By Delaney Newhouse | Focus Editor
As packs of students mill about campus in well-worn hoodies and flannel pajama pants, bracing from the winter chill, a corner on the second floor of the business school is dressed to the nines.
Professional selling, or ProSales, students sit in clusters in a holding room, dressed in crisply starched shirts and ironed suit jackets. They check and compare the papers they’ve enclosed in leather portfolio folders, maintaining a low buzz of anticipation.
In groups of six, they are called to line up in the hall. Soon after, they separate, each entering a small cubicle. There, they’ll sell a product while a camera records their every move, ready to send a video to hundreds of judges.
The Baylor Business Selling Outside competition is one of five in-school competitions ProSales majors take part in each year. This year, 136 ProSales majors role-played a scenario in which they represented a technology firm attempting to provide a software product to a beleaguered HR department.
In actuality, the students were speaking to representatives from Baylor’s partner companies who themselves, in reality, had sold these same products. Andrea Dixon, executive director for the Center for Professional Selling, helped coordinate students and manage the event.
“It’s a unique situation where you’re selling it to people who really understand it, whereas normally you’re selling to a customer who doesn’t understand it,” Dixon said.
Dixon reminded her students to smile as they entered the small booths where their sessions took place. She encourages ProSales majors to participate in the competition every year in order to practice the sort of daunting conversations they will have in their chosen field.
“The hardest thing is learning to be comfortable and confident in your knowledge so that you then engage in a way that’s very warm and real,” Dixon said. “Your prospect in a business meeting is going to be more comfortable if you’re comfortable.”
Ronkonkoma, N.Y., senior Anthony Amesti has been competing since he was a sophomore.
“The meat and potatoes of what you’re talking about is questions to find out kind of where things are going wrong, and you bridge that gap by knowing about the products,” Amesti said. “And so you show them a demo or show them with visuals the gap that you bridged.”
Amesti currently works for Plano cybersecurity firm, Trellix, and also is in the process of preparing for All-University Sing, packing his daily schedule.
“There’s good busy, and there’s bad busy,” Amesti said. “The perks that this program has — the community, the professionalism, the job opportunities — I wouldn’t trade that.”
Amesti and Dixon both emphasize the role of background research and understanding a product in order to better sell it. Dixon said she believes that this understanding is the ProSales majors’ greatest weapon as they enter into the Selling Outside competition.
“They’re knowledgeable enough about the product that they don’t get lost in the details,” Dixon said.
Still, she says the importance of continual learning, despite any expertise a seller may already have, cannot be overstated. It is the attitude and cycle of learning, both within the program and in the greater world, that allows ProSales students to make connections and grow.
“The value of a good salesperson and…the value of a good researcher is to suspend this confidence and knowledge and say, ‘I’m here to learn,’” Dixon said. “I’m going to learn and engage differently when I go in with that attitude.”
Within the ProSales program at Baylor, the idea of constant growth and learning has allowed for an intense culture of collaboration and peer-mentorship which Dixon calls a “coaching mindset.”
“Our students have developed a strong coaching model and mindset,” she said. “And so by the time they’re a senior, their whole mindset is, ‘How can I help the people behind me like somebody helped me?’”
Amesti reflected on this mindset, saying that a number of students had reached out to him for help in creating their sales pitches and even in their coursework.
“I was in their shoes before,” he said. “Why would I not help someone out? And hopefully, they pay that forward as well.”
