Who is the most promising salesperson in Europe in 2021?

The competitors come from 13 different countries, 25 different higher education institutions. Only the four best competitors will make it in the challenging finals. The best one will be awarded the title of the most promising salesperson in Europe 2021.

The competition searches and trains top future salespeople capable of international sales. An individual competitor’s performance is carried out as a 20-minute role-playing event, during which each competitor goes through a B2B sales negotiation.

Only the seller and buyer participate in the negotiation which simulates reality very precisely, and the judges evaluating the competition events monitor the negotiations in the background. In the competition of 2021, the product to be sold is the location marketing platform of PinMeTo ( www.pinmeto.com ). The winner of the three-day competition is decided with three qualifying rounds and the finals.

An increasing global shortage of B2B salespeople

The cooperation partners act as either buyers or judges at the event. By participating in the competition, the companies have grandstand views of the competitors’ top-notch skills.

The main cooperation partners in this year’s event are Gartner, Shopify, Qualtrics Experience Management, LinkedIn, PinMeTo, Tavata, Palo Alto Networks, The Academic Association of Sales Engineering (AASE) and StratX Simulations.

“There is a huge shortage of international salespeople, and often at least the finalists get job offers from the international cooperation companies”, the director of the competition Timo Holopainen and judge Harri Lappalainen from Turku University of Applied Sciences reveal.

The competition finals can be viewed on Friday 19 November 2021 at 14–16. The link to the finals is available at the address www.europeansalescompetition.com .

Boosting competence with global cooperation

The competition has its origins at Turku University of Applied Sciences, where the topic of how increasingly better B2B salespeople could be trained has been under discussion for long. In addition, better methods have been required for the assessment of students’ abilities and competence. Different sales competitions have been experienced as an efficient solution to both challenges.

Almost 300 people will participate in the event in November. The judges are experts from higher education institutions and cooperation partner organizations across the globe. Besides ten European countries, the competitors come from Thailand, Indonesia and the United States. In addition to Turku UAS students, the Finnish participants include students from Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences.