Junior Preview Day

This last Saturday, I volunteered for two hours at Junior preview day, working at the Entrepreneurship table. Our job was simple: go up to prospective students and ask them one question – “chocolate or vanilla?” See we had many chocolate and vanilla cake pops with Entrepreneurship branding that we wanted to hand out to the students to start a conversation and get the department out there, since many people coming to preview days like this don’t even realize that we have a program for Entrepreneurship. So I spent two hours going up to people and trying to sell both the school and the Entrepreneurship department to them, and I gained so much over these two hours.

This is a perfect example of viewing selling, not as an attempt to get more sales or a higher count, but rather as a process of determining if what we’re selling is a good fit for the person we are trying to sell to. Most of the conversations that I had with the students ended with me saying something like “I’m hope that you find the college and major that is the right fit for you.” I felt like this was important because we don’t just want to get students here at Grove City, we want to get the RIGHT students who God has called to be here.

Along with the right fit thing, there would be times where students would tell me “well I know for sure that I want to go into the medical field” or “I love math and science, so I’m thinking something stem.” If this is what they said, I wouldn’t take time to try and sell them on the Entrepreneurship department, because they already know what God wants them to do and area of study they feel called to. At that point, I would just try to sell them on the school, answer any questions that I could for them, and then move on. But if they answered my questions with comments about business or a lot of different passions and interest, then I would start talking about the Entrepreneurship department, and some of those conversations were very fruitful.

Overall this was a great experience to gain confidence in talking to people and great practice to try different selling techniques that we’ve talked about in this class. I’m really glad we get experiences like this while at school here!