University of Akron Sales Major Brittany Nagy wins 2nd place in World Collegiate Sales Open

Dr. Frederik Beuk, Matt Young, Joey Hohler, Brittany Nagy.

On February 22-23, the University of Akron's sales team did it again! Brittany Nagy won the 2nd prize, including $1500 in prize money, in the 2013 World Collegiate Sales Open. Joey Hohler, who also qualified for a position in the finals, secured the 8th place overall in the competition.

The continued strong position of the University of Akron in this competition is first of all an absolute testament to the high quality of our students, especially of those who make the effort to engage in extracurricular activities.

But secondly, it is also a sign of the great team work that takes place at the Fisher Institute for Professional Selling. Although the team was coached for this competition by Dr. Frederik Beuk, both Brittany Nagy and Joey Hohler successfully completed Dr. Linda Orr's advanced professional selling class, which gave them a very strong basis to start the competition with. In addition, as Brittany Nagy is also competing in a national sales competition next week, Dr. Chris Plouffe also coached her very intensively for that, which helped a lot in her performance at the WCSO. Finally, Matt Young deserves credits for volunteering his time as a student coach. Matt was a participant of last year's WCSO competition and helped coach the students throughout the qualifying rounds.

The WCSO is an annual international competition where students from English speaking universities compete to determine which student is the best sales student. This year schools from Canada, the UK and the US qualified for spots in the final. Out of all the schools, only 4 managed to qualify to compete 2 years in a row, which included the University for Akron.

In fact, last year, the University of Akron won first prize. Most universities use qualifying rounds to reduce the number of students who can compete, as each school is only allowed a maximum of 10 students to compete for a spot in the finals. This year, the University of Akron had 12 students who wanted to compete, of which 9 ultimately did enter the competition.

Overall, after internal competitions, about 150 students from 27 schools worldwide started in the first round in which they had to leave cold call voice messages to a prospective customer. In the following rounds the students had to go through sales challenges that increased in difficulty, such as convincing an unwilling secretary to schedule a meeting with her boss, and ultimately, demonstrating and selling a product through a video conference.

Full list of participating universities

(* marks non-US based institution, bold means institution qualified at least 1 student for the finals)

1. University of Akron
2. *University of Applied Sciences- Wiener Neustadt
3. University of Arkansas-Little Rock
4. Aurora University
5. Ball State University
6. Baylor University
7. Bryant University
8. Central Michigan
9. *Conestoga
10. *Dublin Institute of Technology
11. Elon University
12. Georgia Southern University
13. Indiana University
14. Kansas State University
15. The College of New jersey
16. *Niagara College Canada
17. Northern Illinois University
18. University of Portsmouth
19. Purdue University
20. Salisbury University
21. *University of Strathclyde- Glasgow
22. *SP Jain School of Global Management-Singapore
23. University of Texas-Dallas
24. Trinity Western University
25. West Virginia University
26. University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire
27. University of Wisconsin- Whitewater