This July, I will be keynoting the New Horizons in Professional Selling and Sales Management Conference. The audience will be made up of persons with shared interest in improving sales related research, teaching and practice. Of that audience, many will be college business professors.

According to my friend Howard Stevens of The Chally Group, there are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States and fewer than three dozen of them teach sales. Yet, of college graduates without a professional certification, fifty percent of them will find themselves in sales as a first job! The market in the U.S. needs an additional 1.5 million new sales candidates per year.

These 30-plus universities are the start to a sales profession.

At recent Sales Leadership conferences put on by Selling Power magazine, when Gerhard Gschwandtner asked an audience of 200 sales executives sitting at 25 tables to discuss and put forth a "table" definition of "selling", there was nothing close to consensus. The most common theme put forth does not bode well for sales as an honorable profession—the theme of convincing; persuading; getting the customer to do what you want when you want; handling objections; closing early; closing often; and taking at least five "no's" before giving up.

CustomerCentric Selling® practitioners and clients all understand that in order for colleges and universities to offer a major or minor in professional selling, a first step will be agreeing on a common definition for "selling." A definition of selling that honors the customer. A definition that allows a professional salesperson to facilitate the customer's buying process. A definition that allows an organization to actually define, manage and fine tune their business-to-business customer's experience!

Thus, my keynote speech in July will be, Sales as an Honorable Profession.

Speaking of the B2B customer experience, you might have noticed that the term "CEM", or "Customer Experience Management", is gaining legs as a replacement for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The low adoption rate and high number of failed CRM implementations is driving the name change.

During a recent webinar by Bob Thompson, CRMGuru.com, entitled, Why "CRM" Must Die for Customer-Centric Business to Thrive, Bob makes the case for the name change to CEM. What was interesting to me, though, was that in all of the examples he cited using CRM systems to enhance the customer experience, they were business-to-consumer companies. No B2B examples! The primary difference between B2C and B2B is the involvement of a salesperson in the customer's experience. I believe we are the only organization that can enable the "C level" at B2B organizations to define and manage their customer's experience with a salesperson involved.

Lastly, I am very excited about the growing enthusiasm of CustomerCentric Marketing™. Our 2-day CustomerCentric Marketing™ workshop helps corporate marketing staff learn "the language of selling," so they can align their websites, demand creation campaigns, brochures, white papers, phone scripts, success stories, conversational prompters, and product training to help their direct sales people facilitate the selling, buying, and usage of their offerings.

You might be asking yourself: "Wouldn't aligning your tactical marketing efforts with your sales process be part of influencing the customer's experience?"

I hope you were.