It's a conversation that goes infinitely better when the marketing leader has personally spent time on the revenue-generating end of the funnel. The CMO who has carried a quota, even briefly, talks about pipeline differently than the one who hasn't. They understand viscerally what it means to need a deal to close this month, or what might be holding a prospect back at various stages of the pipeline.

2) For Many Aspiring Marketers, Their First Job Will be in Sales

There's also a practical reality worth calling out: in B2B especially, the most accessible entry-level roles are often in sales or sales-adjacent functions. SDRs, BDRs, inside sales, account management, customer success. These jobs are hired in volume, in part because of high turnover, they train aggressively, and are often the most direct path into a company for a recent graduate without exceptional marketing internship experience. Many of today's marketing leaders, myself included, started their careers in exactly these kinds of roles.

A graduate who arrives at their first SDR job without ever having made a cold call, handled a tough objection, or sat through a complex discovery conversation is at a real disadvantage. Their marketing degree in all likelihood didn't prepare them for the actual work of their first paycheck. They will get up to speed eventually, but the ramp will be unnecessarily steep, and the early-career attrition rate in these roles is already high enough without adding "no foundational training" to the list of contributing factors.

This is probably even more important now than it was when I was "dialing for dollars" selling obscure server technologies back in the 90s. As AI eliminates or reshapes many traditional entry-level marketing roles - basic content production, analytics tasks, the generalized marketing assistant/associate projects where new marketers cut their teeth - the early career path for marketing grabs may increasingly run through revenue-adjacent functions, such as sales, where direct customer contact and relationship-building are still hard to automate.

If we're worried about the hallowing out of the junior marketer talent pipeline (and we should be), then sales-savvy marketing graduates are better positioned to find landing spots that get them a foot in the door and in a role that gives them foundational skills that translate well to marketing down the road.

3) Selling Skills are Broadly Useful to a Marketer

There are a handful of skills fundamental to sales training and work that are exactly the skills which make for a strong marketer.

Customer empathy. Marketing (to generalize) teaches you to think in segments and personas. Selling teaches you what a single, specific human being says when you ask them about their problem, including the things they don't say out loud, the workarounds they've built, the politics inside their organization, the budget pressures they're under. That's depth and insight that focus groups or persona research may struggle to provide. In my experience, marketers who have spent time working in or at least directly with Sales, or almost any heavy customer-facing role (field PMs, customer success reps, etc.), tend to do marketing work that more naturally speaks to the customer's needs and voice.

Objection handling. Now I'm not sure how to replicate this exactly in an undergraduate course, vs it being something you just need to experience on the job, but every aspiring marketer should learn how to respond, in real time, when someone tells them they don't believe in their pitch. Often without much courtesy.

The amount of times in my first few startup sales jobs I got hung up on, coldly denied, or even (once or twice) yelled at for bothering someone when I called...it imprints some powerful lessons on how to respond, overcome, and move on.

In a way, this kind of selling is a live, real-time test of whether the marketing message actually holds up under pressure. Marketers who can hold their own in those conversations build infinitely better messaging because they've seen where it breaks, and how vast a gulf there sometimes can be between beautifully crafted value messaging and plain language that actually works with customers.

The economics of attention. Most marketers, and pretty much any social media user these days, understand the idea that attention is rare currency. A great add or message may get only a couple seconds to grab attention before the user (literally or figuratively) swipes up. Selling brings this home very personally in a way that a campaign analytics report doesn't. When you have 30-90 seconds with someone on the phone before they decide whether to keep listening, you learn very quickly what lands and what is just noise.

Resilience. This might be the most underrated of all. Marketing careers involve a LOT of work that doesn't land. 10x this if you work on the agency side. Campaigns that flop in market. Brilliant ideas that die on the bosses desk (or in the CFO's spreadsheet). Strategies that look great in Q1 and need to be entirely reinvented by Q3. There are many ways to teach this, but sales teaches you, fast and unforgettably, that rejection isn't personal and that the next call is the only one that actually matters.

What Might This Look Like in an Undergrad Course?

I'm not out here arguing that all marketing majors should become sales reps, or to focus their internship searches on sales-related roles. I'm suggesting that adding in a sales fundamentals course to the undergrade marketing curricula could significantly strengthen new marketing grads' odds of getting their careers off to a strong start.

If anyone asked me to build a course like this, I would split it into a few sections:

The fundamentals: The basic mechanics of how a sales cycle works in both B2B and B2C contexts. What happens to a lead from first sales contact through to DQ or Closed/Won. What are some of the different models and frameworks in common practice. Students should leave the course able to articulate what BANT or MEDDIC actually mean in practice. Mix in things like pitch scripts, what a pipeline is, etc.

Sales soft skills: Objection handling, resilience, customer empathy, basic discovery questions. This would be a great opportunity to mix in some live or simulated practice activities. Role-played objection handling, listening in on recorded discovery calls with feedback and plotting out conversation strategies, etc.

Intro to modern sales tools and tech: CRM basics, sales forecasting tools, a bit of marketing automation overview. Marketing undergrads who graduate with even basic working knowledge of Salesforce or HubSpot would be wildly sought after in the workforce.

Finally, a closing unit on the relationship between sales and marketing: Organizationally how the two functions typically work together, the unique roles or philosophies around adjancent functions like revenue ops and sales enablement, some of the basics of where the tensions often surface.

This kind of course in my view would make marketing students much stronger candidates for any first job, whether directly in sales or the early career marketing roles they actually want.

To Wrap

My first job in tech sales while still in undergrad was mostly just a way to make some extra beer money. My next sales job, where I landed immediately after graduation, was something I took on grudgingly - I really wanted to work in tech marketing, but finding those jobs in Portland, Oregon at the time was challenging. When that company collapsed (we all started getting "paid" in stock option certificates, hah) I landed in yet another tech startup dialing for dollars, though thanks to the amazing founders I was able to finally take on some real marketing work, a move that ultimately ignited my marketing career.

What I didn't appreciate until much later was just how useful those sales experiences were in setting my future self up for long-term success as a marketer. But my learning curve was steep, probably unnecesarily so, as "sales" just wasn't covered in my undergrad marketing curriculum. A genuine gap in retrospect.

Injecting practical sales skills and understanding into the undergrad marketing curricula would, in my view, better set new marketing grads up for success in both their early and later careers.