Why you take Sales Early? . . . and Spring 2017 Pro-Sales Results

A few years ago, we had a slogan, "Take Sales Early!" During our Spring 2017 Pro-Sales Challenge, it was the sophomores and juniors who ruled the day.

Social Selling Dominance

For the first time, the Pro-Sales Challenge included a full semester Social Selling Challenge. Students were tasked with working to develop the social selling skills by learning how to increase their Social Selling Index score. Each student was provided with a Navigator account from Linkedin's Sales Solutions and we measured SSI score at the start of the semester and on the first day of Pro-Sales Challenge. We awarded both the highest score and highest growth.

Congrats Mirra Gutman (Fall 2018, Marketing): Top SSI Score & Top SSI Growth!

Mirra Gutman is a sophomore by age and a junior by credit. She entered the sales program as a first semester sophomore in Fall 2016. She has worked, since summer 2016, as an account manager in the Center for Professional Sales with a primary focus on student recruitment and engagement. Mirra will be interning with Texas Capital Bank this summer and plans to graduate in Fall 2018 with a Marketing Degree.

Congrats to the top ten most improved SSI scores:

From left to right in picture: Mirra Gutman (1st), Renato Principe (2nd), Antonio Beltran (4th), Ashley Varela (5th), Michelle Toro (7th), Brindan Martin (3rd), Rebecca Moran (8th), Sara Valles (9th), and Ali Kassam (10th) with Daniel Mendoza (6th - not pictured).

Congrats to the Top Six SSI Scores:

From left to right, Brindan Martin (5th), Antonio Beltran (6th), Mirra Gutman (1st), Jake Reni (Social Selling Guru from Adobe), Renato Principe (2nd), Carolina Wilkins (3rd), and Lexi Liebo (4th).

Other students rounding out the Top 10 included: Nousheen Karimi, Ashley Varela, Van Le and Michelle Toro.

Reverse Job Fair Acumen

You know the Job Fair? In the reverse job fair, each student is given a 2 x 6 table and develops their own trade show booth and the corporations come to their booth. The students goal: get recognized, engage your customer, and get hired!

Congrats to Daniel Mendoza (Spring 2018, Marketing) for best Reverse Job Fair.

Daniel Mendoza is a junior studying marketing. Daniel had a recipe for success as the theme of his booth. He will be graduating in 2018 with a degree in Marketing and will be interning this summer with Fidelity Investments.

Rounding out the top ten Reverse job fair winners:

From left to right: Makayla Forsberg (3rd), Lexi Leibo (4th), Ashley Varela (5th), Ali Kassam (6th), Thuy-Mi Le (7th), Nousheen Karimi (9th), Caleb Myers (10th), Steven Burns (2nd) and Ruby Moreno (not pictured 8th).

Role Play Selling Capability

This year we partnered with the Sales Solutions team at Linkedin and the inside sales team at HPE. The competition was in two rounds.

In the first round, the students met with a buying team member from HPE and discussed their current use of Sales Navigator. There was a $300,000 up-sell opportunity, but they were quickly moved to a retention call as they realized that HPE wanted to reduce the number of seats by half. This was a tough scenario and our students handled it with great skill.

For the Final Round, John Moren and Brandon Tillman from HPE started the 20 minute role play with a 3 minute meeting wrap up from the buying committee! So our finalists lost 3 minutes and heard that the committee said, "no sale!" How would you handle such a meeting?

Congrats to our Sales Cup Winner: MaKayla Forsberg (Spring 2019, Marketing).

Makayla is a sophomore Honors Athlete studying marketing. She is the youngest student to win the Sales Cup. She recently was the top sophomore in the country at the UTISC competition in the sophomore/freshman division. She has a marketing internship this summer.

Makayla faced off against the other 5 finalists in the Final day of sales role play competition.

The finalists are shown here left to right: Steven Burns, Ashley Varela, Nousheen Karimi, Makayla Forsberg, Alex Zahabizadeh, and Ali Kassam.

Overall Best Sales Talent

This Pro-Sales Challenge, we really shifted the focus from just role play selling to a more well rounded competition. By introducing social selling to our program, our students not only had to be able to do a sales call and a trade show, they needed to show they had developed prospecting skills and social selling skills. Being the top student in each category is quite an accomplishment. But the best overall rounded sales person was quite the challenge for our students.

Congrats to our Spring 2017 Pro-Sales Overall Winner: Ashley Varela (Spring 2018, Health Care Management)

Ashley is a junior, studying Health Care Management. She is no stranger to being a good sales person as she has been one of Nordstrom's top producers for years.

Ashley is one of the first sales students from the Health Care Management program. All majors can become certified in sales as Ashley has done.

Ashley will be interning with IBM's elite Summit program this summer and will graduate in Spring of 2018.

The rest of the top 10 overall sales students for this year's Pro-Sales Challenge are shown below:

From left to right: Sara Valles (6th), Makayla Forsberg (5th), Renato Principe (4th), Mirra Gutman (2nd), Antonio Beltran (3rd), Ashley Varela (1st), Nousheen Karimi (7th), Caronlina Wilkins (8th), Brindan Martin (9th), and Ali Kassam (10th).

Thank you!

We want to thank our Investment Level Sponsor, HPE, for providing all the buyers for both rounds and working with our students during workshops a few weeks ago. We also want to recognize and thank our Preferred Level sponsors (GTN Technical Staffing, Paycom, Lennox International, Liberty Mutual, Enterprise, and Texas Capital Bank) for their continued support of our program. Their support, along with our other sponsors, allows us to hold these events and support over $50,000 in scholarship each year!

A special shout goes to Nick Toman and Jake Reni for attending this year's Pro-Sales Challenge!

If you want to engage with our events as a corporate guest or sponsor, contact Dr. Howard Dover and one of our student account managers will discuss program engage with you.

Students who want to be part of the next sales event should start by enrolling in MKT 3330, Introduction to Professional Selling and apply Center for Professional Sales to become sales certified. The event discussed in this article is related to MKT 4332: Advanced Personal Selling.