A team of four marketing students from the CT Bauer College of Business placed first in the National Collegiate Sales Competition.
Team competitors Rebekah Elliott and Taylor Herbert, along with team alternates Jozette Bionat and Adrian Sese, participated in the tournament held in Kennesaw State University, in Georgia.
The competition, which took place in early March, had the participation of more than 60 of the top national sales programs.
“It was intense, it was extremely exciting and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Herbert.
The competition required students to prepare a sales presentation with a buyer that would last for 20 minutes. The competitors needed to sell NetSuite CRM, a leading integrated web-based business software suite.
The team was judged by five different judges and recorded on video, which was seen by companies who were interested.
After the competition Elliott and Herbert, marketing seniors, received phone calls and emails from different employers.
“I received four different voicemails from companies that I didn’t even talk to,” said Herbert. “So, it opens up a lot of doors for opportunities that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t go to NCSC.”
All four students are part of the Program for Excellence in Selling, where they began to train for about ten hours each week in school, as well as practicing at home.
According to Elliott, the skills learned at PES help make the program ranked number one.
“I originally came to UH in hopes to transfer to a different college, and PES is what kept me here,” Elliott said. “I see people going to the National Collegiate Sales Competition. I see people having three or four job offers, and that’s what really made me stay at UH.”
The team was selected from 12 students who tried out. After being chosen, they practiced for three months competing against each other to see who was actually going to go to the competition.
“Even after we found out that Rebekah and I were going to compete, it’s still a team atmosphere. So, Jozette and Adrian had a different role; now they were there to be our buyers, but without them it wouldn’t have been possible,” Herbert said.
Both Elliott and Herbert went with the idea of winning the competition because of the hard training they got for the past three months.
“We all had in our minds that it was either win or win. And since it was our 15-year anniversary we had to win,” Elliott said.
