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<\/p>\nWe all love our comfort zones.\u00a0 Comfort zones are all about the familiar, the friendly, and the predictable.\u00a0 The problem is, not much learning happens there.\u00a0 At least not the type of learning that lasts for the long term.\u00a0 That type of learning happens when we are outside of our comfort zones and are experiencing the unfamiliar, the challenging, and the unpredictable.<\/p>\n
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Kelli Rollins<\/strong> and Nathan Olsen<\/strong> are third-year BBA students who chose to get out of their comfort zones this semester when they signed up to participate in the Pacific Northwest Collegiate Sales Competition, an event sponsored by Oregon State University.\u00a0 Students from eight American universities participated in the sales competition on April 17 with UFV being the only Canadian university taking part.<\/p>\n All UFV BBA students are familiar with sales role plays from their BUS 221 Professional Selling classes.\u00a0 In BUS 221, two students work together to prepare a script of a conversation between a buyer and a seller and then perform role plays of that script in class and on video. The seller builds rapport with the buyer, asks questions to determine the buyer\u2019s needs, presents their proposal, demonstrates their product, and closes the deal.<\/p>\n A sales competition such as Oregon State\u2019s is similar to the role-play assignments in Bus 221 except\u2026there is no script.\u00a0 The student plays the seller role, and the buyer role is played by a businessperson who the student has never met.\u00a0 The buyer can take the conversation in many directions and so it is up to the seller to adjust on the fly and to lead the conversation towards a purchase. \u00a0It is like the difference between acting in a rehearsed performance on Broadway versus improv theatre. \u00a0The seller must be prepared to answer a variety of technical questions about their product which, this year, was a temperature scanning device with facial recognition.\u00a0 And lastly, the entire presentation takes place virtually with three judges watching.\u00a0 (Remember the scene in the Hunger Games movie where Katniss gets in an underground elevator and is taken to the arena above where she will have to battle to stay alive?\u00a0 Sales competitions are a little bit like that!)<\/p>\n Kelli and Nathan\u2019s preparations for the sales competition started back in January, meeting weekly online with their coach, Associate Professor Mark Breedveld<\/strong>.\u00a0 During the weeks to follow, a variety of others gave freely of their time to support the training process, including UFV Director of Campus Planning and Facilities Management, Mark Goudsblom; Ricoh Senior Solutions Consultant, Tapinder Tiwana; Sandler Sales Training Owner, John Glennon; and Retirement Concepts General Manager, Glenn Hocking. Thanks, too, to Curtis Holder, Global Sales\u00a0Manager of Tryten Technologies, for providing the use of a mobile tablet station on competition day.<\/p>\n For the third year in a row, the US-based Sales Education Foundation (SEF) has recognized UFV as being a \u201ctop sales university.\u201d\u00a0 What this means is\u00a0that the UFV School of Business is among the\u00a0ranks of 155 North American universities that offer a program of academic courses in sales.\u00a0 Just four of those universities are in Canada.\u00a0 The Sales Education Foundation is affiliated with Dayton University and is dedicated to elevating the sales profession through university education.\u00a0 Their annual magazine with the full list of university sales programs can be found at www.salesfoundation.org\/news\/sefannual\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all love our comfort zones.\u00a0 Comfort zones are all about the familiar, the friendly, and the predictable.\u00a0 The problem is, not much learning happens there.\u00a0 At least not the type of learning that lasts for the long term.\u00a0 That type of learning happens when we are outside of our comfort zones and are experiencing … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":227,"featured_media":1672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,21,13,12,23,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements","category-competitions","category-events","category-international","category-student-engagement","category-women-in-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1670"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1694,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions\/1694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/business\/files\/2021\/04\/Capture-292x300.jpg\")
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