Sales Advise Role Play Spring 2024

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Buyer Guide - Spring 2024

Advise Role Play

APRIL 24, 2024  6:30-8:00 P.M.

 

Thank you for partnering with us as a role play buyer!

This page has everything you should need for preparing for and participating in the role play:

  • Timeline and Microsoft Teams meeting links for your role play session.
  • An overview of the role play scenario, buyer roles, key goals and challenges, and key concerns
  • How to begin and end the role play and transition to providing decision feedback and coaching
  • The students' sales call goals, evaluation criteria and a form to share your decisions with us

If you need other help before the role play please email pslgen.business@uconn.edu.  If you need help the day of the role play, please email Rick Shannon at rick.shannon@uconn.edu or call Katy Ortega at (860) 486-9010.

Overview of the Advise Call

During our semester-long role play, students play Business Development Representatives at Impact, a Connecticut-based marketing agency.  The "advise" call is the final call in a multiple-call sales process, where the students will be presenting their proposal for a contract with you.

You will be working in pairs.  One of you will role-play as Mia, the Director of the UConn MBA program, and the other person will role-play Bill, who is the Director of Marketing and Communications for UConn School of Business. If there is another person in your group, they can observe and provide additional coaching to the students after the role play.  Feel free to trade off these tasks as you role-play with 4-5 students.

The students have scheduled a 15-minute video meeting with you to present their findings on how your digital marketing presence compares with other MBA programs, and a proposal for a contract to help you close gaps they found, and increase student enrollment.

Roleplay Timeline

  • 6:15-6:30: Technical Checks, Q&A with Professor Shannon: If this is your first time role playing with us, please feel free to join the partners' pre-meeting early to meet Prof. Shannon, check your connection and get any questions answered. Otherwise use this time on your own to review the content on this page, download the feedback form and be ready to join us at 6:30 pm.
  • 6:30: Partners' Pre-Meeting: Use the "Partners Pre-Meeting Link" button below to check in with Rick Shannon, the course instructor, who can answer questions or help resolve any technical issues.  You will then leave this pre-meeting and join your assigned breakout meeting where you will stay for the rest of the roleplay.  We are using Microsoft Teams for these meetings. If this is your first time using Teams, you do NOT need to download anything- see this 40 second video for a quick preview of joining a Microsoft Teams meeting as a guest
  • 6:45: First Student Team Joins:  You will greet "out of role", then the students will work as a team to present their proposal to you and earn your commitment to a contract.  They are targeting a 15-minute call, after which you will have 15 minutes to give the team feedback and coaching.
  • 7:15: Second Student Team Joins: Repeat.
  • 7:45: Finalize feedback to instructor: Submit your GROUP feedback for the teams that you met with using the form at the bottom of this page. Students will earn points towards their final exam for each buyer who awards them a meeting.  Once you have submitted your feedback you are finished, we will not be regrouping.  So thank you in advance for your time and coaching, it has a huge impact on the students.

    Video Meeting Links (Microsoft Teams)

    Mia: Bob Butkus - Federated Insurance
    Bill: Kristen Provost - Eliassen Group
     Backup phone: +1 475-282-1761, ID: 783 960 030#
    6:45: Team 1
    7:15: Team 2
    Mia: Katie Pandolfi  - Enterprise
    Bill: Jessica Lundgren - Stryker
     Backup phone: +1 475-282-1761, ID 583 847 085#
    6:45: Team 2
    7:15: Team 3
    Mia: Pete Sullivan - Eliassen Group
    Bill: Daniel Gomez-Quintero - TTi
     Backup phone: +1 475-282-1761, ID 419 308 810#
    6:45: Team 3
    7:15: Team 4
    Mia: Connor DeLaney - Impact Branding
    Bill: Mike Silverman - Fastenal
     Backup phone: +1 475-282-1761, ID 960 010 725#
    6:45: Team 4
    7:15: Team 5
    Mia: Nicole Damboise - Otis
    Bill: Susannah Pennington - Beacon Hill Corporate Recruiting
     Backup phone: +1 475-282-1761, ID: 175 819 965#
    6:45: Team 5
    7:15: Team 1

     

    Mia Hawlk

    Executive Director - UConn MBA Program

    Technical Buyer

    Mia is responsible for the entire scope of the UConn MBA programs. She has worked in higher education for 15 years. She joined UConn in 2014.

    Mia is not a marketing expert. She relies on her colleague Bill's small overworked team, including Tora who manages marketing for all graduate programs.  Mia's team picks up the recruiting task again once students have applied to the program.

    Mia and Tora met with the students on the advice of a friend who is an Impact client to learn about how UConn might improve their digital recruiting presence. This was their in-depth "explore" meeting.

    Moving forward, any contract will need to be coordinated with Bill -- and come out of Bill's budget.  So Mia and Tora arranged for this 15 minute meeting for the students to present their proposal to both Mia and Bill. 

    Read more below about UConn's goals and challenges for MBA recruiting, and specific potential concerns about working with Impact.

     

     

    Tora Ogueri

    Marketing Specialist - Graduate Programs

    Technical Buyer

    Tora recently joined the UConn Marketing Team, bringing a decade of experience with student recruiting and digital marketing. She joined UConn in 2020 but is new to this role. Tora assisted Mia in the "explore" call meeting.

     

    Bill Eyre

    Director - Marketing and Communications, UConn School of Business

    Economic Buyer

    Bill is responsible for marketing and communications programs across the School.  He has had a long marketing career with consumer brands. Bill joined UConn in May 2020.

    Bill owns and manages the marketing budget, and manages the team that develops and delivers marketing campaigns and programming for business unit leaders like Mia. Bill recently hired Tora to manage marketing across all graduate programs.

    While Tora has briefed Bill on her conversations and the "explore" call meeting, this is the first time he is meeting the team from Impact.

    Bill would consider allocating budget away from other activities to hire Impact-- at least temporarily-- if the students convince him it's worth it.

    Read more below about UConn's goals and challenges for MBA recruiting, and specific potential concerns about working with Impact.

     

    About UConn's MBA recruiting goals and challenges

    Reveal this information as appropriate to respond to student questions. 

    1. UConn, like all MBA programs, is always battling to get higher rankings. Key to this is attracting quality students into the program, and delivering high quality programming that helps students win quality positions post graduation to generate satisfied alumni who support the program.  To support this, you are
    2. Your current key goal is to increase quality enrollments in the MBA program. You enrolled 300 new students last year, and would like to enroll 350 students next year;  Longer team you would like to get to 500 students annually, ideally while reducing your admissions ratio from 40% to 30%.
    3. You are specifically looking for help at the top of your recruiting funnel: attracting visitors to your website, capturing their contact information so you can interact with them more personally, and convincing qualified applicants to complete the online application.  Once you have applications, you have a strong admissions process that yields good conversions to quality admits. But competition is fierce, and you both suspect you need to be doing something different to attract and engage with prospective students earlier in their decision making process.
    4. Keeping digital marketing content fresh is an ongoing challenge.  You suspect you should be ramping up new web content and video  much faster than you are right now, as well as spending more time nurturing social media.  But you are not clear the right mix. In the short term are particularly wondering about social media-- how are other schools using it as part of their recruiting process?  How important is it relative to other tools for recruiting MBA students?
    5. You have six months to recruit the next entering class.  This makes getting going quickly very important, but also means that you may need to put off longer term activities until you have made good progress on this year's goal.  

    About Your Concerns

    Try to raise at least one of these concerns during the role play.

    Strong responses should acknowledge your concern, provide a way it can be addressed, and check for your agreement.

    1. How can Impact maintain high applicant quality as you invest in attracting and engaging with more potential students? You don't want to waste money attracting a lot of students who ultimately aren't a good fit for the program.
    2. How much time will be required from people on your teams?  Mia, from the little you have learned about inbound marketing, it sounds like Impact will need to spend time with your MBA program team to develop good content. Tora and Bill, you have similar concerns about the graduate marketing team. Everyone is very stretched right now.
    3. Can you afford to hire external help for this? Marketing budgets are always the first things cut in a shortfall. Your small team, while stretched right now, is pretty efficient with a small budget. You have a little bit of potential budget right now due to your missing team member, but you have found in general that agencies cost much more than you allocate for in-house talent.  Are there things they can cut to lower the price?
    4. How sure is Impact that this will work? No one currently on your marketing team is very familiar with inbound marketing. So it's hard for you to judge the projections that Impact is making. How will they stand by them? Will they guarantee them?

    Beginning and ending each role play

    We've asked the student teams to initially enter the meeting "out of role" so that you can all introduce each other, they can confirm who is playing Mia and who is playing Bill, and address any technical issues.  Once that has been done, please give them a verbal "let's start" signal.

    The students should be closing the call by asking for your commitment to move forward in the sales process. This could include an agreement to sign a contract or at the least an agreement for another meeting to review the contract in detail. You can choose how to move forward from there.

    1. You can give them your positive decision "in role".  This is a huge morale booster, and a great reward if both of you think the student nailed the call.  This does require you to have some sort of pre-planned way of communicating this to each other.
    2. You can tell them you need more time to think (or talk with someone.. etc). Handling objections is an advanced sales skill which has been touched upon briefly in this course. Expect the students to attempt to handle this objection and move you forward in the sales process. They should not end the conversation until you have agreed to another follow-up meeting at a specific time within the next day or two. If they do not, clearly they have not won the contract.

    From there you move to giving feedback and coaching, your most valuable contribution to their learning.

    Providing decision feedback and coaching

    After each team completes the role play, you will have 10-15 minutes to let the students know your decisions on whether they actually would have won a contract, and then provide some coaching, on how the team performed during each step of the sales process (connect, explore, advise, commit).  So before the first role play, please spend a moment deciding as a buying team how you want to manage this.

    The students value your immediate, candid feedback on their performance. Consider starting your feedback by asking the students why they think the call ended the way it did.  Then reinforce things they raise and bring up things they missed, using the criteria listed below as a guide.  This approach allows for self-reflection by the students--a key skill we aim to build through this type of learning experience. And it is also teachers trick to gather your own thoughts and give more useful, better calibrated feedback!  

    Here is a link to the competition feedback form and below that is detailed evaluation criteria.

    Evaluation criteria

    1. ""Connect": builds good rapport: Students should start the call by spending time effectively building rapport: reconnecting with Mia and getting to know Bill.
    2. "Explore": probes for understanding and agreement: An in-depth explore meeting has already occurred, so students should be checking for agreement, and probing for anything that may have changed or they may have missed. 
    3. "Advise": makes clear connections between proposed activities and business outcomes: The majority of the students' time/efforts should be spent in this stage of the sales call process. Students should be walking you through the results of their research, recommended strategies, and the metrics that makes their proposal advantageous to UConn.
    4. "Earn Commitment": asks for the order: Students should ask for your agreement to move forward on their proposed next steps, starting with signing a six-month contract. They should persist when you defer, earning your commitment by responding and adapting to your concerns and making it clear why moving forward is in your best interest.
    5. "Overall": in control, professional: Students should take responsibility for the flow of the conversation, with confident and professional interactions that balance listening and talking. There should be a clear division of responsibility, where most of the team has a speaking role.

    Providing feedback to the instructor

    Your last task is to provide feedback to Professor Shannon so that he can award course points.   Please download this form to share your GROUP feedback. Email your completed form, or a photo of a paper version, to pslgen.business@uconn.edu

    Thank you in advance for your part in helping our students learn.  As an added thank you, below the feedback form link is a link to a page with profiles of all the students in the course, and their LinkedIn contact information.