From National Sales Competition to Making Sales Career (True Story)

Sales is a essential skill for everyday life, it is talking, listening, asking questions. It can be sharing your thoughts and influencing others. Sales competition is a remarkable opportunity to train these abilities. It does not mean you are going to make career out of sales, but it is a great opportunity. My point is everybody sells, everyday to all the people we influence with.
2019 I was a engineering student and competitor for national sales competition called TSC. Nowadays I am graduated engineer and a sales director for a Finnish translation agency. Also I am lucky enough to be appointed officer for Esca association.

But the story started from Turku sales competition and sales studies. I always found sales interesting, but did not consider it as my future job. Until I attended TSC as a part of my studies. Competition was organized extremely well f2f in our school. Competition got 3 rounds as qualifying (first sales meeting), semi (second sales meeting) and finals (final meeting). Product we sold was Search Engine Optimization for b2b clients. Not the easiest product to begin with, because it is service, which results can be seen in next 6months, so strong trust was needed to establish between salesperson and buyer. I was able to get to the finals where I found out that the final buyer was the sales director for company whose products we were selling. Outs… It went well and it was fun, but what happened after competition was meaningful.

We changed contacts with multiple students, business owners, partners etc. After one year of finishing studies I contacted the sales director I met in the competition. I wanted to work for their company, we arranged a meeting and I got the job, because we got the connection and experience from the TSC! In addition two of my fellow competitors got a job as well in the same company. Triple success and probably many other success stories I haven’t heard from other competitors.

Partners, schools and students, ESC is the big brother of the national competitions and HUGE opportunity to have memorable experience, make new contacts and maybe recruit talent or two for your developing Business.

Matias Hokkanen
Sales Director
Ex competitor, judge & buyer TSC, ESC
Appointed officer, ESCA board