Many recent studies suggest that undergraduate education needs to be more effective. Accordingly, individuals involved in higher education continue to search for ways to improve student learning. This article describes a team-based experiential learning project that integrates three marketing courses: principles of marketing, principles of selling, and sales management. Working in teams, students in the principles of marketing course develop new product concepts and create corresponding marketing promotional materials for use in a mock trade show. Students from the personal selling and sales management courses, also working in teams, attend the trade show to identify and select products they wish to use to complete a sales call exercise. This project provides students an opportunity to work in teams and combine their efforts with teams from other courses to successfully complete their respective experiential exercises. The article includes students' reactions to the project and steps for implementation. Inanefforttoascertainthemosteffectivemethodsforlearn-ing, universities across the country are experimenting with a variety of innovative techniques. While scholars may differ in their opinions of which methods are most effective, most agree that the traditional lecture format is not the most effective method for today's classroom. In an article that focuses on the shift from teaching to learning, Guskin (1994) suggests that "the primary learning environment for undergraduate students, the fairly passive lecture-discussion format where faculty talk and most students listen, is contrary to almost every principle of optimal settings for student learning" (p. 20). While it is noted that lectures have a place in the learning environment, it is clear that lectures alone are not the most effective pedagogy for universities. The importance of using cooperative experiential learning projects has received a significant amount of attention in the marketing education literature (Dommeyer 1986;Graeff 1997;Titus and Petroshius 1993;Williams, Beard, and Rymer 1991). There are many opportunities in the marketing curriculum to develop term projects that can provide practical experience for students. These projects range from designing promotional campaigns for existing companies to designing and implementing marketing research studies.The purpose of this article is to describe an experiential learning project that has been used successfully to integrate the efforts of three marketing undergraduate courses and to present student reactions to its implementation. Students in principles of marketing classes develop a new business-tobusiness product (good or service) and develop a marketing strategy to fit the product. Their communication plans include the design of a trade show booth that is exhibited in a mock trade show. Students from sales management courses and personal selling courses choose products from the trade show to use in their semester selling projects.
More universities are incorporating sales content into their curriculums, and although the introductory courses in professional sales have much common ground and guidance from numerous professional selling texts, instructors teaching the advanced selling course lack the guidance provided by common academic tools and materials. The resulting potential variance in content and pedagogy in advanced selling courses makes comparing programs or assessing the relative preparedness of students coming from different universities challenging for recruiters, faculty, and students. A review of the syllabi of the instructors currently teaching the advanced selling course reveals common themes, content, and pedagogy that are helpful to instructors desiring to develop an advanced selling course or those currently teaching the course. A review of the common content of the advanced selling course and an argument for the need of the advanced selling course are provided, along with suggestions for developing the course with examples of various projects and pedagogy. Keywords learning approaches and issues, marketing education issues, classroom management, education administration issues, skills and traits development in marketing education, course content, sales management and sales, undergraduate education, level and type of education, teamwork projects and issues, innovative teaching methods, client-based projects, experiential learning techniques
The latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics reports of the nearly 1.9 million bachelor's degrees conferred in 2014-2015, 363,799 (19.2%) were in business. By a large margin, business was the most popular field of study and has been since the 1980s. The next most popular field of study (as measured by degrees conferred) in 2014-2015 was health professions and related programs (216,228, 11.4%). While these numbers look impressive, it has been difficult for America's companies to find an adequate number of qualified sales professionals. One explanation is that the reference "business degree" includes a host of nonsales-related content areas, including accounting, business administration, entrepreneurship, finance, human resource management, international business, logistics, and management. While "business" is the most popular degree area, students majoring in these nonsales areas may have little interest in pursuing sales and are unlikely to have taken any sales-specific coursework. This assertion is consistent with a study by Weber (2015) that found college students have misperceptions of sales and, as a result, have little interest in pursuing it as a career. Even if they were interested in a sales position, many (if not most) business majors do not have the salesspecific preparation necessary for immediate success in professional sales roles (i.e., business-to-business and nonretail business to consumer sales positions). However, it is worth noting that the number of universities that teach professional selling in the United States has gone from under 20 in 1990 to over 150 in 2014 (Peltier et al., 2014). Even with this increase, the shortage of qualified sales professionals persists. Several studies have examined college students' attitudes toward professional sales (
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