Sloan Sales Competition (Originally posted on 11/1/08)

On October 18, two of my classmates and I participated in the final phase of the MIT Sloan International MBA Sales Competition.

This year the competition consisted of two phases. The first and screening phase was a 5-minute pitch on the phone to sell the private wealth management service of a bank to a wealthy family business owner in his succession planning. 3 top contestants from each school were qualified for the final phase at Sloan. The second and final phase included two rounds.

Round 1 was a one-on-one pitch to sell "American Express card service to a successful furniture store's founder and CEO who had been reluctant to adopt any card service". 15 minutes and no more. I wasn't quite happy with my own performance, but my judge, a Sloan alumnus who founded the Sales Club 4 years ago and currently works at Google, was very nice and gave me very insightful feedback.

Round 2 was a group pitch to sell "Basho Technologies' salesforce management software to Google". The team stayed up late the previous night to prepare for a deck and took the time to practice before the pitch. We played the roles of CEO, CTO and Sales Manager, while 3 judges played Google's CTO, CFO and Country Head of Sales. We got lots of questions from the judges including several which we didn't anticipate. But to our great joy, we did quite well and the group pitch was ranked No. 2 out of the 11 participating schools.

In the end, a 2nd year from Berkeley/Haas stood out of about 70 contestants from 11 business schools and won the championship (including a $3,000 cash prize). I'm quite happy with my performance, as my total score was ranked No. 5.

It was another great learning experience, and it was a lot of fun to meet students from other schools. Many thanks to the student organizers at Sloan. They did a fantastic job!