Jeans were gone, replaced by dark suits.
Slouching was corrected, replaced with squared shoulders.
Casual attitudes were gone, replaced by resolute faces and some well-placed nervousness.
Welcome to Rookie Preview, a special day in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas. Students each semester put their best foot forward in what is the culmination of the Introduction to Professional Selling (MKT 3330) course. These upper-level students prepare for, then participate in, a rigorous mock sales presentation. For the 2023 session, just two weeks before the end of the semester, a lot was on the line…preparing prospective sales professionals for the business world in which the stakes can be high.
(Left to right: Semira Amirpour, Garrett Imler, Abhiram Chilukuri, Inshal Khawaja, Hebah Ahmad, David Cantu, Emily Gonzalez, Ariana Farokhnia, Bill Miller)
“Today we role play,” said Semiramis (Semira) Amirpour, a professor of instruction in the Jindal School’s Marketing Area and one of the professors for the course. As an award-winning marketing professor and member of national sales organizations, Amirpour understands what students need to be successful in professional careers. “Throughout the semester, we teach the sales process using a case we wrote with a corporate partner.”
Dr. Howard Dover, MS’08, PhD’08, a clinical professor in the Marketing Area and director of the Center for Professional Sales at the Jindal School, oversees this important event, the apex of this sales course. He knows how important this day is to his students and what a building block it is in their education.
“Some of these students have really given a lot,” Dover said the day of the competition. “But it’s rookie. It’s right at the beginning. We don’t expect them to know everything.”
This year’s Rookie Preview focused on the premise that the student participants would prepare to sell Salesforce, a customer relations management platform, to Lennox. Representatives from the latter company with UTD to create the academic simulation to teach students the sales process. The objective was to sell the technology to a company that needed the product but did not yet own it. Throughout the semester the students received instruction on knowledge needed to make a sale, such as training, security measures and comparison to competitors.
“It’s a pretty high skill level,” Dover said.
The day of the event students assembled in a holding room and were ushered to an assigned interview room at a specific time. Some chatter in low voices with a friend, while others head down, making a last-minute check of their laptops. Encouragement permeates the atmosphere. “Just remember to breathe,” a student volunteer coaches the students as they leave the registration area and head to their interview sessions. Another says “Good luck, you guys. You’re going to kill it.”
Students individually entered one of seven small offices where volunteers portraying a potential customer for the management software await them. Handshakes and greetings were exchanged, and the interviews, timed at 15 minutes, were underway.
The students tasked with selling Salesforce asked questions, mostly from a prepared list. They responded to the potential customers’ questions, while practicing active listening, appropriate body language, taking notes, addressing hurdles and hoping to get a faux contract signed—all within 15 minutes. Meanwhile, in another JSOM classroom, judges silently watched, scoring the students they have viewed on a screen through closed-circuit monitoring.
After the 15-minute presentation, the students’ relief was obvious. Then the professionals who portrayed the potential buyers gave each student immediate feedback on their individual presentations, emphasizing the positive, mentioning areas for improvement and offering encouragement.
It was a special day, a long tradition in the Jindal School. While the exercise terrifies some, others recognize the value of learning “soft skills” needed for a sales career. Many of the volunteers who serve as judges to score the students or as pose as potential clients, remember it as a standout learning experience.
“I bombed rookie preview,” said alum volunteer Zee Moosa, BS’17, laughing. Having studied marketing and business administration at the Jindal School, he is now employed as a strategic manager in Seattle and recognizes the strengths he built through the competition. His disappointing start resulted in a second-place finish in a similar competition later in his course work. What he learned in the process about interpreting nuances and building relationships has paid off for him in his career. “It taught me the relative soft skills that you need to go into sales, and it’s applicable in more than just a direct sales role.
“I am happy to come back and pay it forward,” Moosa said.
UT Dallas graduates, now well established in flourishing careers, often are eager to volunteer for the event.
“Fifty alums came back this year because they have fond memories of this event,” Dover said. “Many say it changed their lives.”
Among those who agree is Ryan Bond, BS’22, who works in sales for Gartner in North Texas. He volunteered to judge this year’s competition, particularly because he says the Rookie Preview exercise is how he found his career path.
“I had no interest in sales before,” he said, remembering his 2020 presentation. “I learned how to sell, how to be persistent. The Rookie Preview was a good experience.”
With seven sections of the course taught this past semester, 105 students were introduced to the sales process. Amirpour, who taught five sections of the intro course, knows students can benefit from the skills taught. Amirpour taught 4 out of 7 sections. About 190 students took the classes and 100 of them participated in Rookie Preview
“We have such a diverse student body, and some of them have never been taught some of the basics,” Amirpour said. “I spend all semester long working on their personal brand.”
The course certainly keeps up to date on current trends, such as establishing an appropriate “digital footprint” on electronic platforms, especially social media, Amirpour said. “We tell them to showcase yourself the way you want to be.”
In addition, the semester course drills into communication skills, appropriate dress and cultural intelligence. Those elements then become part of the mock sales presentations judged during Rookie Preview. The rubric included such attributes as professional introduction, building rapport, determining relevant facts, discovering the buyer’s needs, effective product demonstration, non-verbal communication, clear verbiage and exhibiting confidence.
During her college career, Sarah Gifford, a business administration senior, participated in Rookie Preview one previous semester and found the experience valuable. A full-time position awaits her this spring with Texas Instruments, and she thinks Rookie Preview was significant in launching her career.
“As an HR student, I get to see how it works on the other side of it,” she said. “I really wanted to be involved with it, too, because they have amazing sponsors.”
Preferred Partners for the 2023 competition were Adobe, Fortnite, Gartner, GTN, Lennox, Memory Blue and Ring Central. Eli Lily and Firemon supported the event as Basic Partners.
Rookie Preview students collaborating with professionals from those organizations and those organizations’ representatives making it clear they wanted to know more about those students has influenced how the event will evolve. Dover has plans to tweak the event going forward.
Dover is looking for more collaboration, and that idea is based on requests from corporate partners who often want to hire the very students they judged.
“We want the professionals to have immediate contact with our students,” Dover said of his plans. “We want to take the good parts of what we’re doing and adapt them.”
The new format will be presented over a few weeks and held within a classroom setting. Dover knows such experiences are important to UTD’s student experience.
“We’re helping these students discover sales today,” Dover said. “We are helping them to understand we need highly intelligent professionals in our field, just like in many other fields.”
