Selling deserves a corner office Before I went to Harvard Business School to study for my MBA, I had imagined that the subject of sales would be part of the curriculum. But it wasn't. In fact, it is absent from most MBA programmes. If you accept that business is about making things and selling them, and that everything else is secondary, this absence makes no sense. When I asked one of my Harvard professors to explain it, he told me that if I really wanted to study sales, I could pay for a two-week evening course somewhere else. You could say the same thing about a lot of what the school taught, but no one was suggesting we go and learn strategy at night school. I found similar responses among other business school professors at other leading schools. Ah, yes, sales. Interesting, just not for us. In his book Birth of a Salesman, Harvard Business School professor Walter Friedman observes that "while business schools have continued to offer some type of sales management instruction - usually within a larger marketing course - they do not offer courses in salesmanship skills. The topic remains, just as it was in the 1910s, more suitable for popular how-to books and memoirs of successful salespeople than for academic classes. Economists, for their part, still tend to ignore the role of salesmanship in the economy. The reorganisation of US business schools in the 1950s to make them more scientific and quantitative, more academic and less vocational, left no room for teaching sales. To get tenure at a business school, you need to be published in a handful of journals that focus on finance, marketing, strategy and supply chains, leaving little room for serious work on selling. The effects of this omission from academe are grave. Many supposedly well-educated people in business are clueless about one of its most vital functions: the means by which you actually generate revenue. The lack of knowledge about sales has opened a class division between salespeople and the rest of business. Salespeople are often seen as operating by different rules and needing different motivators from other employees. They need conventions in Las Vegas and complex commission structures. They need to be goaded to perform and reined in when they sell too hard. They are patronised as "feet on the street" by those who prefer to imagine that business can be conducted by consultants with duelling PowerPoint presentations. Winners and losers Sarah Blakeley (above) Founder of Spanx is the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. Was a chipmunk at Disney World, and then a door-to-door fax saleswoman before devising the footless pantyhose that became Spanx. Attributes everything about her success to her sales experience. Jeff Immelt CEO, General Electric. Considered a good listener, with high emotional intelligence, a team builder. Started in sales at Procter & Gamble, then sold plastics at GE. Says he always looks at GE from the customer's perspective. Willy Loman Arthur Miller's victim of capitalism. After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive. In the US, there are two potent and contradictory views of sales. The first was held by men such as Benjamin Franklin and later incarnations such as investor Warren Buffett and Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and codified in the 20th century by writers such as Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. It holds that in a properly functioning democracy, if you can sell, you can slice through any obstacles of class, status, or upbringing in a way that is inconceivable in more hidebound societies. Great salesmen need no other prop to succeed. Selling well, in this view, is also a reflection of a healthy character. It means you are the sort of person to whom people are drawn - hardworking, clean living, trustworthy - and you are likely to succeed at whatever you choose to do. The opposing view is found in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller's brutal portrait of a man crushed by capitalism, living out the last pathetic day of his life. Willy Loman is defeated by his work as a door-to-door salesman and by his failure to achieve the hollow dreams he has set for himself. For him, selling is a form of humiliation perpetrated for the vile purpose of commercial gain. Miller's play shows capitalism at its worst. Yet year after year, high school and college students are made to read this play and perform it, and audiences pay to see it. Both views have adherents in cult­ure, economics and politics. Some see capitalism as a cleansing fire, with competition leading to fairness and truth, and a just distribution of goods; others see it as the cause of scorched earth and ruined lives. Then there are those who shuttle around the middle, who recognise selling as a force for economic expansion and human improvement, while admitting to its Faustian lures. The ability to sell can be a force for extraordinary good or evil, depending on the motivation of the seller. When the writer Hunter S. Thompson des-cribed the US as a "nation of two hundred million used car salesmen," it is hard to know if he meant it as a jibe or a compliment. To excel at sales means you possess a power over people that can easily be misused. Put a formidable salesman together with a hateful idea, and you could end up with the Nuremberg rallies. Casanova turned his persuasive talents to deflowering nuns. Mahatma Gandhi used his to argue for the principle of non-violence. Bill Clinton sold his way into the White House and out of a sex scandal that might have sunk a lesser persuader. The Dalai Lama is a highly conscious manipulator of his message and style, depending on which audience he wishes to win over. Whatever your view, sales surrounds us. Many of our choices in life come down to this: sell, or be sold to. Even those of us not paid to be salespeople sell every day to ourselves, our families, our friends and our employers. At a time when the chasm between the business and non-business worlds seems ever-wider, sales is one area of business we can all discuss. But what really occurs when one person faces another and persuades him or her to buy? Salespeople must conjure up a perception of value, where none may previously have existed. They must deal with unremitting "No's" interspersed with the occasional, ecstatic "Yes." They must trudge from meeting to meeting making the same pitch, hearing the same depressing objections. They must decide on the extent to which they mix personal and professional relationships. Selling is the single biggest function in business. In the US, millions more are emp­loyed in sales jobs than in manufacturing, let alone marketing, strategy, finance or any of the other parasitic business functions. All over the world, from the most basic to the most advanced economies, selling is the horse that pulls the cart of business. It is as ancient as the Athenian agora, as modern as the Gilt Groupe. Now sales faces a new threat, besides academic snobbery. Using vast databases of personal details, marketers can slice us all into ever slimmer customer groups. They can divine from our keystrokes and swipes what we might buy next. Targeted ads and store design can do the rest. The art and science of selling is undergoing its greatest revolution since the late 19th century, when America's travelling pedlars were replaced by new corporate armies dispatched by the likes of Coca-Cola and the National Cash Register Company. Individuals can now bring their personal brands directly to millions through the internet. The distribution paths to the market have been flattened, unleashing a scramble for Likes, Followers and ultimately buyers. Technology is eliminating barriers and bringing a transparency to sales in an unprecedented way. The classic salesperson is dying but a new form is being born. There is a widening gap between the priorities and thinking habits of the business elite and the rest of society. Paying more attention to salespeople and selling, that most personal and human aspect of business, is the way to bridge that chasm. The writer is author of "Life's A Pitch" (US edition: "The Art of The Sale")