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About the UCSA The organization was officially formed in September 2002 when the nine charter members met to discuss the alliance. There have long been schools in the USA that have taught a course in personal selling but it was never considered mainstream. Then in 1988 two schools began programs that focused on business-to-business sales, as a curriculum unit. With the aid of the early adopters, slowly other schools began to develop and offer similar focused curriculum in personal selling. Mission Statement The mission of the USCA is to advance the sales profession through academic leadership: education, research, and outreach. Why form an alliance? In conversations at conferences, the faculty from the nine charter schools found themselves fighting the same battles in academia as the other schools. Discussions on issues such as: curriculum, structure, staffing, funding and facilities were commonplace and instructive to all involved. The decision was to formalize the mentoring of new schools attempting to develop similar sales programs by providing guidance and advice while at the same time promoting the professionalism of personal selling. By banding together, the group would be able to garner more attention to personal selling as an academic profession and discipline than could be gained from all of the individual schools. How is the USCA able to accomplish its mission? The faculty from each school publishing original articles in academic and practitioner journals and collaborating on longitudinal research studies addresses the research portion of the mission. The USCA will also financially support the annual publishing of the proceedings of the National Conference in Sales Management (the premier conference in sales for faculty). The sharing of insight into curriculum development, recognizing students who demonstrate outstanding achievement in the area of personal selling and recognizing outstanding sales teaching are some of the ways that the USCA will address the academic mission. Finally, the outreach objective of the alliance is achieved through individual efforts of faculty at each school through student placement, consulting activities, and through collaborative work assisting corporations with sales and sales management training. What are the benefits of certification? For the corporations, they benefit by being able to target specific schools that focus on teaching sales. This allows them to improve their ROI by recruiting new, well-educated salespeople, reduce the turnover rate for salespeople, increase productivity of new hires, reduce the payback period for new hires and reduce total training costs of the company. For the schools, the benefits are that companies become aware of
schools that teach professional selling in their curriculum which
in turn attracts higher numbers of quality companies to recruit
for salespeople at their schools. |