Ducky Derby Sales

Sweet’s Plan

We walked into class this semester and were surprised when Professor Sweet told us that we were going to be doing real-life sales. The class made groups of 3-4 and were tasked with selling Ducky Derby tickets, an event run by the ABT’s and Okies. This event raised a ton of money this year and a lot is due to the sales in our class. Below, I will list some reasons why I think it worked.

All about the numbers

Sales is sometimes a numbers issue. If your ratio of closing a deal is 1 in 10…the quicker you ask 10 people, the quicker you will have closed in on a deal.  I know our group asked over 50 people if I had to guess, which was a lot in 40 minutes. With all the groups in our class, i bet we asked close to 40o people. This goes to show that having a bigger sales team can be an advantage.

What they were supporting

I think a major factor in why so many sales were closed was because of the organization this event was donating to. Ducky Derby was supporting one of the American Cancer Society’s organizations. A lot of the people we talked to asked if there was a deeper goal of the event, and when we told them about it, a lot of people jumped on board. This shows the emotional factor in a sales conversation. If you can implement a charity or donation aspect into your service, you might get more yeses out of it.

Overall, the idea to have our whole class act as salespeople was a huge success for the event. More money was raised than in the previous years due to the sheer volume of people who were informed about this event face-to-face. I think that doing this every year will benefit both the event and the students who got first-hand experience.