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Sales and marketing departments traditionally battle each other for shares of company and investment dollars.
To that point, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that there were record investments in digital marketing during the pandemic. But are those investments subsiding?
I ask because another recent report from global research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. showed chief marketing officers indicating marketing budgets have fallen from 11% of revenue last year to 6.4% of revenue this year. Gartner counts this a historic shift.
Meanwhile, another WSJ story says:
ZipRecruiter, an online job platform, shows the number of sales roles advertised has risen steadily this year, up 65% to more than 700,000 open positions around the U.S.
For business school students, this might be insightful information about the job market in the near future. While marketing and sales are always struggling for their share of revenue, there are always more sales positions in a company than marketing positions. While the pandemic caused a historic surge in digital transformation investment, is the Gartner report showing that this investment is now receding?
Recent analysis of LinkedIn data by the Center for Professional Sales in the Naveen Jindal School of Management shows that sales roles average about 20% of a company’s overall employee allocation. The data also showed sales roles saw a reduction of about 10% in the past year across 20 major markets. However, entry-level roles in sales and marketing, called sales development roles, maintained their growth rate even during the pandemic.
What does this mean for student who will be looking for their first job in the next year?
More and more companies are investing in entry-level roles called sales development representative and lead development representatives. These roles can be housed in the sales or the marketing department in the commercial business sector. From these positions, alumni can move into most departments of the company. These roles have grown over 1000% over the past five or six years! I recently presented these findings to other business schools in the U.S. and globally at the Sales Educators’ Academy, an annual event hosted by Florida State University for those of us who teach sales, and at annual conference of the Global Sales Science Institute, a network of academicians and practitioners .
How do you prepare for this job?
At the Jindal School, our sales curriculum is heavily influenced by our industry partnerships and advisory board. Several years ago, our advisory board challenged our program to prepare for this shift by addressing the future needs of sales development work. Based on board feedback, I developed the Digital Prospecting (MKT 4331) undergraduate course about five years ago. This course’s design is iterated each semester to the market trends and prepares students for new trends in sales development.
We are fortunate to have a forward-looking advisory board and partners who have helped us develop a modern curriculum that is one of the few sales programs in the country that not only teaches sales development but also gives our students opportunities to perform sales development activities and gain real world experience.
How has this positioned our graduates?
The top sales development representatives globally and in North America for Adobe and Qualtrics were exposed to the basic skills in earlier versions of the Digital Prospecting class as part of the UT Dallas Sales program. During the pandemic, several alumni interviews were conducted that indicated our students were performing substantially higher than their peers in this new role.
The Jindal School is unique in how our various degree programs move to market. My colleagues in other degree areas and I continuously work to modernize program offerings to give our students the most relevant and advanced knowledge and skills.
Before the fall semester starts, take some time to learn more about the all of the amazing programs at JSOM. If you would like to explore our sales classes, our Introduction to Professional Selling (MKT 3330) class is open and has no prerequisites. That affords all UTD students access to this new trend in business today.
