The overarching mission of university-led intercollegiate sales competitions is to enhance and improve the professionalism of the sales profession through the engagement and interaction of aspiring student sales professionals with other aspiring and current industry sales professionals, industry sales leaders, and academic sales experts. To accomplish this mission, university-led sales competitions use best-in-class judging criteria based upon the most advanced data-driven academic and industry sales research. Further, organizers of university-led sales competitions seek to model professional behavior and practices and encourage competition participants to model such practices during all interactions. While “best practice” can change over time, generally speaking, there is a poor approach, an adequate way, a better approach, and a BEST way to accomplish a goal (selling professionally).

University-led sales competitions provide valuable networking opportunities that lead to multiple and varied entry-level and future career and business opportunities. Additionally, university-led sales competitions provide networking opportunities between the university sales community and corporate sales community that lead to valuable partnerships for each. Finally, university-led sales competitions provide resources for university sales programs and the academic sales community. These resources are required to further the overarching mission of enhancing the practice of the sales profession. The recent influx of corporate-led sales competitions begs a USCA response or position regarding such activity. While beneficial to individual companies, competitions led by a corporation are in conflict in a substantial way with the university sales community mission.

• Corporate-led competitions that target the university sales community students and graduates do not assure an alignment of or focus on a best practices’ sales model. The professional and ethical practices that provide the foundation for university sales education may not be applied consistently by the organizations that sponsor the competition.
• Corporate-led competitions do not promote varied networking or career opportunities or the exchange of best practices among the sales university community students or educators.
• Corporate-led competitions dilute and obfuscate the efforts of the university sales community to promote professional and ethical practices and to secure resources to further the mission of the university sales community, individual university sales programs, and the USCA.
• Corporate-led competitions may include timelines that conflict more with students’ class schedules. For these reasons, we strongly encourage sales universities and educators to support university-led sales competitions that uphold the vetted standards of the USCA and the university sales community as a whole.