Scott Downey

Scott Downey is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, where he teaches courses in sales and marketing. He is the lead author of “ProSelling: A Professional Approach to Selling in Agriculture and Other Industries.”

Scott is also an associate director of the Center for Food and Agricultural Business. He teaches in many of the center’s programs. He is a frequent speaker and consultant for agribusiness industry sales teams on professional development topics like precision selling, sales management and competitive sales strategies. The Discovery™ process he created has been adopted by Fortune 300 companies and has been presented all over the world. He has developed an assessment tool for sales managers and works with sales managers on coaching and developing sales teams.

Scott received his bachelor’s degree at Purdue University in 1985 and his MBA from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif., in 1991. He spent 14 years in the financial services industry before joining Purdue, where he also completed his PhD in consumer behavior.

He works with many student groups on campus. He is director of the sales and marketing degree program at Purdue and developed the Certificate in Industrial Selling offered to undergraduate students across the campus. He developed the Technical Sales Bootcamp for students in science and engineering fields who are interested in sales.

Scott is a fellow of Purdue’s Teaching Academy, which strives to bring together the best teaching faculty from across campus. He is the recipient of the 2012 Richard Kohls Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in the College of Agriculture at Purdue. He won a national teaching award in 2011 from the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association, the service organization for academics in agricultural economics.

His wife, Laura, is a veterinarian. She teaches marketing in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue and currently heads a business that provides patient drug adherence products to pharmacies.