Bayou Sales Challenge 2011

A team of senior marketing majors from the professional sales program walked away with all the honors at the 9th Annual Bayou Sales Challenge, a regional sales competition held at Nicholl’s State University Thursday October 20 and Friday October 21.

UL marketing major Hannah Darby took the top prize in the individual competition, followed closely by her teammate Carly Littell.  UL Lafayette placed first in the team competition, which is awarded to the team with the highest overall average performance in the competition.  This is the second time in the past three years that UL’s team took all the top honors in the event.

For her winning performance, Darby received a scholarship from Mr. Steven Dugal, Managing Partner with Northwestern Mutual Financial Network.  Mr. Dugal also provided a matching contribution to the winning student’s department at UL.  Additionally, Darby received a Toshiba laptop complements of Republic Finance.

UL’s team included Lauren Dooley (Loreauville), Hannah Darby (Lafayette), Carly Littell (Lafayette), Shea Blanchette (Mandeville), and Jordan Johnson (Lacombe).  The team was coached by UL Assistant Professor of Marketing Dr. Duleep Delpechitre.

The event is sponsored and judged by executives and sales teams from regional and national sponsoring businesses who view the event as an opportunity to recruit some of the top sales students in the state.  Sponsoring companies for this year’s event included State Farm Insurance, Republic Finance, Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, Edward Jones, UniFirst and Capital One Bank.

A total of 5 teams and 21 competitors representing UL Lafayette, Xavier University, Nicholl’s State University, Southern University, and Louisiana State University participated in the event.  The competition consisted of individual sales presentation role plays with the students representing Broadlook Technologies, a company that provides an innovative software system that allows users to leverage the internet when performing the necessary due diligence before performing a sales call.  Students were given a different prospective client profile with varying problems for each of the three rounds of competition.  Students are allowed 20 minutes in the first round and 15 minutes in the semi-final and final rounds to identify the customer’s needs, make a sales presentation, handle objections and close the sale.  Ten students advanced to the semi-final round.  The remaining students competed in a 10-minute Pressure Round.  UL students Dooley, Darby, Littell and Johnson all advanced to the semi-final round to compete for one of the two top slots.  Blanchette competed against the remaining 10 students and took first place in the Pressure Round.

The team gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the staff at Broadlook Technologies for the training they provided the students in using their software and for the complementary subscription of the software for use in the competition.