The Center for Professional Selling at the Kennesaw State University – Michael J. Coles College of Business recently hosted the National Collegiate Sales Competition (NCSC), the world’s oldest and highly regarded sales competition.
The event, which took place in early April, invited over 500 students from 68 universities around the world. The three day competition will feature a career fair and live tournament style role-play sales call competition. The event aims to prepare students for roles in sales, management and business development. In addition to the competition, students will have the opportunity to connect with industry leaders through the Coles Corporate Partner program.
The NCSC will give students the opportunity for hands-on experience in selling products to a client. The competition will begin with students participating in elimination rounds consisting of 20-minute mock sales calls, with the final round open to a panel of faculty and corporate leaderships who can give students feedback in real-time.
Terry Loe, director and professor of Marketing, founded the NCSC in 1999 to improve the practice of sales and sales management.
“Other professions like law, medicine, accounting and engineering began as vocations similar to sales and only when they began offering programs in higher education and professional schools did they gain the credibility they have today,” Loe said. “The sales profession has come a long way in building its credibility through the offering of programs and degrees in colleges and universities in the past 30 years.”
Today, almost 50% of all business graduates begin their careers in sales and given the estimated 980,000 sales and sales related jobs currently available in the U.S., it should be no surprise that sales is claiming an increasingly important role in business education.
According to Loe, students who participate in NCSC have greater than a 90% job placement rate on average, and will receive more than 3 job offers before graduation.