
Dr. Lukas Forbes
Western Kentucky University
Lukas Forbes is the Department Chair of marketing and the Director of the WKU Center for Professional Sales. He formerly served in the US Army, attaining the rank of Captain.
Sales professionals keep businesses running. In our increasingly solutions-driven economy, connecting companies with the products and services they need to stay competitive is a fast-growing field for ambitious people excited to make connections and create lasting value for customers.
Our Professional Sales major was developed with input from Fortune 500 companies and leaders in academia.
Dr. Lukas Forbes
Western Kentucky University
Lukas Forbes is the Department Chair of marketing and the Director of the WKU Center for Professional Sales. He formerly served in the US Army, attaining the rank of Captain.
Forever Labs
Forever Labs is an Ann Arbor based Biomedical company that seeks to preserve and extend healthy human life through the preservation and reintroduction of an individual’s stem cells.
Quick facts on the industry.
Median Annual Salary for Sales Managers
Projected 10-Year Job Growth
Number of Jobs
Despite overwhelming demand, only a handful of schools in the US offer a dedicated program in Sales. Ours was built by leading experts and industry stars.
Sales classes often teach marketing techniques from the fax machine days. With our Professional Sales major, you’ll learn tactics for a digital age.
A business education is built-in, so you’ll have expertise ready to apply as soon as you graduate.
This course will not just teach you about selling, it will teach you how to sell. This experiential learning-based course will provide you with best practice models of selling. It will cover selling from prospecting through relationship building, and through the use of role-plays and other experiential activities it will equip the student with the fundamental knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to succeed in a professional selling position.
You negotiate not only in business settings but also in your daily life. In business, negotiations are key elements of a corporation’s strategies and plans. In your personal life, negotiations play the very same role - you negotiate where to eat dinner with your friends, what house to buy or rent with your partner, and where you want to go on vacation with the family.
Effective sales leadership requires a mastery of the “hard” analytical skills as well as the “soft” skills for effective management and coaching. This course is designed to be a “learning laboratory” for exploring key sales and management concepts related to the sales function and that of the sales manager in the firm. We will focus on developing hands-on analytical and management coaching skills through the use of business case studies and articles, and active hands-on practice. The true learning will take place via the realistic cases, exercises, and assignments that will require students to show their mastery of the learning material. Feedback will be frequent and timely in order to help students develop the skill sets. To be brief: this course is not just going to teach about these topics, it will teach you to analyze, it will teach you to coach, and it will teach you to excel as a sales leader.
Effective relationship-driven sales success requires a mastery of the basic sales process covered in the first sales course, but more importantly, it requires a higher and deeper level of “thinking” through the sales approach as a master planner, listener, negotiator, and partner. This course is designed to pick up where we left off in Relationship-Driven Professional Selling with a focus on the planning and research necessary to be a credible and compelling salesperson. Additionally, this course will tackle the advanced topics of team selling, negotiating, and leveraging account development activities through a focus on hands-on activities, written assignments, and case simulations.