Senior leaders have great confidence in their ability to develop innovations, say Prof. DaSilva, but not in their ability to commercialize them. This may result from a lack of formal processes and effective sales strategies. He suggests a new approach: Train your sales people for knowledge and resilience rather than focusing on a product’s bells and whistles. Create a strategic “story” that is easy to understand across the organization. And assign strategic account managers to your most important customers.

​

Regardless of your area of business responsibility, you need to develop sales skills. Because throughout your career you will continually have to sell your ideas to colleagues, customers, and convince others to follow your lead. This course will focus on the most important aspects of sales: how to create a sales strategy, manage the sales process, and convince skeptical customers to believe in you and your solution.

​

In this course you will learn how to formulate an account strategy based upon customer politics, evaluator psychology, and the human nature of decision makers that are unique to every business. You will gain an understanding of how to manage the sales process, specifically when dealing with new products or disruptive innovations the customer is not familiar with. Finally, you will learn how to become a more persuasive person because successful customer communication is at the foundation of all sales.