Craig Wortmann
Clinical Professor of Marketing and Executive Director, Kellogg Sales Institute.
Kellogg Sales Institute
Craig Wortmann is the Founder and Academic Director of the Kellogg Sales Institute (KSI). The Institute defines sales as “helping people make progress in their lives” and thus everything we do is in the service of helping people become both magnetic and unstoppable in their pursuit of progress…for themselves and for everyone they come across.
Craig is a Clinical Professor of Marketing and his teaching covers a wide range of topics based on his experiences as a professional salesperson, CEO, founder, entrepreneur and investor. In all of his teaching - from massive online courses to MBA and Executive MBA classrooms - Craig attempts to create immersive experiences that help people develop into magnetic leaders who drive predictably consistent high growth, for themselves and their organizations. Craig joined the Kellogg faculty in 2017 after almost a decade teaching at Chicago Booth.
Craig's teaching topics include:
- Getting Good At Getting Great (at anything)
- Building Strong, Positive and Powerful Sales Cultures
- Developing Personal & Professional Skill and Discipline
- Entrepreneurial Selling
- Learning By Doing
- Sales Leadership
- Entrepreneurship
- Coaching
- Communications
- Presenting With Panache
- Storytelling
- Writing
- Networking
- Life Hacks
- Practice Makes Permanent
- Generating Positive Energy
Founder/Entrepreneur
Craig Wortmann is a three-time entrepreneur and CEO, beginning with his first software company in 2000. After selling that firm in 2008, Craig conducted a successful turnaround of a struggling digital marketing agency, selling it to a larger French company only 11 months after joining as its CEO.
Sales Engine, Inc.
In 2009, Craig founded his current company, Sales Engine, Inc. on the core belief that sales is the engine of any business. Now in our 13th year, Craig and his team consult to the world’s largest and most successful companies, as well as some of the world’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial companies. His work centers around his teaching, tool-building and coaching.
Investor
Craig currently serves as an Operating Partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital. As Operating Partner, Craig helps the portfolio CEOs and CROs build and tune their sales engines to maximize growth.
Craig is also an active angel investor, solely focused on companies that help people develop healthy habits and empower people to be their best. His portfolio currently includes sleep and food companies, as well as those creating the next generation of female leaders.
Author
Craig is the author of What’s Your Story? a book that helps people tell the right story at the right time for the right reasons. In his book, Craig developed a tool called the Story Matrix?, designed to help people capture, distill and tell their stories.
Courses
Craig teaches four MBA and Executive MBA courses that he designed and built both at Chicago Booth and Kellogg, all of which are among the most in-demand courses at each school, requiring additional faculty to be brought in to teach them. He has also designed and built two massive online courses that continue to reach tens of thousands of students all over the world. Craig’s courses include:
- Entrepreneurial Selling (MBA) - This 10-week course helps entrepreneurs survive and thrive in the “wonderful chaos” from time-zero to break even by acquiring their first critical customers.
- Selling Yourself & Your Ideas (MBA & Executive MBA) - This 10-week course helps students develop a “situational awareness” of the communication skills and disciplines they need to show up, stand out and break through in every room they enter.
- Phase 0 (Executive MBA) - This 4.5-day “sprint” course demystifies the fuzzy front end of starting businesses. Craig and his teaching partner, Professor David Schonthal, guide their students through an intense, 4.5-day journey where they design and launch a business in one week
- Getting Good at Getting Great (Executive MBA) - This 2.5-day course helps leaders scale themselves and their businesses by developing the knowledge, skill, discipline and habits of elite performers. Craig and his teaching partner, Professor Andrew Sykes, take their students on a journey helping them get good at getting great
- Kellogg Mastering Sales: A Toolkit for Success (Kellogg Online Emeritus Course) - Craig’s Mastering Sales course quickly became the highest-rated offering by Emeritus, a platform that offers curriculum from a wide breadth of elite institutions including MIT, Wharton, Columbia and, of course, Kellogg. Mastering Sales: A Toolkit for Success debuted at the end of 2019 and is a 10-week, certificate-earning online course led by Program Leaders trained by Craig. Throughout the online experience, participants build a 32-Tool Sales Toolkit to tackle any challenge they face
- Kellogg Sales School: Professional Certification in Sales (Kellogg Online Emeritus Course) - After helping some of the world’s most successful companies build their own “sales schools,” Craig designed and launched “Kellogg Sales School” as a way for people who are new to sales - or embarking on a career transition - to get great at sales through this seven month sales school experience
Tool Builder
In addition to his teaching, Craig has created more than 100 Sales Tools, ranging from editable PDFs to worksheets, templates, and hundreds of videos. Just as a master carpenter or artist has a customized set of tools, we believe that every salesperson, leader and entrepreneur must be equipped with the tools they need to perform in any situation.
From our “Story Matrix” that helps people tell the right story at the right time for the right reasons, to the simplest of tools like a well-designed voicemail, Craig and his team are tool-builders. Just a few of the tools in this large Sales Toolkit include:
- The Art of the Sales Conversation
- Story Matrix
- What’s Your Story: Story Canvas
- Prospecting Script
- Breakthrough Email Blueprint
- Objections Matrix
- Visual Impact
- Team Selling for Impact
- Teach It Forward
- Win/Loss Debrief
- Client Delight Index
- Quarterly Dashboard
- Weekly One-on-One
Awards & Recognition
Craig is an award-winning course designer and professor, having won multiple teaching awards at two of the top 10 business schools in the world; Chicago Booth and now Kellogg.
- In 2008, his Entrepreneurial Selling MBA course was named by Inc. Magazine as one of the top ten courses in the United States
- In 2012, Craig was awarded the “Faculty Excellence” Award given by the Chicago Booth students to the one professor who had the most impact on them
- In 2019, Craig was named on Chicago Inno’s “50 on Fire” list for his contributions as a thought leader in entrepreneurship and innovation in the Chicago Tech community
- Crain’s named Craig to the “Crain’s Tech 50” list in 2019
- Since joining the Kellogg family, Craig has won the “Kellogg Executive MBA Outstanding Teaching Award” consecutively in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021
- In 2020, Kellogg awarded Craig the “Sydney J. Levy Teaching Award” for teaching excellence
- And in our virtual world, Kellogg’s students have often been quoted as saying; “Craig Wortmann is the gold standard in virtual learning”
Updated September 2022
- Wortmann
- Craig. "What's your Story?" : using stories to ignite performance and be more successful. Kaplan
- 2006. Print.
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MBA, 1995, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
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Clinical Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Kellogg Innovation & Entrpreneurship Initiative, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2017-present
Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 2012-2016
Adjunct Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 2008-2011 -
CEO, Sales Engine, Inc., 2008-present
President & CEO, Cleargauge, 2009
President & CEO, Wisdomtools, Inc., 2000-2008
Relationship Manager, The Forum Corporation, 1997-2000
Senior Sales Executive, Private Label Credit Services, SPS Payment Systems, Inc., 1994-1996
IBM Agent, Manufacturing Specialist, Whittman-Hart, LP, 1991-1994
IBM Marketing Representative, Mid-range Systems, IBM Corporation, 1989-1991
Legislative Correspondent & Intern Coordinator to Congressman James H. Scheuer, U.S. House of Representatives, 1988-1989 -
Sydney J. Levy Teaching Award, 2019-2020
Crain's Chicago Business "Tech 50", 2019
EMBA Outstanding Professor Award, 2019-2020, 2019-2020
Chicago Inno 2019 50 on Fire
Civic and Education: Craig Wortmann, Professor, Kellogg School of Management, Chicago Innovation Awards, 2019
EMBA Outstanding Professor Award, 2019-2020
EMBA Outstanding Professor Award, 2017-2018
Selling Yourself and Your Ideas
Kellogg Executive Education and the Kellogg Sales Institute’s Selling Yourself and Your Ideas
program will force you out of your comfort zone, helping you develop the knowledge, skills and discipline needed to show up, stand out and break through
in every room you’re in.
Dive into a dynamic learning experience that pushes you beyond your comfort zone – enhancing your ability to connect, persuade, and inspire across all facets of your professional and personal life.
Selling Yourself and Your Ideas (LDEVX-477-0)
It’s been said that humans are “meaning making machines.†More than 70,000 years ago, near the outset of the Cognitive Revolution, we created language to help protect and organizeourselves.1Over the ensuing millennia, we have developed myriad ways to communicate with each other. Present day, our communications take many forms, and so we find ourselves in conversations, meetings, presentations, and even as producers on social media. As business leaders, we move through these many forms of communication in the course of a week, and indeed we can even traverse each of them within one day. At no time in history have interpersonal communication skills been as important as they are today. In the Agrarian Age, a farmer who ploughed the field a little better than their neighbors could not acquire significantly more wealth. In the Industrial Age, a factory worker who assembled widgets a little faster than the person next to them could not acquire significantly more wealth. Today, anyone, anywhere in the world, who is a little better at expressing their ideas can see a sudden, massive increase in wealth that is unprecedented in human history. In the 21st-century knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Says Gallo, “The ability to convince others that your ideas matter is the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge at a time when the combined forces of globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence trigger a wave of anxiety across every profession in every country. In the next decade, your ideas-and the ability to articulate those ideas successfully-will count more than ever. Persuaders are irreplaceable." Selling Yourself & Your Ideas is a course that will force you out of your comfort zone to help you develop the knowledge, skills, and disciplines you need to be a powerful and influential communicator, no matter the situation in which you find yourself.
Phase 0: Designing, Building and Communicating Compelling New Ventures (ENTRX-475-0)
This course has been designed to demystify the "fuzzy front end" of starting a new venture and to give you the tools and confidence to build and launch something of your own. You will learn how to identify problems worth solving, test your assumptions about possible solutions, adjust your initial hypothesis based on experimentation and market feedback, and ultimately accelerate the time between inspiration, execution, operations, and growth. We will focus on the importance of achieving "Product Market Fit" - developing the right offer for the right customer - and convincing others to support you on your journey. The tools and skills learned in this class are equally as applicable to startups as they are to corporate innovation projects. The course is geared to: 1) those who want to pursue an entrepreneurial career and are taking this course to develop and pursue a business idea; 2) those interested in a career path in business innovation, whether it's in a new venture or innovating inside a larger firm 3) those who are curious about a career in entrepreneurship and innovation and want to better understand what it entails and explore if it fits well with their inherent personality traits and talents. The construct of the class is a blend of lecture, hands-on workshops, in-market research, site visits, simulations and guest speakers. We will take full advantage of being in San Francisco and do a lot of our learning outside of the classroom. Coursework will be team-based.
Selling Yourself & Your Ideas: The Fundamentals (LDEV-477-5)
Selling Yourself and Your Ideas (LDEV-477-0)
It's been said that humans are "meaning making machines." More than 70,000 years ago, near the outset of the Cognitive Revolution, we created language to help protect and organize ourselves.1 Over the ensuing millennia, we have developed myriad ways to communicate with each other. Present day, our communications take many forms, and so we find ourselves in conversations, meetings, presentations, and even as producers on social media. As business leaders, we move through these many forms of communications in the course of a week, and indeed we can even traverse each of them within one day. In order to be dynamic, high-performing communicators, we must do three things: 1. Be cognizant of what high performance looks like in each of these distinct modes of communication; 2. Develop a situational awareness for how to succeed in each form; and 3. Become agile in calibrating our approach. Selling Yourself & Your Ideas is a course that will force you out of your comfort zone to help you show up, stand out, and break through. You will develop the knowledge, skills, and disciplines you need to be a powerful and influential communicator, no matter the situation in which you find yourself.
Entrepreneurial Selling (ENTR-454-0)
Selling is a life skill. This course is designed as an adventure of discovery. You will be tested, taught and transformed through a series of lectures, discussions and exercises that are designed to push you up and out of your comfort zone. The biggest challenge to growing a successful entrepreneurial venture is selling. Entrepreneurs must build a strong sales pipeline to ensure profitable growth as they tackle other pressing issues like product development, staffing, infrastructure, and financing. In the Entrepreneurial Selling course, you will learn how to acquire and delight customers, use selling skills in different contexts, manage the entrepreneurial selling process, measure your success and use the key tools required for success in building a company. My goal with this course is to make you as efficient and effective in selling as possible, so that when you are spending time selling, not a moment is wasted. Why? Because as an entrepreneur (and a human), the way you spend your time determines success and failure. Period.
