Beyond the Degree: Practical Programs That Transform Sales Careers by: Candace Simon
In sales, the pressure to stand out can feel relentless. Traditional degrees such as The University of Toledo’ s Edward Schmidt Sales Degree have long been viewed as the ticket to credibility, but the reality is shifting. Increasingly, professionals are finding that targeted, non-degree learning opportunities offer sharper tools, faster returns, and more flexible access. These programs aren’t framed by long semesters or steep tuition bills; they’re designed to create immediate, visible impact. For sales professionals, this means skill sets that influence conversations today rather than credentials that sit on a résumé tomorrow. What follows is an exploration of how executive coaching, public speaking workshops, and language learning platforms are reshaping career paths in ways that rival traditional higher education.
Why non-degree routes matter now
Formal education has value, but it can be slow to adapt to the demands of modern business. By contrast, skills-based, non-degree credentials are emerging as high-traction pathways because they are aligned directly to workplace needs. Instead of broad theory, these programs emphasize hands-on learning that solves real problems. For sales professionals, that might mean mastering objection handling, refining negotiation strategies, or strengthening relationship-building tactics. The power lies in immediacy—what you study today becomes usable in the very next client call.
The market for learning is evolving, and sales professionals are in a strong position to take advantage. The future of professional development lies in non-credit programs that emphasize adaptability and lifelong growth. Unlike degrees that may lock you into a single track, these opportunities invite exploration and experimentation. A language course taken today can lead to new markets tomorrow. A workshop completed this month might unlock your next promotion. The promise of non-degree learning is not just in affordability—it’s in its ability to evolve alongside you.
Coaching that accelerates professional growth
Working one-on-one with a coach provides accountability and sharpens self-awareness in ways most classrooms never could. Studies highlight five benefits of executive coaching, including heightened clarity in goal-setting, improved leadership behaviors, and greater resilience under pressure. For those in sales, coaching offers a safe environment to test strategies, dissect missteps, and prepare for high-stakes meetings. It transforms performance by focusing not on abstract principles but on specific patterns of behavior that can be adjusted quickly. A few sessions often uncover blind spots that years of solo trial and error would never reveal.
Workshops that sharpen presentation skills
Sales professionals often underestimate how much credibility hinges on delivery. Enrolling in programs that teachtechniques from public speaking workshops can change the way clients perceive you before you even reach the heart of your pitch. Small adjustments in tone, body language, or pacing can be the difference between a flat response and a handshake deal. These workshops are immersive, feedback-driven environments where you practice in front of others who are also eager to improve. The shared energy creates momentum, and with every iteration, your communication skills become sharper and more persuasive.
Language learning for cross-cultural success
Sales doesn’t stop at borders anymore, and cultural fluency can be a decisive advantage. One practical route is to learn Spanish with online Spanish classes that are personalized, flexible, and supportive of different learning styles. These sessions are human-led, which means you can progress at a pace that builds confidence while still fitting into your workday. The private and immersive format helps professionals pick up effective communication skills they can apply immediately in conversations with clients. For those expanding into new markets, this becomes more than an academic pursuit—it’s a practical and motivating way to deepen trust and speak like a native when it matters most.
Building persuasive confidence
Speaking up in front of a group isn’t just about projecting your voice. It’s about developing composure and presence that carries into every business interaction. The benefits of public speaking skills extend far beyond the podium. Strong communicators close more deals because they can frame solutions clearly, handle objections without losing balance, and maintain authority under pressure. The act of mastering public speech is a training ground for managing nerves, reading an audience, and creating trust quickly—all essential for sales professionals looking to build long-term client relationships.
Coaching inside the sales function
Coaching is not just for executives. In sales teams, structured programs are becoming one of the most reliable performance multipliers. Evidence shows that sales coaching boosts performance, not by offering a rigid script, but by tailoring improvement strategies to each rep’s strengths and weaknesses. This process reinforces repeatable behaviors that drive outcomes, whether that’s more effective prospecting, tighter closing ratios, or stronger account expansion. Teams that adopt coaching cultures tend to outperform because improvement is treated as a continuous loop, not a one-time training event.
Practical frameworks for selling
Many professionals are tired of sales clichés and buzzwords that overcomplicate the work. What they need is a grounded framework. Kevin Sidebottom’s Sales Workshop delivers this by stripping away gimmicks and focusing on a clear, customer-first process. His keynote, The Sales Process Uncovered, arms teams with practical tools that accelerate deal cycles and strengthen relationships. This isn’t theory for theory’s sake; it’s about applying a proven process that resonates across industries. The confidence teams gain translates directly into conversations where clarity and trust matter more than jargon.
Sales is about connection, clarity, and confidence. Degrees may still carry prestige, but they don’t always equip you for the immediacy of client demands. Executive coaching helps refine how you show up under pressure. Public speaking workshops polish the way you command a room. Language learning builds bridges where cultural gaps might otherwise limit opportunities. Non-credit programs provide an efficient, accessible path that fits real business realities. For sales professionals, these alternatives aren’t secondary options; they’re primary engines of growth that prove personal development doesn’t have to be formal to be transformational.
Some Questions I Often Hear About This Topic
Q1: Are non-degree programs really respected in professional settings?
Yes. Employers increasingly value demonstrated skills, and programs that provide direct, measurable results are taken seriously, especially in performance-driven fields like sales.
Q2: How do I choose between coaching, workshops, or language learning?
Start with your immediate growth needs. If confidence in communication is the issue, public speaking workshops help. If strategy and process matter, coaching is key. For expanding into global markets, language learning is essential.
Q3: Do these programs take a lot of time?
Most are designed to be efficient. Coaching sessions may run an hour, workshops often span a weekend, and language classes can be scheduled flexibly around your work.
Q4: How affordable are these alternatives compared to a degree?
They’re typically far less costly. Many workshops or language courses can be taken for the cost of a single textbook in a traditional program.
Q5: Can these skills translate into immediate career growth?
Absolutely. Improvements in communication, cultural fluency, and sales process mastery directly affect how you perform in client meetings, negotiations, and leadership opportunities.
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.
Driving Urgency w/ Tie Backs
You’ve probably been there: a customer nods along, agrees with your points, even tells you your solution looks strong, and then they stall for months when you follow up asking about next steps.
“Let’s revisit next quarter.”
“We need more time to think.”
“It’s not urgent right now.”
The frustration is real. The value is obvious, yet the decision lingers. Why? Because people naturally avoid risk. Taking action, spending money, adopting a new tool, changing a process feels risky. Waiting feels safe. That is why we need to be making sure we are asking the right questions to help them understand the waiting is actually hurting them.
This is where tie-back questions become a game-changer. They don’t just connect your product to a problem; they connect inaction to consequences.
Tie-back questions that drive urgency usually focus on two things:
1. The cost of doing nothing
2. The benefit of acting now
Imagine this exchange:
Customer: “Collaboration between departments is slow.”
Seller: “If this continues for six more months, how much do you estimate it will cost in missed opportunities?”
That question reframes the problem from an annoyance to a measurable loss. Suddenly, inaction looks expensive.
Then pivot to the positive:
Seller: “If we solved this today, how quickly could you start hitting your quarterly goals?”
Now urgency isn’t about fear, it’s about speed and results.
Behavioral economics tells us people are twice as motivated to avoid loss as they are to pursue gain. Tie-back questions tap into that bias by making inaction visible.
At the same time, you can’t only push on pain. Hope motivates too. The balance is critical:
· Highlight the cost of delay. (Loss avoidance)
· Show the upside of speed. (Hope for gain)
When both levers are pulled, urgency rises.
Tie-back questions don’t just connect your product to value, they shine a spotlight on the hidden costs of waiting and the visible rewards of acting now.
And when customers see both, hesitation turns into momentum.
Have a great week!
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.
The Hidden Power of Reviewing Every Call
Here’s a secret most salespeople ignore:
The call doesn’t end when you hang up the phone.
That’s right, most sales people walk out of a customer, hang up the phone, read the email and think they are done and on to the next customer. Fun fact, when I was learning how to waterski, it took me something like five years to get up on two skies. I also drank a lot of lake water in the process. Each time I failed I had to figure out what went wrong and how I could improve. When something happened well I quickly thought about it to figure out what the heck I just did.
Sales is the same. If we are not figuring out where we went wrong, or how we did something well, how are we going to repeatably win? As discussed last week consistency is key so we need to figure out what we can improve on and how we can execute well.
This takes reflection.
Why Reflection Matters
Research shows only 21% of salespeople consistently analyze their calls (CSO Insights). This is why the rate of success is around 29%. Without consistent improvement how will things get better? Knowing that most professionals are not doing this can be our super hero advantage to help the customer and win more sales.
What to Review After Every Call
1. What worked well? – Identify the questions that opened the conversation or the moments when the customer leaned in. What topics were discussed that the customer really was interested in.
2. Where did I lose influence? – Notice points where the buyer hesitated, disengaged, or changed tone. Where did the customer start interrupting your presentation to learn about a topic more? Where did they say stop…I have heard enough and we are going to move in a different direction. Yes that has happened to me before.
3. What will I do differently next time? – One small adjustment compounds into massive improvement over time. One percent improvement each day for a year nets a large return on investment. That means we will improve our presentation skills, improve our aim to hit the mark, build a resiliency muscle, and win more sales.
It doesn’t have to take long—5 minutes after every call can transform your trajectory. Focus on reviewing the “game film” for those athletes (I was not). Learn and get better each day and you will have a successful career in sales.
Have a great week!
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.
Does Free Shipping Increase Sales?
Will I increase my sales if I offer free shipping? Amazon does it so does it generate more sales? How do I compete with Amazon and other big retailers?
These are some of the questions that I hear when I am coaching sales organizations with becoming the brand of choice. It’s something that sales organizations ask all the time when it comes to generating more revenues.
This is about the time that I burst the bubble about free shipping and making more sales. Amazon does offer free sales and they sell quite a bit of products on their sites every day. Sometimes I even buy too much on their site.
Yes, Amazon does offer free shipping, but they offer fast shipping, with great updates on their app that you can see how the product moves through their delivery system. They also offer really simple and low effort returns. The third thing that they do is offer free two-day shipping by a use of a subscription.
This is more than just simply offering free shipping. We need to look at our business and our product offering to understand what we can offer as a solution to our customers so that they will want to do more business with us. Likely we have more than one product / service offering that will benefit our customers far better than just free shipping.
This is the time we need to open our file cabinets and study our customers. What we can do to benefit our customers better? When we really understand our customers, we can start building partnerships with them to buy more and more of what we offer instead of one off sales. We want returning partners that will benefit the more they do business with us.
What I teach in the sales process is that we need to ask a great deal of questions at the beginning of the sales process to understand our customers. This is also the time that the customers start to believe we are really looking to help them and not just sell our products / service.
We need to get the customers to buy into us if we are ever going to sell them more. We need to make sure that we are building that influence and that is why it is crucial that we ask a great deal of questions to truly understand our customers. We need to understand their situation, their issues, and the ramifications.
If we can solve them and get the customer to a better way, then we will reap the rewards of more sales and increased revenues. Each customer has an acquisition cost and we need to make sure that we are selling enough to cover those costs to manage those customers. If we do not, then it does not matter as much about the revenue because we will have too high of costs resulting in lower profits. In the end profits are what keep businesses moving forward.
“Businesses wonder why it is still hard to be thought of as the brand of choice with customers. How can our business make more profitable transactions and stay out of the commodity battle with low profits? I equip your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate explosive revenues with greater profits!”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet
https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book
Why Your Team Needs Investment
Have you ever wondered why your team just seems to be stagnant? As the years go on the growth of the organization seems to hit a ceiling? No matter how you as the leader push, the sales and growth just seem to flat line?
When I first started in sales, I was thrust into learning by so many different programs to get me up to speed with the rest of the sales team. We had annual trainings that we took part in as a group every year. Most of the sales team would groan about the annual sales meeting that took them out of their market from seeing their customers.
It was odd because the owner of the organization would basically have the sales trainer from outside the organization come in and train us with basically the same message the owner constantly presented us with.
It was odd that someone would do this, but as I learned when sales people hear the same thing over time it becomes real. I’ve since learned that with all areas of our life that the more we hear the same message, the more it becomes truth. Having an individual come in from outside the organization annually that aligns with the organization’s goals will help solidify with this.
We would spend a couple days in sales training and at the end of the training from the individual outside of the organization, we would then be held back for a debrief. Now the organizational leader was ex-military, but it is the same thing as watching the game film from professional sports teams. The team discussing what they learned and what they can add to their tool box for becoming better is very useful.
When we discuss with others on our team that we trust and they give perspectives and items they learned that we may not have caught from the training it is very helpful. We are typically drinking from a fire hose with information that we cannot capture everything, so discussing with others will help us catch some things we missed.
By discussing this information, the team will form bonds and will become stronger together. This is crucial as the team will start calling each other instead of the leadership when the trust levels are high between each other to bounce ideas off of each other before bringing to leadership. This is crucial because as the team unites in trust, it becomes more efficient and drive faster sales growth.
The last thing we did was do competitive analysis and each person from the group chose one specific area to teach on. The easiest way for us to learn is to actually teach. It took time to prepare for this, but was very beneficial for all of us to learn.
Yes, this took us out of the market for a few days, but it was sharpening out axe to chop down the tree. If we sharpen ourselves, we will be able to cut mor efficient. Sales organizations need this investment to become better especially since they are so limited in actually selling these days. Typically, only 36% of sales time is actually spent in the sales process with customers with all of the other activities that are required. Sales teams need to be invested in if we expect them to grow sales!
Do you team this favor and invest. By doing so, you will benefit greatly!
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business. I equip your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate explosive revenues with greater profits!”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet
https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book
https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/5AF12 - Sales Process Uncovered Online Training
https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/68N10 - Trustworthy Online Training
What is Your Why For Your Marketing Strategy?
Welcome back. Today I’d like to talk about what a good marketing strategy is in order to increase sales. I will also write about what doesn’t work and why so that you can figure out how you want to move forward with your strategy.
Since the creation of mail advertising, tv, and the internet there has been a great focus on marketing. Now that we as a society have evolved and become smarter, the old way of marketing features and benefits has had to evolve. Just buying the biggest ad in the yellow pages will not work these days.
When people meet us as sales professionals, organizations, institutions they are asking three questions. Today let’s focus on the third question with the assumption that we have answered the first two correctly. This third question is “How Can You Help Me?” If we are going to market to people about us being the best option, we better be focused on answering that question correctly.
If we don’t answer that question, well they will move on down the road to the next person in line. They will also start thinking about what we offer as a commodity if we are not answering that question. If we become a commodity then the only differentiating factor is price. There is no winning strategy for commodities. We need to differentiate ourselves from the competition.
People do not buy features and benefits as the answer to the question above. We must focus on answering the needs of the customer. That is right customers want a solution to their needs. To figure out what needs our offering answers, then we need to ask questions, but to who?
The answer to that question is ask our current customers why they buy from us. What is it that made them desire our offering? Why do they stick with us when there are other offerings out there? Why do people still flock to Apple for their products when there are other products out there that compete on the same performance as Apple? We need to understand why our customers love our offerings and stick with us as repeat customers.
To do that there are tons of tools out there, but I recommend two. Surveys and testimonials are what I recommend. Surveys upon purchase helps in the later steps of the sales process as I teach, but also help get fresh feedback at the time of purchase as to why the customer decided to do business with us. This is fresh insight without outside influence and time that will allow our customers to forget. The other is testimonials. These testimonials work so great because of the law of “Social Proof” that others will follow because of that influence.
That is right, we need to be asking our current customers why they are doing business with us because this is the key to understand how and what we should be marketing. We will see a trend as well with all of the surveys and testimonials that will show us the path to our marketing strategy.
I know this seems backwards in the process, but our customers are the ones that can tell us the why so that we can structure out strategy. Many organizations fail to understand why the customers do business with them and march in a totally different direction leading to mediocre results. We need to understand so we can chart out course correctly to attract more of our tribe.
Answer that third question by asking questions to current customers will allow us to win at this marketing game. Especially when there is so much noise out there to confuse and turn off customers.
Start today to understand your current customers and then you will overcome the competition and stay out of the commodity arena!
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business. I teach your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate more sales with high margins!”