The best accounting class ever

On Tuesday, we teach them how to sell. The principles of professional selling skills are the 3Cs: Candour, Concern and Competence. In order to create learning involvement, I assigned them the following 12 sets of terms: Consultative selling, Customer focus, Customer involvement, Customer decision, Dishonest, Forced selling, Honest, Less involvement, Product push, Sales decision, Self-focus and Solution selling.

These words are printed in large type and pasted on 12 sheets of paper. The students have to match six of them on traditional sales and six on professional sales based on the 3Cs principles.

On Wednesday, the 14 students are divided into two teams again, but with a rotation of team members from previous exercises. Each team has to plan for selling on Thursday. The product is the Thai version of the book Now Discover Your Strengths. It costs 180 baht and sells for 225 baht. Each group receives 108 copies. They will sell what they can, and return the rest. The teams receive 3,000 baht as a cash expense allowance.

We also wanted to teach them about corporate social responsibility, or CSR. So we put the condition that the net profits from both teams will be donated to flood victims.

They needed to develop a business plan based on the following guidelines:

- What is your business objective?

- What is your strategy?

- Who does what, based on talent, skill and knowledge?

- Who are your target customers?

- What are their buying behaviours?

- What are the product selling points?

- Who are you competing against (Can the target market pay 225 baht for a book)?

- Where do you reach them?

- How do you sell to them?

- How do you communicate among the team members?

- What is your Plan B?

- How do you manage stock and logistics?

- How do you motivate the team?

Then Khun Sujimon, a direct sales force manager with WSI, shared some tips, including how to sell on the street, booth selling, and how to deal with tenants for renting a sales booth.

In the afternoon, the teams presented their plans to us. We gave some advise and tips. Both teams then split their groups into three sub-groups: One to conduct a survey, one to oversee planning and logistics, and one to do product training with me. I told them more about the book and how to handle objections.

On Thursday, they went out to sell, and came back with results the next day. Team A sold 80 copies while Team B sold 60 copies. I could see that the students' level of self-confidence has increased dramatically. For many of them, this is the first time they have sold something. Selling on the street is a tough job, and once one is successful at it, he or she can do almost anything. It requires lots of courage _ particularly for Thais to break the saving face syndrome and ask people to buy something with the knowledge that many will say NO.

Then came Coach Jetsada, a veteran finance executive with leading companies like Central Watson Retail, BMW Thailand, Compaq, and GE Medical Systems. He teaches finance to non-finance people.

Coach Jetsada designs his four-hour course with games and exercises. He teaches basic finance terms, how to do a profit-and-loss statement, a balance sheet and reports needed for each role of key business positions. This would take several months to cover in a university, but he does it in four hours.

Then he assigns each team to use the real figures that they did on selling from the day before to develop a team profit and loss statement and balance sheets.

Suddenly both teams sparked up. They dynamically started accounting and bookkeeping. Nobody was sitting down. Everyone was up, jumping, talking, discussing, debating and laughing. Some who had learned accounting at a university were trying to explain the concepts to those who had no formal accounting education.

This was the most fun and engaged accounting class in my life.

Kriengsak Niratpattanasai is the founder of TheCoach, specialising in executive coaching in leadership and cross-cultural skills. Copies of previous columns are available at www.thaicoach.com. He can be reached at 02-517-3126 or coachkriengsak