My Duck Selling Experience

Today in class, Professor Sweet gave us the opportunity to put our newly-learned sales knowledge to the test and go out to get real sales experience. Two of the Greek groups on campus, the Okies and the ABTs, are currently throwing their annual Duck Derby, where people purchase a toy duck to compete in a race down the creek. When we got into class today, we were greeted by a basket of these ducks and an announcement that we would be spending the class period trying to sell as many as we could in teams.

One of the things that stuck out to me the most from this experience was the importance of a string network and connections in sales, especially when first starting out like we were in this assignment. A vast majority of our sales were to different people we knew around campus, whether it was someone in one of our sororities, a friend, someone we worked with, or a professor. Additionally, we ran into a girl who remembered this assignment from when she had taken the class who was very eager to help us. The one thing I noticed about selling to people we had connections with was that we had to be very careful to walk the line between selling well and pressuring them to make a purchase. While this is something you run into in every sales situation, it was increasingly more important in this situation as we did not want to take advantage of our friends.

Additionally, I noticed the importance of strategically positioning the way you are selling to the people you are talking with. Our last couple of sales all came from some of the new Okies, who realistically should not have much motivation to purchase something for their own event. However, as I was talking to them, I mentioned that now was the only chance that not only could they help out their own fraternity by purchasing a duck, but also the girlfriend of one of their fellow Okies. While this is obviously a smaller scale of what strategic positioning is, the importance of it really stuck out to me after we sealed those sales.