45-808 Gaining Advantage through Sales
6 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Ever wonder what separates a good salesperson from a great one—and whether the consultative, relationship-driven style that wins at a 200-person startup will get you anywhere at a Fortune 500 account? How should a company structure, staff, and pay its sales force? What actually keeps a deal stuck in the pipeline, and how do the best sales organizations use data and CRM tooling to fix it? Gaining Advantage through Sales tackles these questions from two angles. The first half of the course builds your personal selling toolkit: how to discover a customer's real needs, build and deliver a value-based pitch or product demo, negotiate, and close—skills that matter whether you are selling a product, a vision, a budget request, or yourself in an interview. The second half zooms out to the manager's and strategist's view: how companies design sales processes and pipelines, choose go-to-market and channel strategies, structure territories and incentive compensation, and use CRM and sales analytics to forecast and coach. Class sessions are built around case discussion, live role-play (cold calls, discovery conversations, and a negotiation simulation), and a running team project in which you will build and pitch a go-to-market and sales plan for a real or proposed product. Guest practitioners—sales leaders, account executives, and founders who have built sales motions from scratch—join select sessions to pressure-test the frameworks against the real world. Please come ready for a highly interactive classroom: bring your current job, startup, or future pitch as fodder for the exercises. There is no final exam—only a final live pitch. You will leave the course better equipped to sell a product, a strategy, and yourself.
Prerequisites: none listed
Offered: Fall 2026
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