Competitive Teamwork: Developing a Team-Based Selling Competition in an Undergraduate Professional Selling Class: An Abstract

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to discuss how to develop, refine, and improve team-based role-playing competitions that could be used as a pedagogical tool in undergraduate selling courses. Specifically, we explore and test three factors—external competition rewards, student role-play and feedback involvement, and utilizing cases written by industry professional—that increase competiveness among undergraduate students, and consequently how those factors influence role-play performance and post-graduation job placement. Since there is an increasing demand for sales professionals across multiple industries and there is a trend toward more marketing students starting careers in jobs focused on sales, we explore how to improve upon known best practices in sales education. Bringing realism to the classroom required implementing techniques learned at intercollegiate sales competition and from sales professionals in the field.

The context for our study is at a small, private liberal art university located on the east coast of the United States. Although the class utilizes a multitude of traditional methods including a standard text with lectures, we focus on the use of a team-based role-play case competition. The competition involves student teams, school wide faculty judges, and support from corporate sponsors who are involved in writing the cases. Overall, we found that adding competition to traditional classroom selling role-play improved student performance and learning. When student peers judged the competition along with alumni who had taken the class in a previous semester, our students were more open to criticism than only comments from the instructor. Careful selection of cases used in these sales competitions is also imperative to successful student outcomes. Practical cases written with input from sales professionals that reduces the emphasis on analytics and focuses more on sales techniques result in more vibrant class competitions. Bringing the selling experience to life in the classroom requires moving from a more traditional pedagogical process to a very practical and interactive class experience. Overall, we discuss how our findings can be applied and implemented in undergraduate courses related to professional selling.