Leaders from the Sales Enablement Society (SES) recently announced that SES had donated an opportunity fund gift of $60,000 to the Center for Professional Sales at The University of Texas at Dallas’ Naveen Jindal School of Management. The proceeds will be used for research and center expenses.
Scott Santucci, president and co-founder of SES, a Washington-based not-for-profit professional organization, presented a check to Dr. Howard Dover, director of the center and of JSOM’s Professional Sales Concentration, and Dr. Hasan Pirkul, dean of the Jindal School, at the organization’s annual conference, which was held in Dallas in October.
Dover said that the gift is the single largest donation that the center has received to date.
“It’s a very generous gift from a society that wants to establish an academic presence by having us focus on moving the field of sales forward,” he said. “It’s going to allow us to conduct research, continue curriculum development and send faculty and students to events like the SES conference.”
Having someone with Dover’s academic credentials be a contributing member “helps us see ourselves through a different lens,” Santucci said.
Established in 2016, the society exists to elevate sales enablement as a recognized profession globally. Sales enablement is an evolving concept of combining tools, resources and training to streamline the sales process and help make individual salespeople and sales teams more effective.
SES board member Nicole O’Brien explained that Dover had joined the society at an early stage and “has been a guiding force in the organization’s development by lending his expertise from an academic perspective.”
Santucci told the audience that even though other universities had approached him with offers of academic research the organization had chosen UT Dallas as its academic partner in appreciation for the contributions that Dover has made.
Pirkul announced that the Jindal School would make a matching gift and establish a permanent endowment of $120,000. He said he would like to see the endowment reach a value of $1 million.
O’Brien, one of the founding five members of SES, said that the organization’s goal is ultimately to see sales enablement as a cohesive practice and not just as individual roles within an organization.
“It should be elevated higher as a structure,” she said. “The purpose of this gift is to partner with the Center for Professional Sales to help us determine what that structure will look like.”
