I teach sales at a liberal arts university and have plenty of real world experience to bring to my lectures. I also bring in salespeople who enhance the material in class. I also conduct research on relationship selling and add to the content in text books and practitioner articles. The two worlds are very compatible and research (Heinze, 2008; Fogel, Hoffmeister, Rocco and Strunk, 2012) indicates that when students take just one sales class that.....The learning curve is 50% times faster when going into a selling job, they are 35% less likely to be terminated, tenure with the company is 40% longer than salespersons with no university training, and each hire with a sales education saved the manufacturer $175,000 over a hire without one. We do pretty amazing things in university preparing our students for the real world.