Trends and Recommendations in Teaching Marketing and Sales 2025

If you teach marketing and sales, this post is for you. We’ll review some of the key trends in teaching the discipline according to the 2025 conference of the Marketing Management Association (MMA).

Hello, my name is Dr. Carlos Valdez, founder and director of MercadotecniayVentas.com, an educational portal where 90% of our content is freely available. Our mission is to educate and inspire students, academics, and professionals in the areas of marketing and sales through innovative and practical content, developing essential skills for value creation.

This is a special video-audio blog dedicated to academia, so let’s get started.

This post is not intended to be a summary of the conference or a news report, but rather to share ideas that caught my attention as an educator with nearly 30 years in the discipline. So, all of my comments carry my personal bias and subjectivity. What I do hope is that these ideas will also resonate with colleagues who are looking to continue growing as educators.

1. The Conference

First, I want to highlight the conference itself. There are many conferences on research and teaching of the discipline in the U.S. All of them are attractive simply because they help advance the discipline in knowledge and contribution to society. However, each one is different and has its own competitive advantages.

The association manages two academic research journals: The Journal of Advancement in Marketing Education, dedicated to marketing pedagogy, and The Marketing Management Journal, dedicated to applied marketing. Therefore, the conference is an excellent space to present research and receive feedback with the possibility of publishing in either of these journals. The conference is very well organized and has a strong atmosphere of camaraderie. It is also held in different cities across the U.S., so it doesn’t stay limited to one area. I encourage colleagues to consider it as a strong option to present their research.

2. Academic Trends

The first trend is obvious and has been since November 2022: Artificial Intelligence. In 2025, there is no doubt anymore: it’s something we must learn, use, and teach our students—who are already using it themselves, and businesses have demanded it from the start. Everyone is at different stages, from light use to advanced users, both in academia and in business. But clearly, we are living in the age of AI. Several presentations showed how it is already being used in classrooms: content creation, brainstorming, research, analysis… literally in every area of the discipline. Many platforms were mentioned, but ChatGPT from OpenAI remains the most widely used.

The second trend: preparing students for the employment challenge. This conversation included several points: from AI, to proving the value graduates can bring, to helping students become aware of their own value so they can promote themselves better. Even before AI, there was the issue of people claiming to do marketing while only covering one small area of the discipline. Now, with AI, this issue has intensified. In my words, perhaps we must reposition the discipline for today’s era and the last 20 years, where technological impact has been vertiginous—and will continue to be.

The third trend, to my pleasant surprise, is the importance of soft skills. I’ve been a firm believer in soft skills, having taught them for the last 10 years in a unique initiative I’ve never seen at another university. As a department and program, we collectively decided which soft skills we wanted to teach and how we would intentionally and measurably integrate them into each class. My program is Integrated Business at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and my course is Integrated Marketing and Sales. So, it was very rewarding to see soft skills recognized and intentionally taught. This also connects to the previous point: helping students get jobs. Employers want graduates to already possess soft skills, because they don’t have the time to train them, and that responsibility falls on us—academia.

The fourth trend, closely related to all the previous ones and the reason for my attendance: LinkedIn. Several presentations emphasized the importance of teaching and motivating students to use the platform. For the past five years, my research has focused on personal branding on LinkedIn. The project I presented, developed with Dr. Jorge Villegas, Dr. Dave Penn, and Ionna Martinou, tested the most relevant theories in personal branding and how user activity on LinkedIn impacts results. As an outcome, we developed a LinkedIn usage scale that was very well received—but that’s a topic for another post.

3. Trends in Teaching Professional B2B Sales

This session was a panel with three professors in the sales field. The trends in sales education highlighted AI once again, but also soft skills and the importance of teaching students with a vision of how they will progress—from sales executives to account managers and later to sales managers. They pointed out that we usually focus on the sales process itself, but not on career evolution. Much of the content we use is geared toward the second level, like account management, and not necessarily for the entry-level position that gets students into a company in the first place.

I see Professional Sales as operating on two levels:

1. Basic and traditional concepts that still work today, such as the sales process.
2. Technology, and how new advancements force professionals, academics, and students to learn both the theory and how to apply it with today’s tools.

The panel suggested that, in order not to fall into the trap of teaching technology that quickly becomes obsolete, we should expose students to the most widely used tools—beyond AI. They agreed that this should include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, specifically Salesforce.com or HubSpot CRM. The idea is not to teach the technical details, but rather what these tools are, what they’re for, and how to use them strategically.

Companies already provide tutorials, training, and certifications, which motivated students can complete to increase their value to employers.

My colleague Alfred Whiffen, with more than 40 years of professional sales experience, and I revamped our Integrated Marketing and Sales course, where 80% of the content is B2B. One of our strategies is to dedicate a session where student teams research marketing technologies (martech) that can be used in the sales process. We specifically ask them not to simply say “Salesforce.com” for every stage, but to explore diverse options. This has helped expose students to new technology while also keeping us up to date with current tools.

4. Recommendations from Editors of Academic Research Journals

One of the most attractive parts of any research conference is the editors’ panel, where they share recommendations on best—and worst—practices to increase the chances of publication. At this particular conference, it was very rewarding for me not only to attend these panels, but also to participate in special sessions where the editors of JAME and MMJ gave in-depth advice to help faculty improve their odds of publishing successfully.

The first panel included Jim Blair (Journal of Consumer Marketing), Anjala Krishen (Journal of Marketing Analytics), Laura Muñoz (Marketing Management Journal), and Brian Rutherford (Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management).

General recommendations included:

• Avoid using student samples.
• Qualitative studies are welcome if done rigorously.
• While the “three-study per paper” trend is common, it’s not a strict requirement.
• Jim Blair advised against using three mturk samples to meet that requirement, as they do not truly count.

Brian Rutherford noted that editors need our support as reviewers. He pointed out that it reflects poorly if an editor has asked you to review three times and you always declined, only to later try publishing in that journal. Jim Blair also recommended getting involved as a reviewer, since the process helps you grow as a researcher and eventually as an editor.

I asked the panel about using AI for qualitative research with large samples, and the unanimous answer was “no” to any use of AI in research analysis.

The second panel included Anjala Krishen (Journal of Marketing Education), Mark Lee (Marketing Education Review), Brook Reavey (Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education), and Adrienne Wallace (Journal of Public Relations Education). These are all leading journals in marketing pedagogy. They explained how their focuses differ: for example, JME addresses pedagogy but also broader academic issues, while JAME is beginning to accept case studies.

I asked what topics we, as researchers, are not covering but that editors would like to see.

Adrienne Wallace commented that we are currently facing a saturation of AI research. She would like to see more studies on leadership, an important but underexplored area. Brook Reavey shared that JAME is moving toward not only accepting cases but also theoretical and intellectual discussion papers. She also noted that they are working to index all articles in Scopus, which will drastically increase visibility and citations for authors.

Another important point was their commitment to remaining independent and not partnering with major publishing houses. This independence allows them to make articles freely accessible online immediately upon acceptance and revision. Brook also mentioned she would like to see a meta-analysis on marketing pedagogy.

5. Recommendations for Submitting Research Articles to Academic Journals – by Dr. Laura Muñoz (Marketing Management Journal)

Laura Muñoz shared five strategies to increase the social capital of marketing and sales professors through research:

1. Alignment with the journal’s focus.
   She recommended carefully reading the journal’s aim and scope to ensure your proposal makes a meaningful contribution to both the theory and practice of the discipline.
2. Follow formatting guidelines meticulously.
   Use the correct style (e.g., APA or Harvard).
   Include all required sections: abstract, keywords, references, figures, and tables.
   Very important: remove any information that might reveal the authors’ identity (e.g., stating where the sample was collected).
   Finally, she advised investing in software to check grammar.
3. Develop a strong conceptual or empirical contribution.
   She suggested “selling” your paper from the introduction by clearly stating three contributions or reasons why the paper is important, and then revisiting them in the conclusion.
• For conceptual articles: propose new theoretical frameworks or paradigms based on a broad review of the literature.
• For empirical articles: use a robust methodology with well-defined constructs.
4. Justify and validate your methodology.
   Muñoz emphasized transparency and replicability, demonstrating validity and reliability, and applying the appropriate statistical techniques.
5. Additional recommendations.
• Include articles from the journal itself in your literature review to show thoroughness.
• Treat your data as an investment that pays dividends: collect variables that allow you to develop multiple articles and use the same dataset for 3–4 years.
• Always present your research at a conference first, and then submit it to a journal for publication.
• Remember that research is teamwork—invite colleagues to be co-authors.

Closing Remarks

Before concluding this post, I would like to thank the conference sponsors: Interpretive Simulations, Marketplace Simulations, Hubro Simulations, Strx Simulations, Knime, Novela, Cengage, Pearson, and Stukent.

Academic conferences should, whenever possible, be an important element in the life of every scholar. They keep us updated on the latest trends in the discipline and help expand our professional networks. This is especially true for academics whose job responsibilities include research.

The annual conference of the Marketing Management Association is an excellent intellectual alternative that any colleague in the discipline will enjoy and find highly valuable.

I’ll close by reminding you that 90% of the content on MercadotecniayVentas.com is free. Also, when you begin your first job in marketing and sales, I recommend the Red Manual for Marketing and Sales Coordinators. It’s not just a book—it’s a manual and practical guide to help you remember the most important topics in marketing and how to apply them with artificial intelligence.

I wish you great success in your academic and research career in marketing and sales.

And remember: in marketing and sales, we must always… generate value.

Thank you, and until next time!