The Marketing & Business Development major provides Citadel Cadets the opportunity to learn and hone skills necessary to be a relationship marketer. Central to this is our new Class of 1980 Ethics in Sales Leadership Lab. This space consists of a brand-new classroom along with four breakout spaces for role play practice. All of the rooms are connected via a state-of-the-art recording system from Interact Solution. Students use the breakout rooms to practice sales encounters or interviews while being recorded or live-streamed to the classroom. Instructors can provide real-time critique to students in the classroom while the students being watched can review those comments immediately after the encounter is completed via their personalized folder in the local server. This lab, and its integrated technology, will help students develop listening and creative problem-solving skills that will help them become a more confident leaders in sales when they graduate.
Student majoring in Marketing & Business Development use the sales lab to practice role-play scenarios to gear up to attend a sales competition. Students have competed at the National Sales Challenge at William Paterson University, the International Collegiate Sales Competition at Florida State University, and the National Collegiate Sales Competition at Kennesaw State University. While only two cadets can compete from each university, all marketing & business development majors are offered an opportunity to attend the Career Fair at these competitions. Students attending have walked away with internships and jobs from top companies across a variety of industries. In the 2017-2018 school year, all Advanced Professional Selling Students landed jobs.
Courses Taught in the Lab
MKTG 302 – Personal Branding & Networking
Personal Branding & Networking is the first class in a series of marketing courses, typically taken in the Sophomore year, where students learn how to develop a persona brand and professionally network in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. Students engage in detailed self-assessment to help clarify personal skillsets, values, and career aspirations. This course provides the foundation for advanced marketing and sales topics taken in later years.
MKTG 303 – Business Development I
In the first Professional Selling course, Cadets learn the basics of “Selling Themselves”. This culminates with a midterm exam that evaluates their “Elevator Pitch” to a recruiter. The second half of the course, Cadets learn a needs-based selling approach where they are evaluated on a Final Exam Sales Role-Play where they sell a product to a customer. Leadership and Ethics are infused into both of these activities via case study and in-class practice sessions. Scores of academic and popular press literature has explored the relationship between ethics and sales outcomes and students are exposed to some of this literature to help draw the connection from their training in ethics and why it is important to sales. Guest speakers are brought to class to help reinforce these skills and nearly always touch on the importance of having a solid moral
compass. Leadership skills are integrated into this course via the role play scenarios used as examples and practiced in class. Occasionally, some semesters have included a computer-based sales simulation that incorporates ethical dilemmas into the decision set. This course is taught in the current Sales and Supply Chain Classroom where professors can bring in outside speakers virtually and role-play recordings can be analyzed and dissected.
MKTG 402 – Business Development II
The Advanced Professional Selling course, cadets are faced with several different selling scenarios including, one-on-one Business-to-Business Selling, Team Selling, and Negotiating. The Professional Selling and Supply Chain Classroom allows the professor to modify the layout of seating to maximize student learning in the various different sales and negotiations scenarios. Ethics and Leadership are infused into this course through the cases that accompany the sales and negotiations scenarios. Many times, these scenarios pit the sides against each other where each side has strict bottom-lines, terms, etc. Students are required to stay the course and develop mutually beneficial value exchange and it sometimes takes significant creativity to come to an agreement.
MKTG 404 – Negotiations & Conflict Resolution
In this course, students explore the theory and practice of dispute resolution using interest-based mediation and negotiation techniques. Students gain a broad understanding of mediation and negotiation strategies, learn and apply skills that lead to greater success in managing conflict, and develop confidence in the mediation process as an effective means for resolving interpersonal, organizational, and community disputes.