Professional Selling student earns spot in “Top 1%” in international sales role-play competition.

Robert Britton

The Department of Marketing's Professional Sales class continued its streak of developing award-winning students. Robert Britton, a marketing major in Professor Cynthia Tomasch's class earned a spot in the “Top 1%” of over 2,100 students who participated in an international sales role-play competition that utilized artificial intelligence this past fall semester.

Professor Tomasch's online Professional Selling class participated in the competition as a way to develop their skills in conducting sales meetings. Students were able to access the role-play platform, developed by the company RNMKRS, through a mobile app to review video training to introduce students to some of the important sales concepts and practice those concepts prior to the competition. After each practice round, students received scores to inform them of opportunities to improve. On November 17 and 18, students completed one competition role-play.

Professor Tomasch attributes Robert's success to his effort, as he practiced the role-play 80 times before the final competition. Because the RNMKRS Role Play app can be accessed 24/7, Robert was able to practice whenever he could make the time!

Robbie confirmed that his many practice sessions were an important reason he was successful in the competition portion, “I did a lot of practice. I was able to refine my approach to speaking with the bot so efficiently, by simple trial-and-error, and then making a note of what changed when everything else was constant.” Robbie's approach to practicing this way produced a blueprint for the practice sales meeting that gave him either a perfect or a near-perfect score on every attribute of the scoring algorithm.

When asked how this experience will help in his future career, Robbie quickly pointed out that he learned the importance of not giving up – a key attribute in a successful sales career, “The RNMKRS bot is nowhere close to perfect, and it will  frustrate you and make you want to quit at times. The most important lesson from this experience is knowing that perseverance is more important than anything else in life; someone may not be the most skilled, but if they refuse to quit and soldier on, they will always end up on top of those who stop short of the finish line.”

Professor Tomasch's students in the spring semester of Professional Selling will also be competing in the RNMKRS online sales competitions. We are expecting another round of award-winning sales students.

To learn more about the competition and the role-play platform, visit https://www.rnmkrs.org/college-competition.