Professional Sales Degree
Can you learn sales? You bet. The days of used car salesman are gone. This program focuses on training students to be successful, modern, technology-driven salespeople for leading companies like Salesforce, Amazon, and Microsoft.
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Professional Sales Highlights
This track features a heavy focus on Relationship-Driven Selling, which is vital to ensuring long-term customer commitments in B2B sales. Additionally, all of our sales classes place an emphasis on hands-on learning, requiring students to practice selling with their peers and professors. Our goal is to provide students with valuable practical experience that will prepare them for the positions they ultimately end up filling once they graduate.
Positions include:
- Advertising Sales Agent
- Loan Officer
- Purchasing Manager
- Real Estate Broker
- Sales Engineers
Developed with the Fortune 500
We worked with leading SaaS companies to develop a program that addressed the needs of today's leading companies.
Median Salary of $127,000+
Sales Managers earn a median salary of $127,000 and there are over 400,000 jobs available in the field.
Hybrid Learning Options
Some courses in this program are taken online & powered by Rize. The core curriculum will be taken on-campus, giving students the best of student life with the flexibility of some online learning.



Program Details
Information on what you'll learn, how the degree is built, and the careers that are possible after graduation.
Why Professional Sales Matters
With the boom in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers - companies like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Amazon Web Services - and the increasing reliance of top companies on cloud computing and other non-native hardware and software, the demand for Business-to-Business (B2B) Salespeople has dramatically grown. Businesses, however, struggle to find qualified entry-level salespeople.
Our Professional Sales major seeks to provide students with relevant, project-based learning thus allowing them to develop one of the most sought-after skills in both Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing technology firms. This track features a heavy focus on Relationship-Driven Selling, which is vital to ensuring long-term customer commitments in B2B sales.
Faculty Contributors
Dr. Lukas Forbes, Western Kentucky University - Dr. Forbes is the Chair of the Marketing Department of Western Kentucky University. He also serves as the Director of the nationally recognized WKU Center for Professional Selling, one of only 20 Fully Certified Sales Programs in the United States. Dr. Forbes is also a member of the Editorial Review board for the Journal of Selling, and previously served on the Review board for the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. His research has appeared in journals to include the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, the Journal of Selling, and the Journal of Services Marketing. Dr. Forbes earned a B.S. from United States Military Academy at West Point, and formally served in the US Army before earning a Ph.D from the University of Kentucky.
How does this degree align with the real world?
In addition to working extensively with Dr. Forbes, we sought feedback from two major Fortune 500 companies - one insurance company and one technology company, both of which employ over 5,000 salespeople - to ensure that the proper learning outcomes were being achieved. These companies have also compared this Professional Sales major to their own internal training procedures to ensure that students are receiving a sales education that focuses on the most vital areas from an industry standpoint. Both companies have concluded that any student that graduates from this program will have a leg up in the job application and interview process upon graduating.
Career Outlook
Professional Sales positions are plentiful and high-paying. The median salary for a Sales Manager is $127,000. Other common job positions include:
- Advertising Sales Agent
- Loan Officer
- Purchasing Manager
- Real Estate Broker
- Sales Engineers
Curriculum Highlights
The HR Management program is a part of the business school and therefore includes the standard business core curriculum.
The Professional Sales core includes:
- Relationship-Driven Professional Sales
- Negotiation in Business and Sales
- Sales Leadership
- Advanced Relationship-Driven
- Professional Selling
About the Partnership
For more information on the innovative partnership that allows us to offer this program, visit this page.
Start Your Application Today
You can begin your application in as little as two minutes, for free & online.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about the concentration in Professional Sales.
No, but you may need one to get hired, and having a degree in Professional Sales provides a massive advantage in earning potential and salary. People with a bachelor’s degree also have a 50% lower rate of unemployment, and on average they make an additional $630,000 to $900,000 over their lifetime, even more in high growth fields like this one.
To craft a resume that really wows employers, you’re going to want some of the certifications included in our Professional Sales program. We’ll get you certifications from sales giant Hubspot in relationship-driven professional selling, sales leadership, and email marketing.
Yes! The only way to make sure our program gives you the skills you need to get hired and teaches you to work through real-world problems that actually matter is to partner with the people out there who are actually doing it. Our collaboration with Fortune 500 companies and subject matter experts means that their multi-billion-dollar expertise is reflected in everything you’ll study here.
Professional Sales is huge, and our graduates can take their coveted skills to any industry they’re interested in. If you love being at the forefront of new trends, it may be tech. If you’ve always been interested in public health, you may want to land a sales job in the lucrative healthcare industry. As a professional sales grad, the high-paying possibilities available to you across industries are essentially endless.
If you have a passion for working with other people, if you want to be one of the most well-paid employees in any company you work for, if you are looking for a degree that opens a ton of doors to different high-growth careers, if you have a knack for creative problem solving , and if you want the work you do to have a real impact, you should consider this major.
Flexibility. Optional Synchronous means our Professional Sales courses can be attended together at one time with other students, or on your own schedule. Many students prefer the learning that comes with live interactions, while other students love the flexibility of doing them whenever they fit into their schedule.
This major is part of an exclusive partnership between Adrian College and Rize Education, which means you’ll be learning with students from your campus, as well as students from a selective consortium of schools across the country. The goal is to help you begin building a national network of people in your industry before you’ve even graduated.