Randy Webb stayed up until 2 in the morning preparing his presentation for the Kroger buyer the next day. Webb, a young salesman for Dial Corporation, had been calling on him for three months, eager to get Kroger to do more than merely replenish the grocer’s previous purchases.

Armed with a detailed flip chart and a warm thermos of the chili he wanted Kroger to introduce to its shelves, Webb was confident that once the buyer tried the product and saw his presentation, he would have the sale.

He had just 15 minutes to make his pitch, so he put his flip chart on the executive’s desk and began the spiel. He didn’t get far before the buyer threw his presentation in the garbage can. Unsure of how he was supposed to react, Webb took the presentation out of the trash and pressed on. Perhaps the buyer was testing his resilience.

The second time around didn’t go any smoother, nor did subsequent attempts to get through the chili presentation. The chart ended up in the garbage four times before the buyer gave him the best career advice he had ever received. 

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I am bored to tears and tired of companies sending young people in here for me to train,” he said. “You’ve done nothing but try to sell me. If you had taken the time to ask me what kind of presentations I like, I would have told you I hate flip chart presentations, and you wouldn’t have stayed up to 2 o’clock this morning wasting your time losing sleep over a presentation I was never going to see.”

The key to sales, the buyer went on, was making a connection with the audience, focusing on their needs and communication style, and trying to see if you can help them solve their problems as a relationship develops. “Sales is a conversation, not a presentation,” he said.

Webb took the advice to heart and never looked back. Just a few years later, at age 29, he became the youngest corporate officer of record for the Dial Corporation. He would go on to serve as vice president of sales for Mars Inc. and president of Uncle Ben’s Inc. Today, he’s the executive director of the Stephen Stagner Sales Institute and a senior professor of practice of marketing in the C. T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.

The Florida native and son of a meat salesman leads the sales institute while being one of the school’s most beloved professors at one of the best collegiate sales programs in the country.

Instilling Sales Skills

Sales has always been a challenging skill to simulate in a classroom environment, but Webb, who joined the University in 1999, just three years after the sales institute launched, has built a curriculum that gives undergraduate students real-world sales opportunities.

In the year-long institute, students’ grades are tied to their ability to sell sponsorships and recruit participants to the institute’s job fair, handle the sponsorship sales of the program’s 500-plus person golf tournament, and recruit their own mentor while convincing them to sponsor the student’s jacket.  

“We put them in real-world situations with real-world sales, and they feel the pressure a salesperson would feel,” Webb says. Education doesn’t get much more relevant than that.

One of Webb’s many additions to the sales institute is the Key Accounts Selling class, a cohort of 20 students who must be interviewed to qualify. The students are put into teams and manage the program’s corporate partners, sell sponsorships to new organizations or upsell existing partners. Webb notes that his fall 2025 customer relations management class sold 534 players on playing with the Golf Club of Houston (one of the largest nonprofit golf tournaments in Houston), while his sales management class sold out the sales career fair at the Hilton, with 112 companies participating. The cohort also travels on a donor-sponsored account trip after they have cold-called executives in that city and set up meetings.

The class is about teamwork and learning to handle rejection while realizing they can make progress with confidence and persistence. “We teach them that they can connect with senior-level people,” Webb says. “They get over the fear of getting an appointment and learn how to handle themselves with that level of professionalism.”

The skills developed at the sales institute are translatable to nearly any career, which is part of the reason all Bauer business students must take Intro to Selling. But Webb says the institute recruits outside the business school because of the richness it adds to class discussions and its potential impact on students’ futures. Building relationships, helping others solve their problems, working in a team, being persuasive — all are essential for any successful career.

Storytelling Success

Webb always wanted to transition to academia after his business career and found that his executive sales responsibilities were very similar to what he does in the classroom.

“My job was two things. One was to give my people the resources they needed to be successful, because if they were successful, I would be successful,” he says. “The second thing was to create the right kind of environment.”

Today, he equips students with resources and creates an environment that has made him one of the most popular professors at the University, earning him the UH Teaching Excellence Award in 2020. In addition to real-world sales experience, Webb uses storytelling to illustrate the skills and knowledge students need to be successful.

A guiding tenet of his philosophy is an emphasis on effort and learning from mistakes rather than on fear-based motivation and punitive measures. He often recounts working as a sales executive for Mars Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the country, still run by the founding family.

While he was an executive there, he launched a new product that failed, costing the company $25 million. When owner John Mars decided to pay him a visit, he feared the worst.

But Mars surprised him with his inquiry. “I want to see what you learned from my $25 million investment in your education,” he told Webb. Webb said he learned to never roll out a product nationwide without a test market first.

“I’m not sure that’s worth $25 million, but at least you learned something,” Mars replied, and never mentioned it again. The focus on learning creates a positive culture for employees, something Webb recreates in the sales institute.

UH has a growing and culturally rich student population, many of whom are first-generation college students working their way through school, as Webb himself did at Florida State. As the years have gone by, Webb relishes the opportunity to connect with students whose lives have been changed by the program and the opportunities it has presented.

“It’s why I do what I do,” he says. “I went into teaching because my goal is to help students get their dream job and change their lives. If I can do that, then it’s been a great semester.”