Each year, sales executives from Fortune 500 companies descend on the Kennesaw State University campus looking to hire the next generation of sales leaders during the National Collegiate Sales Competition (NCSC). The competition, hosted by the Center for Professional Selling at the Michael J. Coles College of Business, is the oldest and most renowned sales competition in the world.
This year, more than 500 students from 68 universities including schools from Europe and Canada will participate in the live tournament style role-play sales call competition and exclusive career fair on April 1-4. The Coles College of Business NCSC Sales Team promises to be competitive, having consistently placed students in the top three, with the overall first place individual winner in 2014.
The National Collegiate Sales Competition is the Center for Professional Selling’s premiere event. Terry Loe, director and professor of Marketing, founded the NCSC in 1999 to advance the practice and professionalism of sales and sales management.
The Coles College Center for Professional Selling focuses on preparing undergraduate students to excel in sales roles, business development and sales management. It connects students with industry leaders through the Corporate Partner program that make experiential learning opportunities possible for students to apply the methodologies and research they have learned in the classroom.
“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,” said Loe. “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.”
The Center for Professional Selling has been integral in this growth across the U.S. and makes a substantial contribution to the Sales Profession and its advancement through annually hosting the NCSC.
With nearly 50 percent of business graduates beginning their careers in sales, and an estimated 980,000 sales and sales related jobs available in the U.S., professional sales is a valuable and growing segment of business education. The NCSC serves as a way for students to gain hands on training selling an actual product, like ADP, to a client.
Students compete through several elimination rounds of 20-minute mock sales calls, with the championship round being broadcast to an audience of students, faculty and corporate sponsors. A panel of leading faculty and corporate executives judge each round in real-time providing students detailed scores and written feedback to improve their skill set.
As corporate sponsors of the NCSC, company representatives act as judges and buyers with the opportunity to network with students from the best sales programs in the world during the exclusive two-day career fair held in the KSU Convocation Center. 2016 sponsors include, ADP, HPE, Bausch + Lomb, Comcast, Waste Management and many more.
“With a 50 percent faster ramp up time and 30 percent lower turnover rate, students participating in the NCSC will experience better than a 90 percent job placement rate and, on average, will receive more than 3 job offers before they graduate,” said Loe.
For more information on the NCSC, or how to become involved, visit
www.ncsc-ksu.org.
