Five Fellows - Judging a Sales Competition

 

Few posts back we talked about Turku Sales Competitions’ preparations and attending to the competition itself. This time we are going to take a look to the judge’s point of view.

Alongside this blog project we had to do another project, and our team selected to judge the Best Virtual Seller (BVS) competition that was in Finnish. Only a few of us had judged before, so this was also a new experience.

We found the judging very enjoyable and educational, although we were perhaps surprised to find that you really must prepare for it too. Luckily, the judges were able to attend training provided by the school to go over the general rules, how to score the competitors and answer questions. This made it much easier to go into the judging situation with an idea of what to do.

Some things we as judges wrote down to remember in our own sales situations:

• The introduction, greetings and the self-introduction are important, like really important
• The materials to be presented, e.g., slideshows, should never contain too much text, only a few lines per slide so that the content remains clear, and the customer does not rush ahead unnecessarily
• Always follow the clock
• Aim for a fluent dialogue instead of a monologue
• Especially in a remote world, if you’re wondering the answer to a question, don’t stare at the ceiling, rather look like you’re writing something on a piece of paper

Because after learning these, and many other new things, we will definitely go judging again. We highly recommend that you take part in a sales competition also as a judge if you have the chance. It will give you a lot of new ideas to develop your own sales skills for when you participate as a salesperson in the competition. It is also good practice for your own objective thinking, because judging the competitors is not as easy as you might think, as the order of the competitors, their personality and technique, among other things, can easily influence your evaluation, even though they shouldn’t play much of a role.

Remember to challenge yourself!

– Five Fellows