FAMU Students Win National Team Selling Competition

Florida A&M University’s (FAMU) School of Business and Industry (SBI) won the National Team Selling Competition hosted by the Center for Global Sales Leadership at Indiana University.

The competition attracts top teams of undergraduate sales students from America's leading universities who wish to pursue high-level, complex sales in an opportunity to practice team-selling simulations. Altria Sales & Distribution employees created the case, role-play the position of buyers and senior management, and also serve as judges.

Some of the universities that participated in the competition included Indiana University, Michigan State University, University of Kansas, University of Florida, Penn State, Ball State University and Syracuse University.

“Everyone was good, but our young people were great,” said Roscoe Hightower, Jr., Ph.D., team coach, lead adviser and a SBI associate professor. “We look forward to continuing to recruit, train and graduate the best professional selling student leaders in the U.S. Under the current leadership of Dean Friday-Stroud, we are continuously in search of excellence.”

According to Hightower, this year’s case was provided to the teams one week prior to the competition. The case included, but was not limited to, convenience store and candy industries focusing on all aspects of general business with specific emphasis on in-store visibility, inventory and pricing. The case challenged the students to really understand and apply what they knew about the basic convenience store business to the concept of team selling.

FAMU’s team consisted of Nicole Crowell, a fourth-year business administration student from California; Keisha Faulkner, a fourth-year business administration student from New Jersey; Jamil Codner, a third-year business administration student from Florida; and Darriel Brown, a fourth-year business administration student from Florida.

“The preparation made the competition seem easier upon completion,” said Crowell, the team captain. “Competing against the best professional selling schools and dominating them made us appreciate the education that we are receiving at FAMU even more.”

Through the program, the students received job offers from Altria Sales & Distribution and at least one will take a position with the firm in 2011. The others are currently in the interviewing process.

Brown, a returning team member from the 2009 second place team, said, “We were on a mission. We were being tested in a number of ways, especially from a conviction or belief in our training, coaching and ourselves. We showed them the outcome when a student has the wherewithal to believe in their training.”