On March 28-29, two TCNJ Business juniors — Phil Nichilo (Interdisciplinary Business with Professional Selling Minor) and Kristen Speigel (Economics) — competed at the National Collegiate Sales Competition sponsored by Kennesaw University in Kennesaw Georgia. Contestants participated in role-playing exercises selling ADP human resources and payroll solutions to recruiters acting as buyers in the tech firm selling scenario. Phil and Kristen were among the 145 contestants representing 65 undergraduate schools. Each school selected the best two of their sales students to compete, with some schools having over 300 sales students to choose from. There are only 70 U.S. schools with sales programs of the more than 4000 US universities. TCNJ ranked 14th of the 65 schools competing, ahead of larger universities such as U. of Georgia, U. of Texas, Florida State, James Madison, U. of Arizona, Virginia Tech, William Patterson, Kansas State, Clemson, and Indiana. Kristen placed 13th overall, after placing first in her role-play room in the wild card, then placing first in her room in the quarter-final round moving on to the 16 contestants in the semifinal round. Phil came in 2nd place in his wild card room (ahead of Ohio University, Aurora University, and Widener University) in the wild and 85th overall. Phil and Kristen were selected to compete because Phil came in first place in the Pi Sigma Epsilon regional sales competition, while Kristen came in 2nd place.
The career fair provided an excellent opportunity to meet employers. Corporate sponsors included BD Medical equipment, H. Schein Dental Equipment, Netsuite (software), McAfee (software), TekSystems (staffing), ADP (payroll), Paycom (payroll), Victaulic (piping solutions), DHL, Precoa, EMC (data Storage), Allstate, Tom James (executive clothiers), Lennox, Michelin, Mohawk (carpets), Waste Management, Cox Media, Xerox, Reynolds and Reynolds (automotive software), and Sysco.
