Experiences from Team Sales Competitions

Abstract

Sales competitions are based on a case-scenario situation where student competitors are given a time limit and allowed to conduct sales interactions with a buyer. They are an ideal experiential learning format as they offer concrete experience with feedback provided by the instructors. Our study looks at potential differences between team events and single competition events. There is not much research on team events and they are not often conducted even that team-based sales competitions offer several pedagogical advantages, particularly in their capacity to simulate complex organizational selling scenarios. At the same time assessing individual contributions becomes more difficult when performance is distributed across several members, potentially obscuring disparities in preparation, effort, or interpersonal skill and making judging more difficult. Nevertheless, they should also offer similar benefits for the participants as single events as they also experience a close to real-life sales interaction. We use results from three sales competitions and surveys to compare team and single events. We found that both formats seem to offer benefits for participants, while the concrete benefits mentioned are different. Regarding personality traits, it seems as if in team competitions, being an extrovert does not play such an important role. We also found that judges in team event seem to find it more difficult to judge the competitors then in single event formats as they felt not so confident in judging the performances.

Keywords: Sales Competitions, Buyer-seller Interaction, Sales Role-play, Team Sales Competition, Competencies Development

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007589