UCM Sales Team members Tara Hansen and Ashlee Eastman took home a combined total of $11,500 at the 2017 State Farm Marketing and Sales Competition Oct. 20 at UCM. Tyler Hirlinger, an assistant professor of marketing at UCM, coaches the sales teams. He said the team competed in a customer service role play, a sales role play and a marketing presentation.
“They (State Farm) did an incredible job actually sponsoring the events, and each competitor, if chosen, gets $1,000 for competing,” Hirlinger said. “So you get a thousand bucks just for competing – it doesn’t matter if you win or you get last place, you’re leaving there with a thousand bucks.”
Hirlinger said the team, which consisted of Hansen and Eastman, trains for the role plays as though they are preparing to be employees at State Farm. He said State Farm gave competitors a selling situation for the role play two days before the competition.
“So they have the situation and they have to adapt the sales presentation to whatever the situation is,” Hirlinger said. “Essentially, you have this client. They have a problem. How do you fix that problem? How do you go about that?”
For the marketing presentation portion, the team received a prompt from State Farm about a month before the competition.
‘it’s always just some sort of prompt that is geared towards millennials, typically,” Hirlinger said. “in the past, it’s ‘How do you retain millennial customers? How do you keep them with State Farm?’”
He said this year the prompt was to rethink the State Farm office using disruptive innovation.
“So they want us to think about how we can get away from the traditional State Farm office,” Hirlinger said. “On top of the role plays, we’re also training and building an entire marketing campaign built around that one idea, which given in a month is not always easy to do. It was a lot of hard work that the competitors put in.”
Hansen, a junior marketing major, received the platinum first place award in customer service role play, earning her $3,000. She also received $1,500 for receiving the gold second place award in the sales role-play competition and another $1,000 for competing, according to a news release.
“The competition as a whole was really rewarding,” Hansen said. “I really enjoyed it.”
Hansen said it was stressful because she had to learn about an industry she knew nothing about.
“I hadn’t taken a sales class until this point, so I all of a sudden am in a sales competition about content that I don’t know,” Hansen said. “But my teammate and my coach are just really good about growing that knowledge base and so it really helped me not only grow in interest and in sales but really as a person.”
Eastman, a senior marketing major, finished fourth in the customer service role play and the sales role play. Hansen and Eastman also won the team marketing competition, racking up $5,000 for the two to split.
Eastman said the competition was a challenging but excellent way to gain real-world experience.
“I certainly learned a lot about sales, planning proposals, researching and insurance,” Eastman said. “My largest take away would be the relationships I was able to form between my partner, the professors, and the lovely people from State Farm.”
Hansen said the competition made her realize it’s possible for her to go into the insurance field, even though her goal is to be a community relations director for a professional sports team.
“It made me really realize that you are going to sell in everything you do… and I’m going to have to market myself anyway. Just having that experience on my resume – it definitely stands out,” Hansen said.
Hirlinger said another sales team is in the process of being created for the 2018 National Collegiate Sales Competition taking place in April of 2018. He said the NCSC is like the Superbowl of sales competitions and the two competitors will be selected by the end of the semester.