Using Sales Competition Videos in a Principles of Marketing Class to Improve Interest in a Sales Career

Purpose of the Study: This study describes an easily conducted teaching innovation to enhance introductory marketing students’ perception of sales and selling. Sales jobs are plentiful; yet, many marketing students do not pursue sales courses or sales careers. Our purpose is to describe a classroom intervention that improves students’ intent to pursue a sales career. Method/Design and Sample: This study tests the classroom inclusion of an actual student sales competition video from the National Collegiate Sales Competition (NCSC) to provide visual as well as verbal learning stimuli. Following a 45 minute lecture on sales, students were exposed to the 20-minute final round winning NCSC video. During the video, the instructor stopped the video 12 times to relate specific aspects of the video role-play to the lecture. Students completed a pre- and post-intervention survey of the Intent to Pursue Sales Career Scale (ITPSC). Results: Results show that the educational intervention positively impacted students’ perceptions of a sales career, salespeople, salesperson ethics, sales knowledge, and intent to pursue a sales career. The largest student perception increases were within the sales knowledge dimension. Value to Marketing Educators: Graduates with degrees in marketing, business, and other areas often begin their careers in entry level sales positions. Sales skills are transferable and have utility in marketing and other careers. Instructional innovations designed to enhance student interest in a selling career, and that also advance sales training, have tremendous value. The use of an exemplar video from a sales competition is an easy way to accomplish these goals

Evaluating Educational Practices for Positively Affecting Student Perceptions of a Sales Career

Despite demand for new graduates seeking a sales position, student reticence toward pursuing a sales career remains. While all students will not choose a sales career, diminishing the existence of sales-related misconceptions among the student population should establish sales as a viable career path for a larger number of students. We test six educational interventions in large Principle of Marketing classes from three different universities (n = 1,355) to help identify educational practices for reducing student reticence toward a career in sales. Our results show that while all six educational approaches raise students’ perceptions and interest in a selling career, the utilization of experienced salespeople to present classroom materials and to discuss their sales career was the most effective. Classroom lecture and role-plays by university sales students had the second highest intent to pursue intervention scores. We offer recommendations for how to best present sales material to these large, lecture-based courses

A Parsimonious Instrument for Predicting Students’ Intent to Pursue a Sales Career: Scale Development and Validation

Students’ desire and intention to pursue a career in sales continue to lag behind industry demand for sales professionals. This article develops and validates a reliable and parsimonious scale for measuring and predicting student intention to pursue a selling career. The instrument advances previous scales in three ways. The instrument is generalizable across academic settings and is shown to be sensitive to differences across varied course coverage and learning activities. The instrument is parsimonious and offers a high reliability coefficient. Finally, the instrument is validated both before and after exposure to a sales module, thus capturing perceptual and attitudinal changes as students become more familiar with this career option

A Critical Review of the Literature for Sales Educators

The Journal of Marketing Education is publishing a special issue on Sales Education and Training in August 2014. In this article, we review the sales education literature from four primary journals and the business literature at large. The four primary journals are the Journal of Marketing Education, Marketing Education Review, Journal of Education in Business, and the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Of the 107 identified articles, experiential learning, assessment, and career development were the three most prominent topics. Future research opportunities in sales education, including those for the special issue, are offered across nine topical areas

Dispelling the myths of online education: learning via the information superhighway

There continues to be a perception that online education is inferior to traditional education. In the U.S. online learning is more developed than in the U.K. This paper provides insights into a U.S. provision and takes a close look at what are perceived as weaknesses of on line learning and argues that these are not necessarily inherent weaknesses of this form of educational delivery. Then, results of two major studies, undertaken in the U.S. are provided comparing the effectiveness of online education to traditional education as perceived by current MBA students and past graduates. Results of these studies suggest that students of MBA modules and MBA graduates perceive the quality and effectiveness of online education to be similar to, if not higher than, the quality and effectiveness of traditional modules and programmes

The reflective learning continuum: reflecting on reflection

The importance of reflection to marketing educators is increasingly recognized. However, there is a lack of empirical research which considers reflection within the context of both the marketing and general business education literature. This paper describes the use of an instrument which can be used to measure four identified levels of a reflection hierarchy: habitual action, understanding, reflection and intensive reflection and two conditions for reflection: instructor to student interaction and student to student interaction. Further we demonstrate the importance of reflective learning in predicting graduates’ perception of program quality. Although the focus was on assessment of MBA level curricula, the findings have great importance to marketing education and educators

Direct tactile stimulation of dorsal occipito-temporal cortex in a visual agnosic

The human occipito-temporal cortex is preferentially activated by images of objects as opposed to scrambled images [1]. Touching objects (versus textures) also activates this region [2–10]. We used neuropsychological fMRI to probe whether dorsal regions of the lateral occipital cortex (LO) are activated in tactile recognition without mediation through visual recognition. We tested a patient (HJA) with visual agnosia due to bilateral lesions of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex but spared dorsal LO. HJA's recognition of visual objects was impaired [11, 12]. Nevertheless, his tactile recognition was preserved. We measured brain activity while participants viewed and touched objects and textures. There was overlapping activity in regions including LO and cerebellum for both stimuli for control participants, including new regions not before considered bimodal. For HJA, there were overlapping regions in the intact dorsal LO. Within a subset of the regions found in control participants, HJA showed activity only for tactile objects, suggesting that these regions are specifically involved in successful multimodal recognition. Activation of dorsal LO by tactile input is not secondary to visual recognition but can operate directly through tactile input

Haemolysis during Sample Preparation Alters microRNA Content of Plasma

The presence of cell-free microRNAs (miRNAs) has been detected in a range of body fluids. The miRNA content of plasma/serum in particular has been proposed as a potential source of novel biomarkers for a number of diseases. Nevertheless, the quantification of miRNAs from plasma or serum is made difficult due to inefficient isolation and lack of consensus regarding the optimal reference miRNA. The effect of haemolysis on the quantification and normalisation of miRNAs in plasma has not been investigated in great detail. We found that levels of miR-16, a commonly used reference gene, showed little variation when measured in plasma samples from healthy volunteers or patients with malignant mesothelioma or coronary artery disease. Including samples with evidence of haemolysis led to variation in miR-16 levels and consequently decreased its ability to serve as a reference. The levels of miR-16 and miR-451, both present in significant levels in red blood cells, were proportional to the degree of haemolysis. Measurements of the level of these miRNAs in whole blood, plasma, red blood cells and peripheral blood mononuclear cells revealed that the miRNA content of red blood cells represents the major source of variation in miR-16 and miR-451 levels measured in plasma. Adding lysed red blood cells to non-haemolysed plasma allowed a cut-off level of free haemoglobin to be determined, below which miR-16 and miR-451 levels displayed little variation between individuals. In conclusion, increases in plasma miR-16 and miR-451 are caused by haemolysis. In the absence of haemolysis the levels of both miR-16 and miR-451 are sufficiently constant to serve as normalisers

Epididymis Response Partly Compensates for Spermatozoa Oxidative Defects in snGPx4 and GPx5 Double Mutant Mice

We report here that spermatozoa of mice lacking both the sperm nucleaus glutathione peroxidase 4 (snGPx4) and the epididymal glutathione peroxidase 5 (GPx5) activities display sperm nucleus structural abnormalities including delayed and defective nuclear compaction, nuclear instability and DNA damage. We show that to counteract the GPx activity losses, the epididymis of the double KO animals mounted an antioxydant response resulting in a strong increase in the global H2O2-scavenger activity especially in the cauda epididymis. Quantitative RT-PCR data show that together with the up-regulation of epididymal scavengers (of the thioredoxin/peroxiredoxin system as well as glutathione-S-transferases) the epididymis of double mutant animals increased the expression of several disulfide isomerases in an attempt to recover normal disulfide-bridging activity. Despite these compensatory mechanisms cauda-stored spermatozoa of double mutant animals show high levels of DNA oxidation, increased fragmentation and greater susceptibility to nuclear decondensation. Nevertheless, the enzymatic epididymal salvage response is sufficient to maintain full fertility of double KO males whatever their age, crossed with young WT female mice